Inside Out Culture

Your Culture Questions Answered: What if your boss is the problem, measuring culture and more!

• Inside Out Culture • Season 1 • Episode 9

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On this episode of the Inside Out Culture podcast we are answering your questions. The issues that people face differ from industry to industry and business to business, so we look at the most pressing issues and provide insights into the things that you can do.

Specifically we look at:

  • What you should do if your boss is the problem 
  • What subcultures are and why they should be different 
  • How to be more innovative 
  • How to shift attitudes surrounding mental health
  • Why staff development always gets cut
  • How you get trustworthy data from staff surveys 

Don't forget that you can submit your questions for our next questions episode by using the email address below.

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Join us as we reveal strategies to close the gap and craft a workplace where values are not just spoken, but lived and breathed, paving the way for a more authentic and engaging organisational culture.

Instagram: @insideoutculture

Email your questions to: insideoutculture@gmail.com

Receive the Culture Leaders Action Sheet: bit.ly/iocpmail



Colin:

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast, where we look at insides of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside.

Cath:

I'm Colin Ellis and I'm Cath Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organization, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.

Colin:

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think. Hello everybody and welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast. I'm Colin Ellis.

Cath:

And I'm Cath Bishop, and welcome to our latest episode, where we look at your culture questions. We explore questions that have come up in our work over the last few weeks, things we've been asked in our coaching work or our talks that we give, and we also are going to take some of the questions that you've been sending into us, which have been really brilliant, quite challenging, and we're going to unpick and explore and think our way through them. So let's get started. We've got some great questions today and the first one, colin, to dive into is one that we've both heard quite a lot. My boss is the problem in our culture. What should I do?

Colin:

Well, I think what we should do is start asking for easier questions. I mean, that's where we start, Just easy things. My boss is a problem. I think one of the things that I hear a lot is people saying things like well, you've got three options Take it, leave it, change it which I always think is well-meaning, but not especially helpful and or realistic. I think there are people in jobs who can't actually take it, leave it or change it, and I know myself you know, having worked in a culture where my boss was the problem that it's a real challenge. But of course, it's hugely important that the leader is the person that sets the tone for everything else within the culture. You know, there's some research that I read where the kind of culture that a person works in is 12 times more likely to predict whether someone leaves or not, and so the responsibility really is on the leader. And you know we're living in an age now where almost 30% of people dislike their manager 40% said their manager lacked emotional intelligence and almost every week we have this kind of toxic leaders, which I think was first coined by Marcia Lynn Wicker in the mid 80s this term toxic leaders.

Colin:

I think bosses who are the problem are often competent, they just don't know how to do the job in the right way. I think they don't realize that their behavior has a detrimental effect. I think they really do lack self-awareness. And so if your boss is the problem, well, if it feels safe enough to actually say something, then that's what you should do. You should try and avoid being confrontational. I recognize that it doesn't always feel safe to do so. I think sometimes, when your boss is the problem, they're often emotionally unstable, and when I say that I mean that they're likely to be affected by swings. It's very difficult to predict exactly how they're going to react at any one time. But if it's safe enough to say something and to actually talk about how you feel, that should be the first thing. I always recommend that.

Colin:

If you have that discussion, often you don't know what's going on in the world, and so anything you can do to bridge that, I think, is important. You can also talk about how you like expectations to be set. That's not to say that it's all about you necessarily. It's always an agreement. You know, when your boss wants you to do something. It doesn't matter whether it's a football coach, it doesn't matter whether it's a, you know, kind of a line manager in a corporate organization. It's still the same.

Colin:

You know you want to create this emotional connection. You can kind of seek help from the people around you. There's a real danger there, though, that it could kind of bleed into gossip and you don't really want to be doing that. You don't want to be talking behind people's back, but also, it's good to talk about how you feel. I mean, obviously, you want to surround yourself with people who can help you and are a good foil for you, but ultimately, if the behavior is having a detrimental effect on your physical and or mental health, then you really do need to speak to someone you know, kind of in HR, who can actually help you navigate a pathway through, who can act sometimes as an arbiter, you know, to help you find a way forward. Yeah, what do you think, Cath?

Cath:

Yeah, it's a tough one, isn't it? So I think context matters and it depends at what level of the organisation you are. So I think the first thing is don't do what they do. Don't be like them If you can recognise that they are causing problems to you and others. Sometimes I feel that people just go oh, that's obviously how I need to behave, so don't. Okay, you know it doesn't feel good. At the very sort of minimum level, make sure you're not repeating or emulating their behavior. Okay, you don't need to be like that. Sometimes you know you're the next leader in waiting, potentially. So be really clear about how you are going to behave in a different way and mark that out. And where there are meetings where you're in charge. So again, this depends what level of the organization you're at, but sometimes people can be quite at quite a senior level and have a really difficult you know, top level boss, but actually they're running lots of things with teams and in that case you set your culture.

Cath:

Whenever you're chairing a meeting, whenever you're the person setting something up, you can create a kind of microclimate that works in the way that you want, where it has different rules, where there is some safety around the conversations where you can really encourage people to speak up, to challenge. So look for spaces where actually you can create the sort of culture that you and you know people around you also need to thrive. Then there's the case of if you're perhaps lower down in an organization where you don't feel you can speak up, then you need to think about the culture of that organization and what this is telling you about it. If people are getting promoted who aren't good leaders, then that also tells you something about the values of the organization. There's perhaps a moment to start thinking about whether this is where you want your long-term future to be and whether in fact it's time to start finding some different routes, out some different alternatives.

Cath:

Sometimes just getting to a different part of the organization, a different department, a different division, can free things up. And again, if you're in a large organization, that's much easier. If you're in a much smaller one, that becomes harder. So context is important, but I would say don't copy their behavior, because you know it's not the right way to behave. Find ways in which actually you can influence. Just see even one-on-one conversations where you're phoning up a colleague or a stakeholder. Yeah, make sure you do those in the way that are true to you and what you want, and then think about okay, what's my path to a better place?

Colin:

Fantastic. Okay, next question, and kind of related in a way to some of the things you've just been talking about, Cath. So can you have more than one type of culture at work, and if so, is that a positive thing?

Cath:

Yeah, this is a question that actually surprises me how many times that I have been asked it because underlying it is almost a premise that we somehow think culture is some fixed thing, that it's the same, that we kind of make it and it stays there and it's got to be the same for the whole organization, which kind of makes no sense in that we are all creating the cultures we're in all the time, and so naturally, different departments will have a different rhythm of working.

Cath:

They will have different leaders, they will have different personalities. Different countries across a global organization will have a different feel. So, yes, you can have different personalities. Different countries across a global organization will have a different feel. So, yes, you can have different ways of doing things. But what you do want to see is this sort of compatibility across the divisions of an organization. So the values are still there. There are certain standards of behavior, of respect, of listening, of allowing different views, those sorts of things you would expect to be common. But it could feel quite different in a marketing department to a research department, to a finance department, for example.

Colin:

And it should do. Yeah, I think that's right. And so I always say and I just started working with a government organization is the purpose and the value should run through every team, every organization. But how a team demonstrates those values might be different depending on the work that they do, but the values are the consistent thing. I often, whenever I see we have one team culture, there's always a bit of me.

Colin:

That's just like oh, you don't really understand how culture works. You know, it's not possible for everybody to act in exactly the same way, and often where you get silos, the silos is where you have I call them subcultures, where you have a broken subculture, and that's because managers don't have the consistent skills to build culture in the same way. So you get this real lack of consistency. Bring their sense of self to the role that they're doing, but there has to be a consistency around the way that the values are demonstrated, exactly as you said, Cath, in terms of standards and behaviours, because these are the things that you want the culture to be known for. But the way that they do them, yeah, can be quite different, right.

Cath:

And that's okay. And I think sometimes people just want to be released, that, yeah, that's fine, that's okay, that's fine. We don't have to sort of create some robot, you know so, some world where we all behave the same, and that, again, it's part of us getting comfortable with something that feels different from other parts of our work where we might want more uniformity as such, and actually this leads on in turn to the next question, really, which is about how do we become more innovative?

Colin:

uh, often you see it as a value. In people's organizations we are innovative. And then you go and talk to people and say oh well, how do we do this thing? I think there's a simple formula that I often use, which is time plus creativity plus safety equals innovation, right?

Cath:

Mm nice.

Colin:

Complex maths that I know, spot the guy who started his career in the bank. But you, most organizations, don't ever get to innovation because they never make the time for it, and so I think the important distinction here is creativity is an imaginative process as opposed to innovation, which is kind of a productive process. You can't really measure creativity. We can measure innovation in the sense that here's an idea that we put into practice. Now, innovation, there's two types of innovation. There's innovation of self, innovation of team. And innovation of self is you actually taking the time to become more knowledgeable or to get other insights, or actually spending some time to think about how you might like to do things differently. And then you know, kind of, when it's the team, it's about the team coming together and saying, okay, well, if we had a blank canvas to solve this particular problem, what's a way that we could do this? So I think it starts with time. You have to actually make time to be creative.

Colin:

You know, one of the things when I was a manager myself is I shamelessly stole from the big tech companies. So 3M used to do this thing called 20% time, where they would give their engineers one day a week to work on whatever they want. But as a government manager I couldn't do that with my staff. So we did 5% time and it was two hours a week between three o'clock and five o'clock on a Friday, where we'd take a problem that we had that week and we'd say, right, let's put aside thing. You know all the. You know the typical ways that we would do things. You know post-it notes and pens and whiteboards and all these things and let's try and be creative about how we can solve this. So, make the time, you know, kind of create a creative space. So, and I, you know a place where ideas can flourish, which is often outside of a meeting room. You know I used to take whiteboards into parks and stuff like that, crazy things like that, which you can do Australia, because the weather's more predictable, of course.

Colin:

But then it's got to be, it's got to be safe. People have got to feel safe to be able to raise ideas. I think some of the greatest innovations came through failure. I often think people are like, oh, the greatest lessons are through failure. Actually, the greatest lessons are through successes. But that's okay. I think that there's a lot that we can learn from failure and it's got to be safe to fail, not that we want it done deliberately, but people have got to know that leaders aren't going to point the finger at blame with them if they try something and it doesn't work. So I think innovation is possible in every kind of team, in every kind of organization, but there's got to be time, you've got to make the space for creativity and it's got to be safe to find.

Cath:

Yeah, I love that Really. Key pointers there Time, creativity, safety and environment really important. So the interesting thing, quite a few companies did this, particularly in technology space, having this specific time where people could work on their own projects. And, what was interesting, they actually had multiple benefits. Not only did they get some great ideas, actually they got great engagement because it was motivating for people to do this and there were well-being benefits that came from it too. So it really was powerful on a lot of levels and I think sometimes people think, oh well, that's what you do if you're obviously in a sort of creative industry, but we actually need a lot more creativity in most of our workplaces.

Cath:

It's the bit that we are going to be able to do better than AI. It's one of those skills that comes up time and time again in terms of most valuable skills for the future workplaces in sort of World Economic Forum reports, those sorts of things. So we actually need it's really worth us carving out a space. It's going to be something that creates value in our organizations, and a good friend of mine who's a leadership development consultant wrote a book that's called Be Less Zombie consultant wrote a book that's called Be Less Zombie, elvin Turner. So I would definitely recommend that if anyone is wanting to think a bit more. Lots of great practical tips about bringing innovation into the workplace.

Colin:

That's a good value as well. Be less zombie. Love it, love it. I can just see someone painting that on the wall. Anyway, that's a whole other podcast, okay. Next question, and quite a serious one, actually, and something that we've touched on in the podcast today. So business largely pays lip service to employees' mental health some exceptions. So what do you think is needed to shift the attitude of businesses across the board and how do you think that will be achieved?

Cath:

Yeah, it's a really great question, Really grateful. It was one of our LinkedIn questions and I'd love to know actually more thoughts of listeners as well to this. I think inevitably, with a deep question like this, that is really challenging the heart of the organizations we've created over the last sort of 50 years or so, there have to be some different levels at which we start to think about this. How do we shift the attitude of businesses across the board? First of all, it's something about how we create leaders, what leadership development looks like from the beginning, not just halfway through the organization, but actually when you join, when you become an employee, when you become then a manager, then leaders, whatever your pathway is then we have to make sure that we are educated, aware and really valuing this. Now, what's going to enable us to actually not just pay lip service is that the people at the very top perhaps the board level and the senior leadership need to be valuing this. So we need to make sure we're getting better at collecting data, meaningful data, and that the shareholders are going to be saying this matters to our organisation Now, reputationally, as the number of culture crises increases, it is going up the agenda for lots of boards and they are starting to think about have we got the right people on the board who are informed about how we lead in this area? So I think it's a real area of change and transition and growth. And when you have that top level of leadership that care about this, that see it does matter and it relates to the bottom line, then you can start to get some change when you know we're no longer at a lit service level. But we need that to be kind of part of what happens. And traditionally we see most movement in this area in purpose-driven organizations, yeah, where they really care about the impact that you're having on a part of society, the customers, the communities, the environment. And so again, it's the companies that are taking those sorts of aspects of their business, the governance, ESG agenda seriously, where they're taking the impact of the impact, of the impact of the impact, of the impact of the impact, and usually there's much better understanding to this area. So, you know, if you're looking for companies that care, those are the sorts of things I start looking at. How seriously do they take this in their annual report, in their quarterly reporting? Within the culture of people you speak to, I think the other thing that can have a huge to have a voice in a survey. If we are asked, we can often speak loudest with our feet, ie we leave organizations where we don't see people care about this. So retention, attracting talent, employee activism are areas where we can start to show this matters.

Cath:

It's important to the health of the organization and I think that's the kind of key area, isn't it?

Cath:

It's seeing the health of our people as a really important part of our responsibility as a leader. There's a brilliant business for health organization that's been working to try and create, if you like, a resilience index to try and help us add health into ESG. So we it's a bit mad we think about the environment, our social impact, our governance, but we don't think about the health of the people in our own organizations who are our key asset, who, even if we only care about performance outcomes, well, they're the ones delivering them. So we must care about those people and hopefully we've moved beyond that. We actually know in itself, we need to look after these people. So for me, it's a growing area Organisations like Business for Health and we'll put a link to them in the newsletter, in the action sheet as well. Have a look at some of the work they're doing to educate, to run pilots with organizations linking into local health community as well, so that business is part of how we actually change our attitude towards health across society. So it's a big question.

Colin:

Yeah, it is, and I want organizations to be more proactive on this, Cath. What I see a lot of is organizations spending hundreds of millions. What I see a lot of is organizations spending hundreds of millions. I'm pretty sure I read a stat that by 2026, organizations have been spending $95 billion worldwide on wellness programs.

Colin:

And yet what Oxford University found is that wellness interventions mindfulness classes, well-being apps had no significant impact on well-being, sense of belonging, job satisfaction or mental health, nor did they improve the culture. And I think organizations that take mental health seriously proactively reduce stress, proactively reduce overwhelm, proactively reduce burnout, they focus on human interactions, they make time for relationships, they celebrate success. Yes, I'm not advocating that you abandon your wellness program you still need some interventions but actually spending more of that money on building a respectful culture that has a sense of belonging, doing what you said like involving staff in those conversations. That goes much further at safeguarding the mental health of employees than the reactionary stuff. It's like oh, we burnt you out, here's a program that we can send you on, and so you're absolutely right. It will become more and more important and organizations will be more and more exposed by employees if they don't take it seriously. I 100% agree.

Cath:

Yeah, I think that's right. It's no longer good enough to have yoga on Thursday lunchtimes, you know, when you've got poor line management happening. Yeah, it needs to go much deeper. Yeah, brilliant, fantastic question. Great, okay, so next one why does staff development always get cut first when money is tight?

Colin:

It's a good little segue from the last one. They all link on today All link on they do yeah, and people will be thinking, aren't they smart? They've linked these questions, but actually it's as much of a surprise to us as it is to everyone else. It is.

Cath:

Beautiful.

Colin:

This is something I experienced myself 30 years as an office employee. It's something I saw time and time and time again is where you get three months to the end of the year and then, all of a sudden, there's no money to do the things that you wanted to do. Now the way that I counted this as a manager is I always spent all of my budget upfront and I would always spend it on the team. There were some things that we did as individuals, but I would always spend it on the team. I would do team development days. I always used to take my team off site for two days at the start of a financial year to define the culture that we needed to be successful, and that's where most of my money went. So there's a couple of issues. That's where most of my money went. I think partly. So there's a couple of issues is partly there's usually no people strategy or no culture strategy that actually determines the amount of money that's required and the outcomes that the organization can expect by spending that money. Often it's just a pot learning and development budget. It will be called and there'll be X thousand dollars, but it's not really given. Not much thought is given to it. It feels like I'm being hypercritical, but I think it's justified, so I'm just going to carry on with it. But I think I do.

Colin:

I think lots of leaders are like how much do we think? A hundred grand, yeah, let's do that, you know, for an organization of 5,000 people or whatever it might be. And then it's incumbent on people to really think about it. So I think you know, really thinking about what's an appropriate budget to evolve the culture in a way that's not only positive but only maintains that sense of performance. I think it's easier to cut money on so-called discretionary items rather than stop investing operating expenditure on dumb projects. There's a lot of dumb projects that don't get killed in the early stages that really drain operating expenditure. That really should just stop.

Colin:

I think that money would be far better spent on staff development. I think what leaders need to realize is actually removing spend on staff development on cultural evolution actually undermines engagement. It leads to reduced productivity, makes people unhappy. Some of the statistics we've seen around certain millennials and Gen Z is where they don't feel that there's an investment in their future, a serious investment in their future. Then loyalty completely decreases Because what they're looking for is organizations that actually do the things that they say they will do and they don't welch on those promises. So I think you know, as humans we change, as humans we evolve, and what we're looking for is a commitment from our organization to actually put their money where their mouth is and when they remove the money, and then we stop believing them.

Cath:

Development is part of performance for me, so it would be just totally mad to separate them, and I think for me seeing staff development as somehow optional in itself is a big problem. We have seen some progress, because I know that when things were difficult, for example in the pandemic, we have always seen staff development cut. But in the last year, 18 months, when things have been difficult, there has been less of a knee jerk reaction to cutting development, because actually we saw how it hurt us before. We saw how then we needed to invest again in people, and so I actually think we've moved further in realizing that. And it isn't always the first thing to get cut.

Cath:

But in a way it comes back to that previous question. It's about seeing development as integral. You just can't separate it out of your budget because it's tied to your performance, and if you still care about your performance and your results, then you have to care about this as well. So it comes back to that almost that deeper philosophy of what you believe is critical to your organization thriving in both the outcomes it gets and the people who work for it. So yeah, it has that kind of goes back to that deeper underpinning in a way.

Colin:

Okay, Cath. Last question linked again. Look at this. We're so onto this. So collecting know your staff data is notoriously challenging. Low percentage returns on surveys and withheld or inaccurate data is commonplace For staff perspective. Why should I and what will you do with it are common fears when it comes to providing feedback. So how do you develop a culture of trust in order to gain engagement from employees, so you can collect a true, unskewed data set from your workforce? And again, this is another question that came via LinkedIn.

Cath:

Yeah, that's a goodie, isn't it? Actually shout out to Stephen Dowd, who's been supporting us on LinkedIn and he's thought up this really important question, actually, because it goes to the heart of this question of surveys. Now, surveys are a big issue and we could almost do an episode on surveys, although actually no one's going to be motivated because every time we hear the word survey, we tend to switch off these days. So I think there are sort of different angles to this. Let's unpick a few of them. Firstly, I think you know he's right in saying how do you develop a culture of trust so that we can get really good data on our culture? Well, the thing is, you don't build trust through surveys. So let's not fall into that trap. Trust in itself is not built through the survey. The survey may be trying to help you find out about the culture, but trust in itself comes from that building relationships, the values of the organization, the leadership, the behaviors, all of that piece. So let's make sure that we're actually investing in that sense of things, rather that side of things, rather than actually just surveying to try and get a result we want to hear, so that we can sort of feel good about ourselves, because often it feels that surveys are just trying to justify something or if they're good enough, if we can get high enough score, then we don't need to do anything else in a certain area. We actually need to be working hard on building trust all the time, regardless of what our surveys tell us. So separate out those two things.

Cath:

I think there are actually some more innovative ways of surveying or getting a sense. And so don't do the same survey over again. Don't ask too many questions. Find different ways of getting in touch with your organization. I mean, actually as managers, don't wait for the annual survey. Find out from your teams. Really, you want that informal feedback to be flowing all the time. You want to be listening to the stories that you hear from others about what it's like to work with your team, or the things that your team tell you. You start listening out to those stories because that's the most powerful way to actually get directly in touch with the culture of the organization. There are some new ways coming with sort of AI, some of which, you know, kind of get to the over monitoring stage, which is horrendous, but I think others are starting to look a bit more in a kind of more fun way.

Cath:

What else can we find out about how many times people in teams are connecting with others outside their teams? I, you know what's the sort of vibrancy of communication within an organization. So there are some other ways in which we can start to get a sense of the energy, the communication level now there are. You know, apparently you can also find out how many times your employees are updating their resumes. If they're doing it on your system, of course, they might not be doing it on your system, but that would obviously tell you that there's a problem. I mean, there is a world in which surveys can play a role, but they are never the full picture that Adam Grant was part of with a couple of others a few years ago Scott Judd and Erica Rourke who were saying that the survey isn't quite dead yet.

Cath:

Okay, there are some value, some helpful aspects that come from it. For a start, if people aren't filling out the survey, that's telling you something. Actually, people who don't fill out the survey are more likely to leave. It probably means you're also asking, you know, dumb questions, not the right question, and actually you know there's something that you need to do differently. So all you know always tells you something. It's still a channel to your for people to give their voice. It shows a commitment that you are interested, although really that depends on then what you do with it and whether you change anything as a result of it.

Cath:

And the questions you ask can actually influence behavior. So you might ask something that then means people will start noticing oh yeah, how do my leaders value my voice or actually what else is going on around me that matters. So they are quite a good way of even nudging people to start looking at the way their line managers managers are line managing. You know, if you poll people, what are they going to plan to buy a computer in the next six months? They're 20% more likely to. So it's actually also a way of influencing behavior.

Cath:

So the thing is to ask better questions like are you personally committed to improving the experience of what it's like to work here? Yeah, those are really valuable questions, you know. That can give us a sense of. You know, actually are we all part of creating the culture rather than just trying. Some of the questions are just so long, these surveys, that they're meaningless what we're asking. So does that question actually give you meaningful data? But always with the survey. My sort of caveat is what else matters that isn't on the survey, and make sure you're finding out about that as well. What do you think?

Colin:

Yeah, no, that's all great. I've filled in my first year of energy engagement, sap and surveys. I joked once that sometimes the engagement survey actually creates this engagement. It's so bad, so many long questions, you know. The other thing that I would add to that, Cath because that's all great stuff is don't ask questions if you're not going to do anything with the feedback that you get.

Colin:

You know, one of my favorites is you know, on a scale of zero to 10, how much do you trust the leadership team? Well, if the score is five, then you have to actually do something different, otherwise people are never, ever going to trust you, and so surveys should be short. I don't like it when people incentivize people for filling them in as well. If you fill it in, you get a prize. Well, the prize should be a sense of belonging. A prize should be knowing that something happens with that information, and so you know.

Colin:

Ultimately, I think if you're going to survey staff, then leaders have to be seen to do something with the information that they receive, and the best thing to do is to involve the staff and say hey, listen, thanks for all this. Here's the feedback that we got. We're now going to use this to inform our cultural evolution program for the next year and we're going to involve you in that, and that way you'll get contracting then, isn't it? Yeah, that's right. And then you'll get continual engagement, because people are like, oh great, they're actually doing something with the feedback that I provided.

Cath:

Great, I mean. Those were six amazingly tough, complex questions. There are no right answers. We're really hopefully just helping to unpick a bit, look deeper at what's going on within our culture and giving you some tips, hopefully some tools along the way. So it's been a brilliant episode. Thanks so much, colin.

Colin:

Thanks, Cath, and just a reminder to everyone if you've got a question, you can send it to insideoutculture at gmailcom. Otherwise, you can jump on LinkedIn, follow Cath and I and you can comment on any of our posts, ask us a question at any time and look forward to the next question episode.

Cath:

Thanks, Cath, sounds good. Bye. Thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture Podcast.

Colin:

Please remember to like, subscribe and, of course, share with others who you think may be interested.

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Cath Bishop

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Colin D Ellis

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