Ever watched a Simon Sinek Ted Talk, a short from a Tony Robbins event, or an Instagram Reel from Gary Vee?

How did you feel instantly after that clip ended? Get a little extra pep in your step that morning? Did you make an extra “gratitude” focused journal entry that night? Did you get an urge to take on that difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding with Karen in Procurement?

I know you did – and good for you!

This is the result I see from leadership workshops with leadership-focused speakers, sprouting everything they genuinely believe to be true about culture.

Feedback provided by attendees at these workshops is always the same. “That talk really impacted the team”.

What happens next? We walk away, determined to make a change starting right now. We create and implement some kind of tool or discussion framework, maybe create some type of scorecard that relates in some way to the talk we just sat through. We’re trying desperately to expand the reach of our experience to others in our workplace and teams, seeking to sustain the sudden positive feeling you and everyone else had, as a result of that talk.

But what happens in reality?

Frustratingly, we get no substantial progress with people in the wider business, our talks and tools taken away from those culture workshops are lost on others who weren’t lucky enough to experience that original workshop environment, and the efforts are fruitless because your audience (the do’ers and task focused executors) are very-much different folks with different employee-experiences than you and your leadership-focused peer group.

Why can’t you make cultural change? Because the elements of genuine culture-enabling change never features in these high-level, motivational, and aspirational workshops and talks. The truth is, the “Culture Leaders” performing these talks are mostly ill equipped to have them in the first place.

Real, culture-enabling changes starts at a very boring place. It isn’t sexy to talk about and people who claim to be the experts of culture typically never get any professional exposure to what truly matters in sustaining culture in any organisation. They just don’t understand where it all starts.

[People who claim to be the experts of culture are mostly HR, came from some kind of HR derivative career – or ‘people and culture’ advisors/managers, as they call themselves these days… Don’t get me started on how absolutely ridiculous it is to give a person a job title denoting responsibility for a workplace’s culture.]

What about Executives and their consistent claims of great culture?

Executives, leaders, and business owners are more than happy to talk about their culture, how good it is, how long it’s been sustained, and how proud they are of it. And why shouldn’t they?

Here’s the thing; If we consider the executives to be employees too, we need to ask ourselves; what is their employee-experience?

The most senior people in any business hold most of the authority and power. As such, if you’re somebody in that position of power, your personal perception and personal experience of the workplace culture cannot be trusted as a source of the reality.

Your experience is at the extreme end of a spectrum – put brutally – it’s false, when compared to most other people in your business.

Everyone has an innate interest in ensuring you have a good experience whenever you interact with them at the workplace. You will almost always walk away from every interaction feeling like people are happy, feel good about their work, their future, the business, and their leaders. Why? Because you have the power to end it all for them, today.

But if we ask the people, and if we keep our ear to the ground, paying attention to what the people are talking about, this will tell us everything we need to know about the real culture that exists.

It’s a real-life version of The Truman Show

When I’m visiting a workplace, I watch the owners, CEOs or Senior leaders walk through the place, and often feel like I’m in a real-life version of The Truman Show, and it’s the leaders playing the role of Truman Burbank.

[For those born a little later than the rest of us, “The Truman Show” was a film made in 1998, where Truman Burbank believes he is living a natural and ordinary life – unbeknownst to him, his life is taking place on a large set, populated and surrounded by actors, just playing a role.]

Enabling a good culture to develop, grow and permeate in a workplace cannot be achieved by synthetically recreating the “signs” of a good culture.

We can’t say we have a good culture, when all we did was tell our managers to:

• Establish a regular day where we get together and acknowledge good, team players;
• Set up a weekly free lunch and get fruit bowls available to everybody;
• Tell everyone they can leave at 3 pm on Fridays;
• Organise weekly yoga sessions before work;
• Set up a quarterly team day and lets get everyone out of the office to infuse more fun here.
• And so on….

Don’t get me wrong, people in various workplaces might love these things, but it isn’t culture. We can’t just add more ‘stuff’ to people’s plates, who are already time poor and frustrated, and tell them now they have to be happy because we’re such great employers.

For good culture to develop and change an employee’s working experience, we must start by understanding, identifying, and removing the culture-killers that are so prevalent in workplaces. This is a practical act of creating effective fundamentals.

When I’m in a conversation with senior leaders about their perception of workplace culture, there are questions I must ask to get to the truth.

Are any of these happening in your workplace?

• You’re hiring processes result in people with misaligned values entering your workplace.
• There are bottlenecks in process, teams and functions aren’t aligned, and errors that can be avoided regularly occur.
• People are getting frustrated when executing standard workflows for their role.
• You have multiple and excessive systems people must utilise to achieve their basic or fundamental work requirements.
• Your leaders change the rules, policies, processes too frequently, and without consultation.
• You have far too many meetings that get in the way of the do’ers and executors, doing and executing their work.
• You don’t have a regular and systematic approach to feedback and performance discussions.
• Your leaders make varied decisions that leave your workforce scratching their head.
• You don’t communicate proactively, expediently, and with clarity around change, priorities and performance.

Yes? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but your culture probably isn’t that great after all.

No? Well congratulations, but be sure you’re correct. If you are, you’re likely already seeing the commercial benefits of good culture.

That list of questions certainly isn’t exhaustive, but everything on it is a culture killer. How many are prevalent in your business now?

It’s far too easy to focus on what people say they want in a workplace, react, and go about trying to offer those perks and benefits to appease frustrated people who don’t understand the bigger picture of culture in the organisation.

The result? They may have taken up that yoga class, eaten that free banana, gone home early last week, or received a compliment from Wendy in payroll, but they still have to return to that dodgy workflow that feels stupid to follow, that clunky system that adds 2 hours to their day, and attend that 6th meeting this week which could have just been an email. All of this, undoing any good you created by offering those perks.

Operational fundamentals in your workplace that function and make people’s working lives worth living are the core enablers of a good culture developing, taking hold, and permeating through your entire business.

Don’t be Truman Burbank – look deeper.