Building Cultures That Hold Up

Organisational culture is one of those things everyone talks about and very few people manage well. It gets attention during periods of growth and good results, but the real test comes when the business is under pressure. A downturn, a restructuring, a sudden change in leadership. That is when you find out what the culture actually is, rather than what the internal comms deck says it should be.

We have worked with companies where the stated values on the wall had almost nothing to do with how people behaved during a difficult quarter. In one case, a client had five published values, including 'openness' and 'trust'. During a cost reduction exercise, the same organisation held planning meetings that excluded half the leadership team, announced decisions with no context, and responded to pushback by escalating rather than listening. The gap between the written values and the lived experience was enormous, and people noticed.

This is not unusual. Most companies have a version of this problem. The question is how wide the gap is and whether leadership is honest about it.

The companies that hold together during difficult stretches tend to have a few things in common. First, their leadership teams are consistent. They do not shift tone or priorities every few weeks. People in the middle of an organisation can tolerate uncertainty, but they struggle with inconsistency. If the chief executive says one thing on Monday and the chief operating officer contradicts it on Thursday, people stop listening to both of them.

Second, they are honest about what is going wrong. Not brutally or carelessly, but openly. People can absorb bad news. What they cannot absorb is being told everything is fine when it clearly is not. When leaders sugarcoat problems, they lose credibility, and credibility is very difficult to rebuild once it is gone.

Third, the best organisations have a clear, practical view of which behaviours matter and which do not. Culture is not about office perks or Friday drinks. It is about how decisions get made when time is short, how disagreements are handled between senior people, and whether frontline staff trust the organisation enough to raise problems early rather than burying them.

One useful exercise we run with boards is a simple gap analysis. We ask them to list the five behaviours they believe define the organisation, then we go and talk to people across the business and ask what actually happens in practice. The overlap is often surprisingly small. But knowing that is the starting point for doing something about it.

Culture change is slow. It does not happen through workshops or posters. It happens when leaders behave differently, consistently, for long enough that people start to believe the change is real. That typically takes twelve to eighteen months at minimum. There are no shortcuts, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

If you are reviewing your own organisation's culture, start with a simple question: how do people behave here when nobody is watching? The answer will tell you more than any engagement survey ever will.