Gwen Mdinaradze is the Founder & CEO of EdBridge, helping companies turn learning into a competitive advantage.
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A leadership team announces a renewed culture-centered change, built on trust, team cohesion, collaboration and employee voice. When executives introduce the initiative, the message is compelling: It talks about new values, the learning involved in executing the change and how employees will receive a deserved opportunity to voice their concerns and share ideas.
Yet several months later, employees describe the workplace exactly as they did before. Through disconnected learning initiatives that were aiming for cultural change, with no existing behavioral change, the workplace that teams and managers experience seems to be exactly the same as before.
I’ve seen this many times, and often, leaders and teams remain confused as to why the change is not working. This persistent disconnect led Dr. Sharon Ravitch of the University of Pennsylvania and me to explore what we call the “Culture Between Us” framework, both in talks and in our upcoming book, The Culture Between Us—the consequential space between the culture leaders believe they are creating and the culture employees experience every day.
That in-between space might hold the real reason many culture change initiatives never reach the people they are intended to positively affect.
Culture change is not a message to be delivered.
Organizations often treat culture change as a communication challenge. Leaders develop new language; introduce updated values, norms and commitment statements; hold town halls; and ask managers to reinforce the message. These steps can create awareness, but awareness is not the same as change.
Employees often do not experience culture the same way leaders see it (as I’ve written about previously); most importantly, employees experience culture through what happens after the announcement.
Employees notice whether managers respond differently when concerns are raised. They observe which behaviors are rewarded, tolerated or ignored. They notice what specific learning and coaching is available for them to practice the change and follow the updated values, norms and commitment statements leadership has announced. They compare what the organization says it values with what its systems continue to prioritize and show daily.
For instance, an organization might declare employee voice a central value. But employees will evaluate that commitment through practical questions: Can I question a decision without being labeled difficult? Will my manager listen without becoming defensive? Will anyone explain what happened to the feedback we provided? Does raising a problem lead to action, or does it just create more work for the person who raised it?
If the answers to such questions remain unchanged, employees will reasonably conclude that the culture remains unchanged.
Learning initiatives cannot carry culture change alone.
Strategic learning is essential for organizational transformation, cultural change and competitive advantage. In order to change the mindset and behavior, work more effectively and be competitive, leaders and teams require new knowledge, behaviors and capabilities, especially in today’s fast-changing world.
Yet a manager may attend training on psychological safety and return to a performance system that rewards speed over reflection. Employees may participate in a collaboration workshop while continuing to compete for recognition and resources. Leaders may learn the importance of listening while operating within decision processes that leave little room for employee influence. Learning initiatives that are disconnected from organizational strategy and employee capability development needs require a more strategic approach.
Disconnected learning is a waste of time, resources and money when an organization has not created the conditions in which the learnings can be practiced, sustained, measured and applied.
Culture change therefore requires more than teaching people new behaviors. It requires examining whether the whole learning ecosystem, as well as organizational structures, incentives and leadership practices, make those behaviors possible.
Here’s what you can do to close the ‘Culture Between Us’ gap.
Closing this gap requires more than leaders listening and employees speaking. It requires leaders and teams to become partners in understanding how culture is created, interpreted and experienced across the organization.
I recommend beginning this process with an independent cultural assessment conducted by a trusted third party. Anonymous quantitative surveys can identify patterns across teams, functions and organizational levels, while confidential qualitative interviews or focus groups can reveal the experiences and organizational conditions behind those patterns.
Maintaining appropriate distance between leadership and employees’ identifiable responses can reduce fear, protect confidentiality and create greater space for honest feedback. Leadership should receive aggregated findings and recurring themes rather than information that could reveal individual participants.
These findings should provide an evidence-based foundation for designing cultural change. Instead of beginning with predetermined values, generic and disconnected trainings or executive assumptions, leaders can identify the specific gap between the intended culture and employees’ lived experiences. This evidence can inform which leadership behaviors, management practices, learning initiatives, incentives and organizational systems must change.
Leaders and teams can then participate in developing practical solutions while the organization establishes clear measures for determining whether those changes are producing a different employee experience.
The purpose of an independent assessment is not to keep leaders removed from the process. It is to help them enter the process with a more accurate and less filtered understanding of the organization.
Conclusion
Through my own research on organizational learning and my ongoing work with Dr. Sharon Ravitch on the “Culture Between Us,” I continue to examine how the realities experienced by leaders and teams can be different and how that gap can become a source of organizational learning rather than organizational fracture. Culture change becomes possible when leaders are willing to look beyond intention, teams are able to share their experiences safely and both participate in turning what is revealed into meaningful action.
The goal is not to make everyone experience the organization identically but to build the structures, relationships and learning processes that allow teams and leaders to work cohesively in a positive organizational cultural environment. Only then can culture change move beyond what leaders announce and become something people throughout the organization can recognize, experience and trust.
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