Culture is what happens when nobody’s watching

Almost every company has its values written down. Commitment, excellence, teamwork, customer focus. They’re on the website, at the office entrance and in the sales presentation.

And almost every company has another culture, the real one, that isn’t written down anywhere. The one you see on a Friday at six in the evening, when a customer calls with a problem and there’s no boss around.

That’s your culture. The other one is marketing.

Culture is defined by what you tolerate

I’ve often seen the gap between the written culture and the real one. A company says it values teamwork, but rewards the salesperson who sells most even if they trample everyone. It says the customer comes first, but nobody answers a complaint until it reaches the managing director. It says it wants initiative, but punishes every mistake.

The team doesn’t read the values. It watches. And it learns very quickly what gets rewarded, what gets punished and what gets let slide.

That’s why I say a company’s culture is shaped, above all, by what its leader tolerates. If you tolerate someone arriving late to every meeting, you’re saying other people’s time doesn’t matter. If you tolerate a good professional treating their team badly, you’re saying results justify anything. You don’t need to say it out loud. The team gets the message anyway.

My three culture rules

I don’t have a poster with values. I have three rules I try to make visible in every decision:

1. I tolerate mistakes, not apathy. Whoever decides will get it wrong sometimes, and that’s part of growing. What I don’t accept is not trying, not caring or hiding the problem.
2. Bad news is shared early. We managers have a right to know the truth. And the team needs to know that bringing a problem isn’t punished; hiding it is.
3. The company comes before people and job titles. Mine included. Decisions are made on what’s best for the company, not on who has the most power or seniority.

They’re simple. The hard part is sticking to them when it costs you. And it’s exactly then, when it costs you, that the team watches what you do.

How to change a culture

You don’t change a culture with an annual conference or a values workshop. You change it with visible decisions. The ones with the most impact are of two kinds:

• Stopping tolerating something. A behaviour everyone knows about and nobody corrects. The day the leader puts a stop to it, the team understands the rules really have changed.
• Starting to reward something. Publicly recognising whoever brought bad news in time, whoever helped another department or whoever made a mistake while trying to improve something.

A single decision like this says more than a hundred internal emails.

Culture shows in the P&L too

Some managing directors think culture is a soft, HR topic. It isn’t.

A culture where problems are hidden produces expensive mistakes that are discovered late. A culture where nobody decides without the boss turns the managing director into a bottleneck. A culture that tolerates mistreatment drives the best people away. And you know what it costs to replace someone good.

A strong culture, on the other hand, helps people decide without someone supervising every step. And in an SME, that means speed.

The Friday afternoon test

Here’s a simple test. Think of a difficult situation that could happen in your company tomorrow while you’re not there: an angry customer, a mistake in an order, a conflict between two people.

Do you know how your team would act? How would you like them to act? The gap between those two answers is your job as a leader for the next few months.