Why the culture challenge should be top of your agenda…
Those of us who’ve worked in lots of different cultures will have no shortage of examples about the impact it can have, not just on the people who work there, but on how effective the organisation is as a result.
It’s huge. But don’t just take my word for it. A couple of weeks ago I organised a breakfast for CEOs to talk about the culture their organisations might require in the years ahead.
It was so oversubscribed I had to add a brunch session as well.
And when I asked both groups why they felt it was such an important topic, they essentially said this: without a good culture it’s hard to achieve anything, but with the right culture you can achieve everything.
So, there you have it. Five hundred years of collective leadership experience in one line.
But there was also a third point that came out in both groups: contexts change, culture needs to evolve, and managing that evolution is one of the biggest leadership pressures.
Certainly, the context has changed beyond recognition in my working lifetime.
In most workplaces, automation has long been driving a shift from hierarchies to fluid, cross-functional teams, from working on individual tasks to working on shared solutions.
The sheer number of relationships, interdependencies, and sources of conflict we now need to navigate has massively increased, and the skills and behaviours we require have transformed as a result.
And for organisations engaged in partnership working or system change, you can add another order of magnitude to that importance.
On top of that, we’ve had the huge shift to hybrid and remote working over the last five years.
Culture transmits through close contact. Connections and relationships, soft-skills and shared ways of thinking, a genuine sense of belonging, all these things are far more difficult to achieve when people don’t spend quality time in each other’s company.
We can see it already in employee mental health and staff engagement scores.
It’s hard enough for new joins to develop psychological safety, let alone when they can’t see the subtle signals between their colleagues because they’re all in boxes on a screen.
Where are relationships fractured or forming, who looks to whom for challenge or validation, who is in which “in-group”? They’ve no way to tell.
Equally for leaders, it’s hard to even model let alone embed consistent values and norms when half the communication during your online meetings is happening invisibly over WhatsApp.
And that’s before we add AI into the mix; my agent refining my emails only for yours to summarise them for you; avatars in meetings to capture key points, blind to the myriad micro-expressions those points might have triggered.
For all its advantages, AI is already increasing the distance between people, making genuine relationships harder to build, tacit skills harder to learn, and cohesive cultures harder to embed.
And, if all that wasn’t enough, it’s also happening at a time when the norms and culture of civil society, in its broadest sense, is being undermined by media systems whose very business models run on incivility.
This is why nearly thirty CEOs of major charities dragged themselves into London at an ungodly hour to talk about this stuff together. And it’s why the culture challenge should be top of your agenda too.
It is, perhaps, the elephant in our room. The growing issue that isn’t going away. We aren’t going to go back to forty hours a week in the office, and technology and AI will continue to reshape both the nature of our work and the tools of our discourse.
But the principles of human relations haven’t changed. The importance of psychological safety and belonging. How we model and embed culture and values. How we teach and transfer soft skills and shared beliefs. How we build healthy relationships and high-performing teams
How we make people feel valued and seen.
What’s changed is that we now have fewer opportunities and less effective channels for doing most of those things. That means we all need to become far more conscious and intentional about how they will happen. And I do mean all of us.
So, ask yourself, what does this mean for recruitment and induction, for buddying and mentoring, for team time, roles and targets; for you as a leader?
And given how important we all know this to be, how can you get this culture challenge to the top of your team’s agenda too?