There's a lot of talk about ideal workplaces and people leaving bad bosses. While spotting problems matters, the bigger question is: How do you actually change the culture? As leaders, we face a challenge – our position makes it hard to see what's really happening in our organizations.
The Leadership Challenge
As leaders, we want honest feedback about our workplace culture, but our presence often changes how people act around us. Employees might tell us what they think we want to hear rather than the whole truth.
Most companies use employee surveys to try to get around this problem. While these give us some information, surveys alone rarely create real change. They show us symptoms but don't fix the underlying issues.
It also goes without saying that the larger the organization, and the more layers, the larger this information gap is.
The Key Players: Direct Supervisors
Here's what many culture change efforts miss: top executives only have limited contact with most employees. Employees mainly look to their direct supervisors to see if culture improvement efforts are real or just talk.
Think about it: When an employee decides if they had a good day at work, they rarely base that on the CEO's latest company email. Instead, it's about their immediate work environment and especially their relationship with their direct supervisor.
Additionally, frontline staff interact with more customers on a day to day basis than the CEO. They, and their supervisors, by direct effect have a bigger outcome on the customer experience because of that.
Investing Where It Counts
If you want to transform your culture, put your resources into developing your front-line and middle managers. These people turn your company values from words into daily realities for your teams:
- Coach them well. Give managers the skills they need to create the culture you want. Management is a skill that needs development, not just a title.
- Reward the right behaviors. What gets measured gets done. If you want managers to focus on employee growth, creating safe spaces for honest discussion, or encouraging new ideas, include these in their performance reviews and rewards.
- Help them learn from each other. Create opportunities where managers can share what works and what doesn't when implementing culture changes.
- Lead by example. Show the culture you want through how you treat your own team members.
Moving Beyond Top-Down Approaches
Traditional approaches like new mission statements, posters of company values, or company-wide trainings rarely create lasting change on their own. While they signal what matters, real transformation happens in the thousands of daily interactions between employees and their supervisors.
By the way, any employee with a modicum of job experience has gone through a myriad of restructurings, and "change" efforts. They can tell if it is real or just a new coat of paint.
By developing your managers, you create a ripple effect. Each improved supervisor-employee relationship spreads through teams, departments, and eventually, the whole organization. If their supervisors are getting improvement efforts, they will see that in their daily lives and believe that the effort is real. That will show up in their daily work.
Seeing Real Progress
When your next employee survey comes around, you'll likely see better results from this approach than from any top-down program. But more importantly, you'll notice practical changes: more new ideas, people staying longer, better customer relationships, and teams that truly live your values.
I also guarantee that the answer you are getting back do not mean what you think they do. And any centralize approach to respond to the survey is doomed to failure. As a manager, I got my best intel when I leaned in and asked more directly what the questions meant to they when they were answering. Did this break anyonmity? Yeah, for some. But was I able to actually respond to their needs? Absolutely.
Changing workplace culture isn't about big announcements – it's about consistent behaviors at every level of your organization, starting with those who most directly shape employees' daily experiences.
What steps are you taking to help your supervisors become champions of positive culture change?
