How to Make Culture Your Tailwind

The culture in your organization can often feel like a headwind, making everything more difficult. While the problems may be historic, the responsibility for – and benefits of -- resolving them lie with the leader. What if those headwinds could be turned into momentum? What if your team could navigate uncertainty and adapt to disruption with little effort? It’s entirely possible.

Even good leaders sometimes encounter toxicity, despondency, and division among their workforce. Often this shows up as artificial harmony with underlying tension, or as change resistance. They may also notice the same issues keep coming back, dragging down performance.

Culture can be described as patterns of behaviour that have become entrenched, or simply “how we do things around here”. When a new leader arrives, they inherit the existing patterns. This can feel like a strong wind working against them. Changing those patterns is possible with deliberate action, whether the team includes a few people or thousands.

How do leaders choose the right things to do, to create the culture they need?

Let’s start with what leaders should avoid doing:

1. Treating culture like ‘the soft stuff’. When leaders let it take a backseat to the business, their team learns they can dismiss it too.

2. Deflecting or delegating their own accountability for culture to subordinates.

3. Believing the written rules are what shape the culture (and ignoring the unwritten).

4. Relying on sanctions and incentives.

5. Expecting culture change to ‘burn like a project’. It won’t. Humans are messy and beautiful. They won’t conform to a checklist or a spreadsheet.

6. Interpreting their employees’ honest feedback as resistance.

7. Giving up when it gets hard.

In contrast, leaders who succeed in creating healthy cultures start with themselves. They never miss the opportunity to model and reinforce the culture they want. They use themselves as a tool for culture change, remembering they are always being watched by their employees as though they’re in a fishbowl. They set the tone and example for their team, and even the briefest interaction or smallest decision intentionally creates ripples.

Take for example a Deputy Minister whose executive team didn’t collaborate well. He was in the habit of allowing his Chief Financial Officer to follow him into his office after every executive committee meeting. Everyone would witness the door closing behind the two men, day after day. It was eroding trust among the whole team. When the Deputy Minister stopped this habit in favour of encouraging dialogue as a team at the committee table, it quickly shifted the dynamics for the better. The Chief Financial Officer did not like losing privilege, but that discomfort (the hard stuff!) was necessary for everyone to feel they were equally valued on the team. The quality of collaboration, debate and decision-making improved as a result.

Like this Deputy Minister, it takes strength of character to understand ourselves, and to understand how our actions affect those we lead.

The single-most powerful step a leader can take to create a healthy culture is to develop their own character and support their team in doing the same.

Character isn’t personality or leadership style. It’s the result of dedication to personal growth, and to recognizing that “who we are while we’re busy doing” is just as important as what we do as leaders (1). Developing the 11 dimensions of leader character is entirely possible, and directly supports operational excellence, as described in this MIT Sloan Management Review article(2).

Leaders with strength of character exercise good judgement. They draw on insight, intuition, and situational awareness to make their decisions. This habit is described beautifully in a quote attributed to the 20th century Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. [Victor E. Frankl]

The process of culture building can be understood as a system-level interpretation of Frankl’s concept. In other words, the right actions are thoughtfully chosen responses to the current patterns of behaviour within the system.

The Human Systems Dynamics Institute’s Adaptive Action process offers a practical method for this. Ask a cycle of three questions:

1. “What?”

Start by asking “what do we know and observe about the problem or the current situation?” To answer this, it’s important to have as many different sources and perspectives as possible, and to use the lens of character (who are we, not just what are we doing). Leaders’ own observations and feelings are useful here, if they are complemented by data sources that reflect others’ experiences. Qualitative data – such as stories, testimonies, observations of emotions, mood, tone and body language – are just as relevant as quantitative data, since humans are not machines who can be reduced to ones and zeros.

2. “So what?”

This is the question that leaders often skip over when they jump directly from issue to solution, and yet it is exactly where the power lies. This “pause” is for reflection and insight: noticing what are the trends, contradictions, tensions and patterns. This requires being willing to challenge personal assumptions about the situation and pulling others into the dialogue. There are many different truths co-existing within an organization. They often reveal themselves as team-level behaviours that reflect an over- or under-weighting of dimensions of character. Once patterns are spotted in the data, they help to reveal the root causes of the issues, and where energy and focus are needed.

3. “Now what?”

Once root cause is known, the next step is often simple to determine and is not a long list of actions. Often one wisely chosen action will stop the problem at its source, and almost always that action will involve activating certain dimensions of character. Symptom responses are rarely effective, sometimes cause damage, and usually require repetition, whereas root-cause responses often have a sustained and intended impact.

Adopting this habit of asking the three questions avoids “knee-jerk” solutions. While it may seem like this approach will slow down the process, the opposite is true.

The hallmark of a healthy culture is the embodied character of its leaders. Their habit of regularly pausing between stimulus and response allows them to become iteratively better at understanding themselves and their organization and taking actions that have the intended consequence. In so doing, they create an adaptive system that is higher performing, because it can weather any storm. The rewards are great; for the leader, team, and organization as a whole.

Credit to my Culture Team for always standing with me in curiosity, allowing these lessons to be discovered.

(1) This concept is from Mary Crossan, Distinguished Professor at Ivey School of Business.

(2) M. Crossan, B. Furlong, R. Austin, “Make Leader Character Your Competitive Advantage” (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2022).