Why culture is a system, not a slogan

Culture is the sum of the behaviours an organisation rewards, tolerates, and quietly punishes. Change the incentives and you change the culture.

Most culture work fails because it treats culture as a message to be broadcast rather than a system to be redesigned. Downstream, under pressure and on an average Thursday, the culture people experience and the culture that founders believe exists are different.

The behaviours you reward are the culture you have

People are exquisitely sensitive to what gets someone promoted, protected, or praised. If you reward heroics, you will get burnout. If you reward candour and then punish the messenger, you will get silence. Behavioural science is unambiguous here: incentives beat intentions, every time.

You do not get the culture you announce. You get the culture you tolerate.”

The work of a seasoned HR practitioner inside most organisations is to articulate the gap between wish and on-ground behaviour, what is rewarded and what is brushed under the carpet. This means interventions at multiple levels:

• Getting the founders ready to recognise the gaps and be okay to spend time, energy and effort in bridging it
• C-suite buy-in on steps they need to take, to bridge this gap. Having them initiate the need for these tweaks
• Bringing next level managers into the room, assessing their battles, helping them design systems of intervention, so their teams can see their capacity and power to affect change
• Constantly using feedback from all levels, from interns to the C-suite, to check non-linear progress

The work is to make the invisible visible. The first step is to name the real incentives operating inside your teams and to redesign the ones pulling against the organisation you say you want to build.