What exactly is the role of leaders in shaping workplace culture – and why does so much advice on the subject fall flat?
In today’s Leadership Focus, Simon Nash, Group Managing Director of Law at Work, tackles a topic that many leaders ask him about and about which many myths and misconceptions abound.
The two big errors
If you go to enough leadership events, or read too many leadership books, you’ll quickly learn that the ‘leadership gurus’ tend to say pretty similar things about leadership and culture. It feels like I have heard it all, several times over. Take it from me, I have attended far too many pretty poor leadership teachings (and one or two great ones), so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.
One of the most common things you’ll hear is that organisational culture is a pretty straightforward thing; that leaders can choose the culture they want in their businesses. That declaring the new culture, using words, is a key part of the leader’s task. And that everyone else’s job is to ‘get on the bus’ and ‘live the values’.
Businesses that buy in to this model often invest huge sums in expensive culture-change programmes including highly positive launch events, branded T-shirts for everyone and coffee mugs bearing short lists of values or catch-phrases and glossy ‘culture-books’ that exhort people to believe in the new way of being.
A slightly more nuanced version of this adds in the role of the leader as an example of the new culture. Sometimes you hear about this in the midst of a large-scale ‘cultural transformation programme’ that the new culture has been launched, but the problem with its lack of traction is down to ‘manager buy-in’ or leadership alignment to the new way.
So the role of the leader in this model is to ‘Know the way’; ‘Show the way’ and ‘Go the way’. Or in other words, to describe the behaviours that make up the new culture by their words and actions, setting the clear expectation that everyone else will do as they are told and act in accordance with the proclaimed values and behaviours.
The trouble is, and the trouble has always been, that all of this is a waste of money because it never works. It never works because it never can. That’s not how culture works and its not how real people really change, in the real world.
Unfortunately, it is quite a compelling way to sell consulting services, so I doubt that its days are numbered.
For consulting firms it’s the golden goose, as every culture initiative fails to deliver the promised benefits leading to… yet another investment in a different consulting firm’s culture change initiative.
The other error, albeit somewhat rarer, is those leadership gurus who take this insight to the opposite extreme. Culture initiatives always fail, so they reason that culture either doesn’t exist at all, or simply cannot be changed and they fall back to a model of leadership that is highly individualistic and overly simplistic.
These approaches tend to reduce complex situations down to very simple cause and effect explanations. They over-emphasise human agency and ignore context and the invisible forces that drive and restrain behaviour in all human systems.
Leadership in this model becomes a heroic act of the will, to make results happen through the magical adoption of some very simple strategies often expressed in catchy phrases. You’ll often hear this material in the hype of motivational speakers.
The trouble is, that just like the large-scale cultural change programmes, this personal-scale motivational approach also doesn’t work. The catchy slogans sound great when the guru weaves them into his compelling spiel, and you feel pretty pumped up to leap your ‘hundred foot hurdles’ or walk across burning coals, but the magic doesn’t last. Life is too messy and complicated to be solved by trite generic advice and slogans.
Seeking a third way
So for wise leaders who want to make an impact through creating effective cultures, we have a problem.
The internal mass marketing of slogans doesn’t generate a real organic evolution of a company’s ways of being. And the hype of the promise of individual change outside of any systemic context does not generate a sustainable change in the real world.
Wise leaders clearly need a new approach when it comes to culture.
Wise leaders need to appreciate that culture is an emergent property of any living system. Culture is an effect, not a thing in itself. Culture is the collective felt expression of how values and power really operate in real contexts. Culture is deeply psychological – felt collectively but experienced personally. Culture responds systemically to changes in the material conditions of life – this means that an effect might have many causes, and the relationship between cause and effect is rarely linear.
All this might lead us, rather sceptically, to lose faith in the notion that leaders can do anything at all about culture. But that would be a mistake too.
I was doing some weekend work in preparation for another session on culture with a client board several years ago. My writing had got ‘stuck’ mid-morning on the Saturday, so I went out to get some coffee and pastries. The Saturday newspaper caught my eye, so I eagerly bought a copy. It promised sixteen pages of Culture. Sixteen whole pages dedicated to the very problem that was giving me writers’ block. Getting home I went straight to the supplement. What was in those sixteen vital pages? Well there were listings and reviews of plays, movies, album releases, book launches, TV shows, a new poem, a ballet and a new exhibition at the gallery.
“What’s that got to do with culture?” I was initially frustrated, but ‘everything’, was the answer.
Human beings, have for tens of thousands of years worked out their collective identities through campfire stories, through shared songs, through cave-art, through long poems passed on by word of mouth, through the repetition and refinement of epic dramas.
In the last few hundred years though, in business and economics, we have forgotten this. We have replaced the richness of drama with trite mission statements. We have replaced the truthfulness of poetry with bland values. We have taken the music and artistry out of the expression of anything meaningful at work. We have turned craft into commodity, and exchanged the richness of value for the shallowness of price.
And then we wonder why people feel a little empty about their jobs. Why the ‘Purpose Statement’ does not inspire them with any sense of a noble quest. Why people might be able to recite the ‘values’ but feel disconnected from the ethical tradition in which they make any sense. Why the stated culture does not evoke any feeling, beyond an energy-less sense of cynicism, if not outright rebellion. Why the attempt at declaring a new ‘Day Zero’ breeds more satire rather than acceptance.
So knowing that humans create and sustain their collective identities through arts, how can leaders lead their organisations in a culturally sensitive way? Well here are seven or eight starting steps…
The first step is to abandon the pretence.
Wise leaders need to let go of the egoic heroism and have the intellectual humility to admit that the culture doesn’t just become what they say it should be. Every human organisation has its own sense of collective selfhood. It will be what it is will be. It will become what is emerging. This is deeply true at a psychological level irrespective of the legal structure or capital structure, which are artificial constructs in the economy or legal system.
Secondly a wise leader must develop herself.
Naturally there are a whole range of specific areas of managerial knowledge and skill, but here I’m talking about cultural development. That means becoming culturally sensitive and the way to do that is to immerse yourself in novels, to go to great plays, to write poetry, to hear live music and to experience visual arts. Through cultural development you’ll feel more deeply how human drives such as hope, fear, desire, greed and envy play out in human relational systems.
The third task is to have a sense of your own story.
If you know what you stand for then you’re more likely to be sensitive to the collective story. Articulating your own values can be an important element of this, but beware of the curated ‘social media values’ of the constructed and idealised way we like to present ourselves.
Fourth, listen.
Listen to the story of your organisation. Listen to the voices of the people in it – your employees, your customers, your investors, your trusted suppliers and partners. No-one has a monopoly on collective identity and the voices you ignore probably know your organisation’s shadow better than the top leaders.
Five, practise intuition and integrity.
Let your life reflect the leadership story that’s emerging and use reflective practices such as journalling or coaching to keep it real.
Six, let the new story write itself.
Kierkegaard said life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. This is especially true when it comes to emergent properties of living systems such as culture.
Seven, pay it forward.
Ensure you are equipping the next generation of leaders to be a part of the still-yet-to-emerge culture that will eventually displace whatever it is you are building.
Our only real legacy is to raise metaphorical children who will tear down our vain edifices in the name of the truths we do not see.
And Eight, if you really must, now you can go out and buy the branded mugs and T-shirts.
Simon Nash is an experienced leader, speaker, and writer with over 30 years dedicated to examining the intersection of people and ethics in the workplace. Renowned for his innovative and disruptive perspectives on the dynamics of people and work, Simon has garnered numerous accolades throughout his career. His approach blends deep ethical considerations with practical strategies, enabling businesses to address growth challenges effectively and sustainably.
One way Simon fosters leadership growth is through board offsites, as they provide leaders with the opportunity to step away from the daily tasks and engage in open dialogue. This environment promotes the exchange of ideas, enhances coaching relationships, and underscores the organisation’s commitment to developing its leaders.
Law At Work plays an essential role in providing expert guidance to businesses, particularly in areas such as leadership development, coaching and mentoring, and organisational culture. With a focus on clear, commercial advice, Law At Work’s multidisciplinary team has extensive experience in all areas of people, safety, data, and leadership development, enabling businesses to propel forward.
