Your Culture Is Showing

The shadow of the leader is long.

I was brought in to assess a company that needed help getting its operations in order.

In our first meeting, the owner and one of her managers spent the better part of an hour dissecting a current employee. Laughing at her. Breaking her down. A full character assassination while I sat across the table taking notes and trying to decide if I was really hearing what I was hearing.

I told myself it was a bad day. It wasn't.

That employee came up again and again as I started turning over stones.

No matter how many operational gaps I found—and there were many—it soon became clear that the real problem wasn't a process or a system: It was the culture. And the culture had one architect.

What I found inside that company was some of the most corrosive behavior I have encountered in a professional setting. Incessant gossip. Back channeling. Triangulation. The owner talked about her people to other people on the team. Ideas shut down for not aligning with the mission, then quietly adopted months later when someone in the inner circle suggested the same thing.

Nobody trusted anyone, not because the team was broken, but because the leader was.

When I reported  what I was observing, I was met with deflection. A reframing of reality that made the dysfunction sound like everyone else's problem. 

Classic. And telling.

People weren't loyal to this owner because they believed in her; they were loyal because they were afraid of what would happen if they weren't.

Here's what I know after working inside founder-led businesses across multiple industries:

Culture is not a values statement on a website. It is not a team-building exercise or an offsite or a catered lunch. Culture is what the leader does when they think nobody is watching. It is how they talk about people who aren't in the room. It is whether they take credit or give it. Whether they protect their people or sacrifice them for convenience.

It starts at the top. Every single time.

The good news is that it can also be fixed at the top.

If you're building a team and wondering why trust feels low, turnover feels high, or people seem guarded, look in the mirror before you look into your processes. The culture you have is the one you've been modeling.

And if you need someone to come in and tell you what they see, then you can look to me too.