When did you last check your organisation’s foundations?

Part of my work is developing leaders. Yet one of the most useful things I tell a CEO early on is that a leadership program probably won't fix the problem they've just described.

It's a poor sales line, but it is an honest one.

The brief said capability. The managers said something else.

A CEO once asked me to design a program for his middle managers. His description was clear: they wouldn't make decisions. Everything came up the line. The executive meeting had become a clearing house for matters his managers were already authorised to decide.

He wanted them more confident, more decisive and more accountable.

When I spoke with those managers, a different picture emerged. They described approving something within their delegation, then watching it overturned at the next executive leadership team meeting. One manager told me she no longer put recommendations in her reports. She listed the options and let the executive choose, because that way nobody could overturn her. Over time they had worked out that making a call carried risk and escalating it carried none. Why waste your time when the executive team will waste it for you?

They weren't short on confidence. They had simply learned the lesson the organisation kept teaching.

A program would have taught them decision-making frameworks and sent them straight back into the same executive meeting. Within three months the old behaviour would have returned, and the verdict would have been that the managers didn't take the training seriously.

Conditioning shapes behaviour long before any program arrives

Every workplace conditions its people, whether anyone intended it or not.

People watch what happens to the colleague who raises a concern, who says no to an extra project, who pushes back on a senior leader in a meeting. They notice which commitments get honoured and which quietly lapse. Then they adjust, and repeated often enough, the adjustment becomes instinct.

Most new starters are inducted, onboarded and shown the ropes. Then reality teaches them how things work. Often within months, capable and motivated people have adapted to whatever the organisation rewards.

That is why I say you are never really building a culture, but perpetually renovating one. Like a house, it gets remodelled as the years go on, a room at a time, with everyone still living there. You can change the look of a room, but you're still working with the bones of the house.

Anyone who has renovated an older home knows what happens when you ignore the bones. A crack appears in the plaster, so you patch it and repaint. Six months later it's back and bigger, because the crack was never the problem. Something underneath kept moving.

The system always wins

Harvard professor Michael Beer and his co-authors argued in a 2016 Harvard Business Review article that leadership training disappoints so often because organisations send people away to learn new behaviour, then return them to structures, incentives and senior leaders that haven't changed. When the individual and the system disagree, the system tends to prevail. 

In renovation terms, the program is fresh paint. Everyone admires it at the graduation lunch. A few months later, the crack is showing through again.

What gets labelled a capability gap is often a reasonable response to the conditions people are working in. That is a hard thing for an executive team to hear, because it shifts part of the responsibility onto the people commissioning it.

Four lessons your organisation may be teaching right now

Here is a quick way to start reading your own conditioning. It won't give you the full picture, but it will tell you whether you need one. Look at what happens in four moments, and what people would reasonably conclude from them.

After someone makes a call. If decisions made within delegation regularly get reopened higher up, people learn that escalating is safer than deciding. Look at your last executive agenda and count how many items don't belong there.

When bad news travels upward. If the person delivering a problem gets questioned harder than the problem itself, information starts arriving late and softened. Think about the last time you heard about an issue before it had become urgent.

When something new is added. If priorities keep arriving and nothing is ever taken away, people learn that commitments are negotiable and start quietly rationing their effort. Ask what your executive team has formally stopped doing this year.

When poor behaviour delivers results. If a strong performer bullies, belittles or bulldozes colleagues and nobody challenges it because the numbers are good, everyone learns that results excuse conduct. Despite your zero-tolerance behaviour expectations and values presentation over muffins, a new starter quickly concludes what it takes to get ahead here.

None of these will show up in a capability framework. Every one of them teaches people how to behave, and they don't stop when the training does.

Repainting a wall won't fix a moving foundation

Leadership programs aren't the only fix applied to the surface. Restructures and recruitment campaigns often go the same way. 

A restructure redraws the floor plan: new teams, new reporting lines, new titles. If decisions still get overturned at the top, though, the people in the new structure learn exactly what the people in the old one learned.

Recruitment works the same way. An organisation preparing to grow hires more people, but if existing staff are already battling unclear ownership and constant rework, the new starters walk straight into it. A year later there are more people waiting on decisions, and a bigger salary bill.

Whatever you change, the conditioning moves in with it unless you deal with it directly.

Inspect first

No sensible builder quotes on a renovation without inspecting the structure first. Organisations skip this step all the time.

That inspection is what I built the Culture Compass™ for. It looks at how vision, risk, capacity and aspiration are working against each other, drawing on what staff experience, what people leaders see day to day and what the executive is trying to achieve. The point is to work out which problems need development, which need clearer authority and which need the executive team to change how it operates, before the money is committed.

I describe my approach as compassionately confrontational. Sometimes that means telling a CEO the program he asked for will help, but only after his executive team changes how it handles decisions made below it. Neither of us enjoys that conversation. It costs far less than funding the same problem twice.

If you are planning your next investment in people, structure or culture, let's have a chat about what your organisation is teaching first. The same goes if your staff engagement survey is due and you'd rather not throw good money at another familiar report. Every year it plays out the same way. The findings sit for months, then reach the executive as a handful of broad statements like "85 per cent of staff would recommend us as a place to work, up one point on last year" or "we should focus more on learning and development and promote from within." None of it gets near the problems people are dealing with every day.

Fresh paint will cover a crack for a while, but it won't stop it spreading. Fix what's causing it, then paint.