For A Positive Workplace Culture, Make Words Match Decisions and Actions

If organizational values on paper don’t match up with employee’s day-to-day experience, culture suffers. Here’s how to back them up with action.

How often do organizations go through the motions of defining their company value statements, only to leave them to languish like just another exercise checked off the list? When organizational values such as integrity, respect, collaboration and trust don’t, in reality, reflect what people experience in their day-to-day work life, organizational culture suffers. By only paying lip service to their values, leaders lose credibility.

A degraded culture can have a disastrous effects. We’ve seen major tragic events through the years whose causes have been rightly attributed to the culture of the organization—the Space Shuttle Columbia tragedy, the BP explosion at Deepwater Horizon, the Brumadinho dam disaster in Brazil and more recently, Boeing’s frequent mishaps.

An organization’s culture is best thought of as “how we get things done.” The primary factors that give definition are upward communication, trust in leadership, organizational support and perception of justice. But few leaders can honestly say they know what kinds of decisions and actions they engage in that influence these factors.

The most influential force in establishing the culture of an organization is leadership decision-making. Leaders need to become sensitive to the affects their decisions have on elements of their cultures. 

If, indeed, their stated organizational values are integrity, respect, collaboration and trust, leaders must learn to reflect them through actions like these:

1. Encouraging upward communication.

Leaders depend on those closest to the work for information to inform decision-making. Nevertheless, leaders often convey that they only want good news. The organization soon learns to avoid telling the truth about what is actually going on. The result becomes obvious when an unanticipated outcome occurs.

What you can do: Re-frame what you want to hear by asking the right questions and learning to listen. “What are the most important challenges you are working on?” “What barriers stand in the way at this point?” “What is your strategy to fix it?” Play back what you hear, and let it sink in. Be willing to know the real story without shooting the messenger.

When Paul O’Neill, then CEO of Alcoa, visited plant sites he would often give out his cell phone number and tell plant employees, “Call me if you have a safety problem you can’t get fixed.” 

2. Providing support for goal attainment.

Leaders need to ask themselves whether they show genuine interest in their people, invite real feedback on the status of goal attainment and listen for opportunities to provide support. In the absence of genuine support, problems are withheld and decisions are made with only partial understanding.

What you can do: Distinguish evaluating performance from providing support. Both are important but if the former is prominent the conversation you want to have is less likely to happen. Collective intelligence kicks in when two people talk openly, and it gets better with mutual respect.

“How can I help?” or “What do you need?” can start the conversation that turns out to be pivotal. Create an atmosphere that welcomes the real conversation that needs to happen. 

After the Columbia Space Shuttle failure, which was directly related to upward communication, NASA leaders were taught to ask in meetings, “Is there another point of view on this in the room?”  

3. Promoting organizational justice.

The perception that “decisions that affect me are made fairly” is a central element of a strong and effective culture—one that gets things done effectively. The underlying principle in play is reciprocity, meaning, “I tend to respond in a manner similar to the way I’m treated.”

What you can do: Often the leader doesn’t see the impact of a given decision on the perception of fairness in the organization; the impact on the culture. It may not be the “what they did,” but rather the “how they did it” that matters.

For example: An executive leader is terminated. The decision was carefully made and fully justified in the best interest of the organization. But what the organization remembers (the culture) is how it was done. Respectful or humiliating?

When you listen to stories of this kind you hear how they managed the change as much or more than what the change was.  

4. Building trust.

A CEO’s ability to inspire trust is essential to a culture that will support high performance. Leaders’ actions and decisions influence trust to the extent that they are credible and authentic.

Trust can mean level of confidence or level of integrity. “I know she can do what we need,” or “I know she has character.” Both are important and both have strong influence on the culture. Neither can be faked for very long.

What you can do: Think about the leaders you trust, in both competency and character. What do they have in common, in contrast to those you aren’t so sure of? Dedication to the best interest of the organization is a fundamental principle, even when it isn’t fun, as is commitment to ethical standards, in principle and in action.  

Moment by moment, leaders are creating the culture of their organization. When their words correlate with their decisions and actions—demonstrating that their values are genuinely embedded in their decision making—they are building a high-performing organization in which people can thrive.

This article was originally published in Chief Executive in August 2024. 

To explore organizational culture in greater depth, you can read Tom Krause’s book If Your Culture Could Talk:  A Story About Culture Change.