A conversation is missing from my book, Let’s Talk Culture. I want to talk about it.
I’m still very proud of the book. I genuinely believe it’s one of the most pragmatic books on culture you can read to build culture by design, simply, one conversation at a time.
The book outlines five conversations:
- Expectation: make the unspoken spoken
- Clarification: make the invisible observable
- Communication: make the words a language
- Confrontation: make feedback less difficult
- Celebration: make recognition more meaningful
The more I talk to teams and clients around the world about why culture doesn’t stick, the more I notice a pattern.
A team leaves the room with a clear set of behaviours they chose themselves, in their own words. They do genuinely good work and the team are as committed as they can be to make it happen. Then a few months go by and one or two of the behaviours drop off.
Why?
There’s a capability gap.
‘Give feedback in the moment’ is a nice behaviour to agree on. A solid commitment to make. But it’s also a skill, and most of the people who agreed to it had never been taught ‘how’ to deliver on it.
So they didn’t do it. And the times they did, it was inconsistently practised.
You can’t fairly hold someone to a behaviour they haven’t been equipped for.
That’s where the sixth conversation emerged.
Capability.
You have to make the aspiration achievable.
It sits between communication and confrontation, because confrontation without capability isn’t accountability, it’s punishing someone for a gap you created.
I have been running leadership programs for nearly a decade, and my culture work sat alongside it, almost as two different businesses. Leaders would ask me for the culture work or the skills work.
I’ve come to realise they are the same work.
Culture asks for behaviours. Those behaviours demand a set of skills. If you skip the second half, you’re destined to fail before you begin.
It’s something we have to really consider when designing leadership programs. Do the skills we’re developing actually help support the culture we’re creating?
Practically speaking, the capability conversation isn’t hard or long.
Look at the behaviours your team has agreed to. For each one, ask honestly: do we know how to do this, or have we just agreed that we should?
Name the gaps you can’t close in house, and decide what you’ll do about them. That’s all. It’s not glamorous or groundbreaking.
It’s like an Ikea flat-pack left in the box because nobody had the right screwdriver, and the fix is just making sure you and the team have the right tools for the job.