Culture is not a poster problem

I've spent the better part of two decades in boardrooms watching leadership teams spend real money on culture work that had no chance of working. The values get refreshed. The survey gets run. The comms get tidied up. Then everyone waits for the culture to change.

It doesn't, because none of that touches the thing culture is made of.

Culture is what people experience, not what you announce

A culture is the sum of thousands of small interactions. A manager who looks up when someone walks in, or doesn't. A meeting where disagreement is welcome, or quietly punished. Feedback that arrives as information, or as a verdict.

Eric Berne, who developed Transactional Analysis, described basic human hungers: for recognition, for structure, for stimulation. When those are met at work, people bring their best thinking. When they aren't, people go looking for them in other ways, and that's where you get politics, drama and disengagement.

Leaders are the delivery mechanism

This is why I don't believe in culture change as a separate project. The culture is delivered by leaders, every day, in how they meet or ignore those needs. A beautifully worded values statement can't recognise someone. A leader can.

So the useful questions aren't about the poster. They're about the room. Do people know what's expected of them? Do they feel seen for the work they do? Are they stretched, or just busy? Can they say the uncomfortable thing without it costing them?

No frameworks for their own sake. The test of culture work is whether it changes what happens in the room on a Tuesday afternoon.

This is the argument I make at length in Thriving Culture. The short version: stop treating culture as a communications problem. It's a leadership problem, and that's good news, because leadership is something you can actually develop.