I have watched organisations spend a fortune trying to train people out of a problem that was never a skills problem.
The engagement score dips, so a program gets bought. The program is good. People enjoy it. Six months later the score is where it was, and the conclusion drawn is that the program didn’t work. It worked fine. It was aimed at the wrong layer.
When I built the team culture model, the thing that helped me most was not the six conversations. It was realising that culture has layers, and that the layers sit in an order.
At the top is what the business gets: retention, performance, innovation, growth. Underneath that is how people feel about the work, which is engagement, and I think of engagement as energy, focus and purpose. Underneath that is what a leader actually does, the conversations. And underneath everything is psychological safety. Can people say how they really think and feel?
Read that from the bottom up and you get a rule I wish someone had given me. You can’t train your way out of a safety issue, and you can’t survey your way to a behaviour change. The outcome you want lives at the top. The thing you can act on lives further down.
Here’s the honest bit. For a long time my instinct was to go straight to the top layer. A retention problem? Let’s talk about retention. And of course nobody in the room could do anything about retention directly. It’s a result, not a lever. The conversation went in circles and I went home wondering why a room full of smart people couldn’t solve it. They couldn’t solve it because it isn’t solvable at that depth.
So before you buy the program, or run the survey, or write the strategy, take a moment to ask where the problem actually sits. Is it that people don’t know how (capability)? Is it that they don’t know what’s expected (expectation)? Or is it that they know exactly what’s expected and don’t feel safe enough to say the expectation is unrealistic?
Those are three different problems. They have three different answers. And only one of them is fixed by a training day.