Seth Dobbs (he/him): When people talk about organizational culture, what do you think that actually means? Is it something you as a leader can have an impact on, or is it just something to monitor and hope for the best about. Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs, and this is the Principle Driven Leadership podcast. Where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations, and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills. I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact.

And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. The step we’re taking today involves understanding what organizational culture is and how we as leaders can have a positive and negative effect on it. For this step, I’m going to talk about Reyna and Teagan. Reyna, a software developer, first met Tegan while interviewing for a job where Teagan worked.

Reyna was impressed by Teagan’s obvious intelligence, but was even more excited by how they described the work environment. Yes, they worked hard, but they had a culture of fun and camraderie. They had a refrigerator full of craft beers, a game room, a lounge area, and an open desk environment to encourage collaboration.

Teagan assured Reyna that there was nothing more important than good team communication and interaction. And Reyna felt that this was exactly the environment she was looking for and excitedly accepted the offer when she received it. She was brought in at the start of a new project and was welcomed by the team.

Things seemed good for the first few months. The team worked hard. The game room was great. The beer was really good. All as promised, but there was some kind of undercurrent in the team that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. Least until things changed. More specifically, like many projects, the project Reyna was on fell behind.

She started noticing in that case that other team members started making passive aggressive remarks about each other in daily meetings. Now, nothing too accusatory, at least at first, she hoped she was just misreading the people. She wasn’t. Things got worse. Another developer, Brooks, was clearly falling behind, but in part because he wasn’t receiving support he needed from other team members.

In fact, they seemed to be avoiding him almost like they were setting him up to be blamed. This really stressed Reyna out. The behavior wasn’t at all what Teagan had described. In fact, it was further slowing down the work and leading to other problems. Reyna looked forward to the next monthly project review with Teagan so that they could set the team straight.

Reyna felt they really needed to pull together as a team to meet the deadline. The project review with Tegan did not go as expected. From the start, Teagan spoke with a raised voice and occasionally yelled about how incompetent the team was and how bad the team was making Teagan look, the quality of the work was bad and slow.

Teagan asked out loud, “do I have to code all this myself?” Not surprisingly, and as more or less Reyna had predicted, several team members then pointed out all the problems Brooks was having, and Teagan immediately jumped on that and started berating Brooks in front of everyone.

Reyna actually tried to stick up for Brooks, reiterating the importance of team and collaboration that Teagan had described to her and the need to pull together. Teagan responded that, yes, being a team was very important and that Brooks was letting the team down. Then they dropped an ultimatum on Brooks and stormed out of the room.

After a few moments, Brooks got up and dragged himself out, not seeing some of the other team members smirking behind his back. As Reyna walked back to her desk, she started thinking that the disturbing behavior she saw in the team weren’t in spite of Teagan. But actually because of Teagan. Reyna was likely correct.

Which brings us to the principle for this episode. Culture Starts With You. Now there’s a lot of material out there talking about organizational culture. So I’d like to provide a definition for the purposes of Principle Driven Leadership, which is this: That culture is the organizational muscle memory that drives reflexive behavior.

It can be best seen in how an organization reacts in the face of adversity and how it deals with the difficult. It’s often easy to believe you have a good culture when there isn’t stress in an organization. The cracks, the misalignments, the bad behaviors don’t always manifest so clearly when things are going well.

But when you put pressure on an organization with a poor culture, it really comes out. The negativity becomes so much stronger, as we saw with Teagan. Now they talked a good game, but when things were tough, the truth came out. Their behavior showed something other than what they had said to Reyna. And it’s that behavior that the rest of the team was modeling.

The thing is, to a certain extent, it doesn’t really matter what you say, what you post on the wall, et cetera. As a leader, you are a model for behavior. Whatever you do or allow to be done repeatedly is an indicator to everyone as to what is acceptable under your leadership. You need to be mindful of what kind of organization you want to lead, how people should interact, how you want them to face adversity with each other and so forth, and then live it.

Be, to the best of your ability, the model of how you expect others to behave. It’s that simple and that difficult. It’s not enough to just say what you want the culture to be. If you aren’t embodying it, in addition to whatever behaviors you’re already exhibiting, you’re also modeling that hypocrisy is okay.

Of course, you should communicate the guiding principles of your culture. Announce them, post them on the wall, whatever is effective in your mind to communicate them. You also need to live them. Now it’s possible that Teagan wanted a culture of blame throwing of siloing and intimidation. They were certainly creating that, but if we hold them true to what they said about good team communication and interaction, they need to model it. If Teagan wanted to truly make good team interaction core to their culture, they could start by being supportive rather than accusatory when things became difficult. They could recognize when team members are trying to cast blame as they did with Brooks, and instead of jumping in and also blaming Brooks, perhaps ask why he wasn’t getting the support that he needed. Changing a culture takes time, but it’s important work for a leader to shape an organization. You’ll know you’re making progress in this when you see team members guiding each other’s behavior rather than just waiting for you to handle it. This means the culture is being more wholly embraced. Years ago when I was a project manager, I was a big proponent of team members asking questions, of pushing back on things, even pushing back on my own decisions if they didn’t think my decision made sense. And I, I continue this to this day as an executive leader.

Now in that long ago scenario, I had a team member move to another project with a different project manager, and that project started facing problems that no one wanted to raise. She pointed out that I always said people should speak up, and one of the other team members said Yes she would if she was on a Seth Project, but wasn’t going to do it on this one.

Now, I don’t say that to pat myself on the back. It’s been a long learning journey for me to get to that point. But rather to emphasize as clearly as possible how much a leader shapes culture. Members of the same team had moved from one project manager to another and had a completely different culture and how they worked.

Also just I’d like to point out briefly, it’s actually possible for different subcultures to exist in a broader, large organization, and this heavily depends on what different leaders model and cultivate, which is to say that if you aren’t happy with the culture you work in, you can work to carve out a better culture within your own sphere of influence.

That’s also very hard work, but can make a difference, especially to those you lead. But returning to the main point, think about the two different groups of people in that last example. One with the culture of asking and questioning versus one with a culture of staying silent and keeping their heads down.

Both existed within a single corporation and each group created different kinds of leaders because of those cultural differences. And that’s what ties this into the overarching principle that Leaders Create More Leaders. Being mindful of what kind of leader you want to create should shape how you, yourself act as a leader.

Culture isn’t just some external factor. It’s not a stocked fridge. It’s not a foosball table. It’s not Thursday night outings. It’s how the organization works together and how they handle the good, and perhaps more importantly, the bad and most challenging situations. We as humans are always looking for cues to social norms, and in particular, we look to people in leadership positions to see how they behave, often modeling ourselves after people we perceive as successful. That’s why part of Creating Leaders is building the culture you want to see. Why culture starts with you. It is recognizing this fact that in part led me to first start talking about leadership principles to my team and to my peers.

I wanted to make clear what my cultural expectations were and then followed that by doing my best to model them. We as leaders can shape our organization’s culture. In fact, we do shape our culture whether or not we are mindful about it.

So we should be mindful about what we’re trying to create. We are the models of what is acceptable, meaning we are models of what our culture is willing to allow. Now, ultimately, we can only control our own behavior. We can’t control external factors nor the people we lead. Only ourselves.

So what do we want to model? What do we want to create? And that’s what I want you to think about after this episode. What kind of organizational culture are you trying to create? How do you want people in your team to behave in challenging times? And how do you want them to behave in good times? Thanks so much for joining me.

Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it. And send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. Join me next time where I’ll talk about the importance of creating space for the people you lead to truly shine.