What’s your organizational culture?

I’ve discovered during my 20 years as a consultant that many times business leaders may describe one culture, but the actual culture is significantly different. When I ask employees—not leaders—for insights about a company’s organizational culture, some of my favorite questions are nonchallenging, fun-to-answer ones like these:

• What three words describe the culture here?
• What is one thing you would like to see change in the culture here?
• What is one thing you hope will never change about the culture here?

To dig deeper into the living culture of an organization, leaders can conduct more-thorough interviews or use pulse surveys to gain insights on touchy issues like these:

• How does our culture support our vision?
• What is holding us back?
• What do leaders truly pay attention to?
• What do employees get rewarded for?
• What happens when people step out of their lanes? 
• Who is excused from following the rules?
• What are the unwritten rules?
• What are the off-limits topics that employees don’t feel safe discussing?

The answers to these probing questions can provide leaders with meaningful and actionable insights about the organizational culture—as long as employees trust that their candid answers won’t get them into trouble. 

Imagine if you asked employees from all levels of your organization these (and other) questions and analyzed their responses. You could gain a deep sense of organizational culture and how successfully you are communicating your vision of an ideal culture throughout the entire team. You could understand any gap you discovered between your experience of the existing culture and the experience of others.

When there is a sizeable gap, it is critical that leaders don’t make employees feel uncomfortable about not being aligned with the leadership-espoused culture. There are understandable reasons behind employees’ choices in the workplace, and these reasons are often related to their experiences in the organization. I recommend that leaders try to understand why employees are making the choices they are making, why they perceive things the way they do and what data supports their beliefs and behavior. 

Once you have a grip on the extent of any gap between leadership experience and employee experience, you can start to transform the culture.

One of the biggest mistakes that leaders make is thinking they can manage company culture by themselves. It’s important to involve others, especially downstream employees. Because of leaders’ self-limiting beliefs and because their efforts are, by nature, limited, they cannot effectively tackle culture change. That’s why top-down attempts to change company culture usually don’t succeed. A team effort is required.

One last nugget of advice: Remember that culture is a living, breathing thing. It requires your constant attention. Organizational culture is not something to address just during annual meetings, performance reviews or the onboarding of new team members. You must actively manage your culture because your culture helps determine the fate of your organization. And to manage it, you must first learn what type of organizational culture you actually have.