In brief
- Culture isn’t only set in strategy meetings. It’s set in everyday conversations between managers and employees.
- A complaint, a “no,” a conflict, a piece of bad news: each one teaches people what’s really true at your company.
- Most of these conversations happen without a plan. Giving managers the behaviors and the language for them is culture work.
When leaders talk about culture, they usually mean the big things. The values, the mission, the all-hands meeting, the engagement survey.
But employees learn what the culture really is in much smaller moments. The way their manager responds when they raise a concern. The way a request for time off gets turned down. The way a disagreement between two coworkers gets handled, or doesn’t.
None of these feel like culture conversations while they’re happening. They are. Here are seven that teach more than any values poster.
1. The complaint
An employee raises a concern about a coworker, a policy or a decision. What happens next tells them whether speaking up is safe here.
If the concern is heard, looked into and followed up on, they learn it is. If it’s brushed off, or it somehow gets back to the person they complained about, they learn to stay quiet. So does everyone they tell.
2. The “no”
Managers say no all the time: to a schedule change, a raise, a new idea, a request to work from home. The no itself is rarely the problem. How it’s delivered is.
A no with a reason, and a path forward if there is one, teaches people they’re respected even when they don’t get what they asked for. A no with no explanation teaches them that asking isn’t worth it.
3. The conflict between coworkers
Two people on a team aren’t getting along. The manager has a choice: step in, or hope it works itself out.
When managers avoid it, the team learns that bad behavior is tolerated as long as it’s quiet. And the behavior a company tolerates is part of its culture, whether it chose it or not. I wrote about how that adds up in There’s No Such Thing as a Non-Toxic Culture.
4. The bad news
Someone has to tell their manager that a project is behind, a customer is unhappy or a mistake was made.
If the messenger is thanked, people bring problems forward early. If the messenger is blamed, problems stay hidden until they’re too big to hide. This is one of the clearest tests of a culture, and one of the easiest to miss, because from the top it looks like everything is fine.
5. The feedback
Every piece of feedback teaches someone what matters here. Feedback that only covers results teaches that results are all that count. Feedback that covers how the work got done teaches that behavior matters too.
The best feedback happens in regular conversations, not once a year. Here’s how to run a performance conversation instead of a performance review.
6. The policy question
An employee asks why a rule exists. “Because that’s the policy” ends the conversation. Explaining the reason behind it, or admitting the rule may need another look, starts one.
One answer teaches people to follow rules without thinking. The other teaches them to understand what the company is trying to protect. The reason a leader gives is one of the clearest reads on a culture. Here’s the question that tells you what your culture really runs on.
7. The exit conversation
When someone leaves, the last conversation tells everyone still there how the company treats people on the way out. Respect and a real question about what could have been better says one thing. Silence, or a quick handoff to IT for the laptop, says another.
The people who stay are watching. And the reasons people leave are usually about how work gets done, which is exactly what an honest exit conversation can tell you.
What to do about it
You can’t script every conversation. But you can decide what they should teach.
Start by describing the behaviors your culture needs, in plain language, so managers know what a good response looks like. (Here’s how to turn your values into behaviors.) Then coach managers on the conversations they’ll have most often: the complaint, the no, the conflict and the bad news.
Every one of those conversations either closes the gap between what your company says and what it does, or widens it.
Read next: Say vs. Do: The Gap Your Employees See Before You Do
Start here
Know what your conversations should teach
It starts with naming your culture’s personality. The Culture Quiz gives you a first read in a few minutes.
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