The Metropolitan police has clear values on its website and a detailed ethics code. The fire service has a similarly robust code of ethics. Tony Danker, then director general of the Confederation of British Industry, gave a speech to a Future of Work conference about the importance of values in the workplace and how they matter now more than ever. Yet in all three organisations, toxic cultures have come to light in recent weeks. Days after his speech, Danker was sacked.
We know now that there is a big gap between what these organisations and their leaders say is important and what actually happens within them. Noticing and learning about that gap is what understanding culture is all about. It should be the number one priority for senior leaders. But ask them what’s on their priority list, and they’re likely to talk about quarterly results, growth or hitting targets.
What is clear is that we cannot judge a leader or their organisation by the mission statement on the wall or the values on their website. If we want to know the true or “deep” culture, we need to go in and ask questions, as Dame Louise Casey did throughout the Metropolitan police, and the CBI board member Jill Ader is about to start doing there with a review of culture, governance and processes. Questions about the experiences that people have at work, what it feels like to do their job, whether they feel safe to speak up and share their ideas and worries, whether they feel supported if someone behaves inappropriately towards them, and whether values come first or last in times of pressure.
A few simple questions like these can unlock the true picture of what a culture is like. But it’s become all too easy to ignore in a world where working life is dominated by short-term metrics about things, stuff, tasks, numbers, data, outputs – not about people. The oversight that comes from boards is clearly often insufficient. They have a wealth of data yet no idea what it’s like to work in a company.
Engagement surveys are often held up as people-focused but these also operate at a surface level. They might indicate where a leader could follow up and find out more about what’s going on behind the responses, but all too often there’s no follow-up, a new set of targets for the next annual survey is set and leaders move on.
Metrics have a lot to answer for – they explain why leaders in the CBI, Metropolitan police and fire services (and Yorkshire Cricket and British Gymnastics, for that matter) stayed in place for years, without understanding fully (or worse, without caring about) what was going on around them. These leaders have been judged, appraised and rewarded for other things than culture – I wonder if it even came up in their annual reviews.
As outcomes and results have become the chief metrics, leaders pay less attention to how those outcomes are achieved. And if you don’t value or measure “how” something has been achieved, corruption and poor behaviour follow. If you’re never rewarded for upholding values, you quickly learn what matters, what has currency, what the “real” values are.
Cultural change is both easy and hard. It can happen both quickly and slowly. Let me explain. It’s easy because it’s about treating people with respect. It doesn’t require academic qualifications or great intellect – in fact, that can even get in the way sometimes. People get promoted for being incredibly clever in their knowledge of engineering or law or economics or for getting results. But we should really be promoting leaders who enable those around them to develop and thrive, and help those who are heard less in the organisation to speak up.
We need our leaders to want to listen to difficult feedback and seek it out rather than suppress it. At any point over recent decades, senior leaders at the Met could have found out what Casey found if they’d wanted to.
But leading cultural change can be challenging: you need to role-model your values under intense pressures from those in power above you (maybe shareholders or government) who don’t share those values. And step in when respect isn’t shown in a small moment in the middle of a busy day, when it’s easier to look the other way. And hold your “top performer” to account who delivers the best sales figures but acts as a bully. Though all of that is actually easy to do if you are genuinely rooted in your values.
James Timpson, the head of the shoe repair and locksmithing company Timpson, offers an inspirational example . He doesn’t believe in mission statements, keen to stay rooted in reality rather than some shiny PR construct. He recruits on personality, employs prison leavers and focuses on supporting colleagues, convinced this is the best way to help colleagues “outperform”, as he calls it.
I have witnessed John Morgan, co-founder and CEO of the construction giant Morgan Sindall, visit every single one of his company’s leadership programmes. He doesn’t highlight sales figures or growth targets – he spends his entire session discussing the organisation’s values. He even gets the leaders to act them or mime them and consider which matter most in order to bring them to life.
When Glenn Earlam came into David Lloyd in 2015, he went round every club leading a conversation on values which were embedded in everything that happened. He ensured that they returned to pre-pandemic membership within weeks of post-Covid reopening.
Although drastic culture change is needed in multiple organisations, we shouldn’t kid ourselves this can be fixed by “diktat”. It’s the existence of fear that has prevented people from speaking out so far. Creating more fear won’t improve things. Bullies and abusers cannot be tolerated and the response to their behaviour sends ripples through the culture. But as teachers know, when you punish the whole class for what one kid did, you sow resentment, disengagement and a lack of trust. And as parents know, consistent boundaries are needed, but after that it’s care and respect, listening and compassion that help develop our children. The same goes for the workplace.
If there’s one clear message to learn from these shocking cultural crises, it’s that the daily role of leaders and their priorities must change and success metrics for organisations must shift. It’s not rocket science but it needs consistent attention: culture is built and values are brought alive one conversation at a time. Conversations, experiences and stories offer us the best measures of long-term success – leaders must start listening to them.
Cath Bishop, a leadership and culture coach, is an Olympian and author of The Long Win
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