I often quote a CEO colleague of mine who, when asked if culture is always driven from the top, pointed out that culture lives in everyone’s behavior, so the CEO can’t single handedly drive culture, but “The CEO can kill the culture in a heartbeat.” I think it’s true that we all look up the chain of command when evaluating the behaviors that define culture, and I imagine scenarios where an organization claims to want innovation, yet the CEO publicly reprimands a senior leader for taking a calculated risk, or the organization claims to want collaboration, yet the CEO promotes the least collaborative person on the staff, simply because he brings in a lot of revenue. Those are examples where the CEO is killing the espoused culture with one swift blow.
That is not the only way a CEO can kill the culture, however. There is also the passive approach. Let’s say the CEO wants that collaborative culture, and was smart enough NOT to promote that un-collaborative revenue generator. The CEO could still get in trouble for other things that they are NOT doing. Like when one department storms ahead on a complex project without involving other key internal stakeholders, and the CEO doesn’t call them out on it at the meeting. Or when one department head refuses to share their budget numbers ahead of the big budget meeting, and the CEO lets it slide. Doing nothing can have the same impact as doing the wrong thing.
People may not talk about it as much, but the numerous instances of inaction produce results that employees definitely notice. They may not remember exactly when the organization made the shift away from consistent collaboration, but they know it happened, and that’s one reason why they are now looking for a new job.
One way to avoid this problem is to have a senior team that are true accountability partners when it comes to culture. My latest post on Forbes offers a structure for making sure the senior team stays on top of culture. You could add to that periodic senior team sessions where you talk about how the CEO or other team members may be unintentionally sabotaging culture with inaction. The sooner you address the passive destruction, the better.