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Ask a chief executive to describe their culture and you will get a confident, articulate answer. It will also be incomplete. That’s because everything a leader learns about their culture arrives through a chain of people, and every link has a reason to smooth it. By the time it reaches the top, it is a heavily processed account, edited by everyone who would rather not hand bad news to power. So leaders reach for what they can see directly, the engagement score, the retention number, the values they model in the room. And they view those proxies as the culture. Those proxies are the part you can see, which is exactly why they are the most dangerous thing to trust. The better they look, the more confident you get, and that confidence is risky. My latest piece is on why you may be the last person to know your own culture.

Link in bio.

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Open post by bentonbradfordconsulting with ID 17896538442543007

Ask a chief executive to describe their culture and you will get a confident, articulate answer. It will also be incomplete. That’s because everything a leader learns about their culture arrives through a chain of people, and every link has a reason to smooth it. By the time it reaches the top, it is a heavily processed account, edited by everyone who would rather not hand bad news to power. So leaders reach for what they can see directly, the engagement score, the retention number, the values they model in the room. And they view those proxies as the culture. Those proxies are the part you can see, which is exactly why they are the most dangerous thing to trust. The better they look, the more confident you get, and that confidence is risky. My latest piece is on why you may be the last person to know your own culture.

Link in bio.

0 0

When a company grows, the way its culture travels changes. At a smaller scale it moved by proximity, person to person. Growth removes that proximity: past a certain size, most employees never meet the people who originally shaped the culture. They learn it from their manager and from what they watch get rewarded and tolerated. So culture does not drift. Its direction is set, deliberately or not, by the sum of thousands of promotion and tolerance decisions. Every promotion teaches people what success looks like. Every tolerated behavior teaches them what standards actually matter, and in time those signals outweigh anything written on the wall. The culture you have is the one you have been promoting and tolerating, whether or not it matches the one you describe to candidates. My latest piece is on what is actually carrying your culture now.

Link in Bio.

0 0

Open post by bentonbradfordconsulting with ID 17973625872117442

When a company grows, the way its culture travels changes. At a smaller scale it moved by proximity, person to person. Growth removes that proximity: past a certain size, most employees never meet the people who originally shaped the culture. They learn it from their manager and from what they watch get rewarded and tolerated. So culture does not drift. Its direction is set, deliberately or not, by the sum of thousands of promotion and tolerance decisions. Every promotion teaches people what success looks like. Every tolerated behavior teaches them what standards actually matter, and in time those signals outweigh anything written on the wall. The culture you have is the one you have been promoting and tolerating, whether or not it matches the one you describe to candidates. My latest piece is on what is actually carrying your culture now.

Link in Bio.

0 0

Every leadership team watches certain people under pressure: the one with the temper, the one who goes silent when a decision is due. The leader who should worry you more is rarely one of them, because by every visible measure they are one of your best. They stay composed, they communicate consistently, and they tell each audience the version that protects them. Nothing reads as dishonest, and the reports stay clean.

But the organization starts acting on a picture that is no longer quite real. This is where culture begins to bend, long before anyone would call it a culture problem, because a rewarded distorter teaches everyone that managing the message pays. Distorted information is worse than none: the company acts with confidence and is wrong.

My latest piece is on the most expensive operator you are not worried about, and how they shape your culture.

https://tr.ee/ik0nBQ4bW5

#BentonBradford #TheLeadershipDeficit #CultureConditions #ThePerformanceDividend #TheChamber

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Open post by bentonbradfordconsulting with ID 18566495119070833

Every leadership team watches certain people under pressure: the one with the temper, the one who goes silent when a decision is due. The leader who should worry you more is rarely one of them, because by every visible measure they are one of your best. They stay composed, they communicate consistently, and they tell each audience the version that protects them. Nothing reads as dishonest, and the reports stay clean.

But the organization starts acting on a picture that is no longer quite real. This is where culture begins to bend, long before anyone would call it a culture problem, because a rewarded distorter teaches everyone that managing the message pays. Distorted information is worse than none: the company acts with confidence and is wrong.

My latest piece is on the most expensive operator you are not worried about, and how they shape your culture.

https://tr.ee/ik0nBQ4bW5

#BentonBradford #TheLeadershipDeficit #CultureConditions #ThePerformanceDividend #TheChamber

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