I’ve been chatting with my colleague Pete Burden about workplace culture and levers.
I’d used that word in an article we wrote in 2018 about how to change the culture in your organisation. In that piece I talked about how the levers that leaders can use to change culture include what you say and do, as well as processes and symbols.
Pete read it, and he feels uncomfortable with the word.
He says, “ ‘Levers’ implies that an organisation is a machine that can be manipulated, that if you know what the levers are, you can have some control. And that it is in the hands of leaders.”
I think he’s right.
It’s surprising how often people behave as though there is a linear path to changing culture, but I’ve yet to see any evidence for this.
Workplace culture is everyone’s responsibility
What is more honest, and borne out by my own experience, is that organisational culture is everyone’s responsibility, not just leaders, and rather than quick fixes or levers that can be applied by those in power, there are opportunities to make change happen and they require people to participate together.
So for example, a while ago we did a piece of work with a university, and we found that people who had a really good experience with their personal development reviews (PDRs) tended to feel more positively about their overall workplace culture.
On the face of it this might suggest that if you compel people to run PDRs and ‘train’ them how to do them ‘properly’, satisfaction and engagement at work will improve.
Those things might help.
But what is really going on?
Could it be that managers who are truly invested in their colleagues’ success tend to have more meaningful and productive development conversations with them?
The culture differentiator
In our experience, the differentiator for culture is people who take an interest.
Because those people help to create a highly supportive environment which enables their team members to succeed. And that leads to their team being more engaged and having a more positive experience of their workplace culture.
Implicit in that is what’s at the heart of really good PDR conversations: caring about the individual, their development and their future.
It’s not the PDR that changes your culture. Because if a PDR is experienced as an act of compliance, assessment or control it might not be much fun. But if it’s genuinely about your development, it could get quite exciting.
So it’s how the PDR is done that makes the difference.
And that’s down to the attitude of the manager.
How managers can make culture better
Training every manager in how to do a good review isn’t necessarily going to fix anything if their heart is not in it.
On the other hand, exploring how to be curious and how to adopt an enquiring attitude might help them to become more interested in their team members.
This could mean learning to:
- listen well
- have empathy and look for the areas in common
- be really curious about what’s causing any difference
- take the time to make meaning together.
These things engender a level of interest that’s needed to demonstrate to someone that you want to support them, which helps them feel safer and secure.
So I understand Pete’s frustration with the word ‘levers’ because for example, you can’t just make it a requirement for everyone to do a PDR four times a year – that’s not going to change anything.
You can’t make managers feel interested in colleagues’ development. They have to choose that for themselves. The challenge is to help people make good choices of their own free will.
If you really want to have a good culture, you have to enable and equip people to make meaning together, to develop their relational skills, and to get really curious about where there’s dissonance.
Those are the three core skills we teach in our work.
Because if you teach people to engage differently, it can have a really big impact. And that impact is not limited to one meeting.
Culture change is an iterative process
The idea that does resonate from the old blog post was that culture change is an iterative process – for culture to evolve you need to make predictions about what might happen when you say or do something. Then you try something out and adjust based on what actually does happen.
But if you go into that thinking you have the levers to change others, you’ll quickly be disabused. Your levers will crumple and you’ll have to think harder. There’s an opportunity in that.
So if you want to create a better culture, it doesn’t matter too much what initiatives you start, it’s how you do them that’s important.
If this gets you thinking about the culture in your organisation or your team, here’s some questions to think about:
- What could you do to help people listen better?
- How could you foster a culture that is curious?
- What opportunities do you see for embracing difference?
- What experiments can you set up to explore what’s really going on?
Need help with your team in 2025?
Wish your team worked together better? Want to improve the culture in your organisation? Need to empower leaders? We can help. Talk to us about facilitating team days, resolving tension, or designing emerging leader programmes.
At Then Somehow we help universities and other organisations build emotional literacy, increase empathy, and help you see the world differently, giving you practical tools to shift the stuff that’s stuck.
If you’d like to discuss how we can help your organisation develop leaders and perform better, get in touch here.