(Please enjoy this 7️⃣ minute read)
Deep Dive on Diagnosing Culture
A leader calls me up. They’re frustrated. The team isn’t performing. People are disengaged, or political, or passive. Accountability is low. Trust is eroding. They describe the symptoms in vivid detail. The heartache and the drama. The struggle with meetings. The interpersonal issues. The hurt feelings and annoyances.
They have a culture problem.
Here’s what I’ve learned after years of doing this work: the leader almost never sees their own role in creating it. They tell me all the ways the team is the problem.
Culture is one of the hardest things to change. Since everyone contributes to culture, no one sees themselves as the problem. It’s all the other people they work with. If only they would change this would all be better.
Culture is all of us. It’s the leader and the team. It’s the employees and partners. The customers and the market even play a role. Culture is one of the most complex and intertwined things in business.
So how do you actually diagnose and improve a culture? Not in theory, but in practice. When you’re in the room with a defensive leader, a skeptical team, and everyone has a different story about what’s going wrong.
Let me walk you through how I approach it.
Culture Is Behavior, Not a Poster
Before we get into the method, let’s get the definition right. Culture is not your values statement. It’s not what’s printed on your mugs or on slide two of your all-hands deck. Culture is the aggregate of everyone’s behaviors. It’s what gets rewarded and what gets punished. It’s how decisions actually get made. It’s embedded in your systems and how you talk with each other.
“Your culture is the behaviors you reward and punish.”
One of my favorite questions to diagnose culture is: “What do people need to do to survive and succeed in your organization?” I want the real answer. I want the lived experience, not what the handbook says.
What happens on a random Tuesday morning, or the Thursday before a big deadline? What behaviors get you promoted? What behaviors get you sidelined? The answer to that question IS your culture - whether you like it or not.
This is why culture work is uncomfortable. You’re holding up a mirror, and not everyone likes what they see.
The First Conversation: Contracting with the Leader
When a leader asks me to help with their culture, the very first thing I do is ask a direct question: “Are you committed enough to this culture change to make changes to yourself if required?”
I need that answer explicitly. Out loud and on the record, sort of like when an airline steward requires verbal confirmation to help when you’re seated in an exit row.
I’m planting a seed that they can’t ask everyone else in the org. to change. They don’t have immunity.
I’m also giving myself potential ammunition for later.
Because when I go do the diagnostic work, I will come back with findings. Some of those findings may implicate the leader. That’s when defensiveness kicks in (hello, ego that we all have! 👋).
If I don’t have that prior commitment, I have no leverage. The leader can dismiss whatever they don’t want to hear. But when I can say, “Remember when you told me you were willing to change yourself if the data pointed there? The data is pointing there.” I can bring back that reminder from when they were not ego-triggered so that we can make progress.
Going to the Team: The Questions That Matter
After I have the commitment to personal change from the leader, I go talk to the team. This is typically individually so that I can get a more honest answer (it’s difficult to be honest about culture in front of your peer group). I ask three core questions, and then follow where the conversation leads:
- What gets rewarded here, and what gets punished?
- What happens when you do something amazing?
- What happens when you make a mistake or otherwise fail?
These questions are simple, but they’re diagnostic gold. They reveal the lived culture, not the stated culture. When someone tells me “If you make a mistake here, people pile on and never let you forget it,” that tells me more about the organization than any values document ever could.
Interpreting What You Hear
Here’s where it gets nuanced. If one person complains heavily about the leader, I’m skeptical. That person may be the problem. They might be operating in drama, unable to see their own role. But if multiple people independently say similar things? I take it very seriously. The leader is likely doing something that’s having a real negative effect.
There’s an important exception: sometimes the leader is pushing the team toward new and better behaviors, and the team is resisting. People default to wanting things to stay the same. Change feels like punishment even when it’s progress. I’m listening for patterns and have to piece together the big picture. I’m not a recorder of facts, I’m a synthesizer of information and systems.
And I go for depth over breadth. I’d rather fully understand one anecdote - who was involved, what was said, what happened next, how it was interpreted - than collect twenty surface-level complaints. Depth reveals whether a situation is actually what it seems. Breadth just gives you a pile of impressions.
The Gap Is the Work
The real insight in any culture diagnostic is the gap between what leaders say the culture is and what employees experience.
Every organization has stated values and lived values. If those two things don’t match, you have a choice: change the values to match reality, or change decision-making to match the stated values. Either can be the right call. But pretending there’s no gap is never the right call.
There must be coherence.
It’s important to reconcile values with behaviors, and I like to be explicit in writing these down. What do the values look like when people are behaving consistent with them, and what does it look like when they’re not?
Values like “accountability” or “innovation” are meaningless until you can point to specific behaviors. What does accountability look like in a morning standup? What does innovation look like when a project fails? If you can’t answer those questions, the values are just words.
Delivering Findings the Leader Can Actually Hear
You can have the best diagnostic in the world, but if you can’t deliver the findings in a way the leader can receive, nothing changes.
A few things I’ve learned:
Apply Non-judgment. There are people. There are problems. The people aren’t the problem, but the behaviors and the system are the problem. I try to separate the two. It’s the difference in saying, “You are the problem” and “These behaviors are causing these negative outcomes.”
Tone and word choice are everything. I’m watching the leader’s body language the entire time. If they’re closing up, going defensive, crossing their arms - there’s no point pushing further. You can’t give feedback to someone who isn’t ready to hear it. I do my best to choose words and a tone that minimize the chance of triggering someone.
Don’t dwell. Share the finding and move on. Don’t make it a bigger moment than it needs to be.
Connect incidents to themes. If you stay at the level of anecdote, you’ll end of debating anecdotes. You need to connect incidents to themes and patterns. The anecdotes are evidence, not the whole story.
Empathize from your own journey. I share my own path. Chances are I’ve received similar feedback as a leader. I’ve had blind spots pointed out to me that were uncomfortable to hear. Sharing that builds trust, creates vulnerability, and demonstrates that change is possible.
Making Change Visible and Verbal
One of the most underused tools in culture change is saying the problem out loud. It sounds almost too simple, but a leader who stands up in front of their team and does four things creates enormous momentum:
- Name the culture problem clearly: “We don’t have enough accountability in this org. to hit our goals.”
- Acknowledge their own role: “I’ve contributed to this through these behaviors.” (then share them)
- State the specific behavioral changes they’re committing to. “From now on I’ll ensure we close meetings with action items.”
- Reinforce publicly when they’re doing those things, and remind the team why.
This creates public accountability for the leader, gives the team shared language, and makes it obvious if progress isn’t being made. Culture change that happens silently is invisible - which means it’s also unverifiable. If no one talks about it, no one knows if it’s working. Get it on the table and make it obvious.
“The system’s function and dysfunction are in us. It will not change unless we do. We must do so publicly and vulnerably. There is no safe way to be great.”
How Do You Know If It Worked?
Culture reveals itself under stress. If you haven’t seen the organization go through a hard moment since the work began, you can’t be confident anything has stuck.
Signs that the change is real: the leader notices changes in themselves and in the people around them. Employees notice changes in the leader and in the environment. Tangible things have shifted - how meetings run, who gets promoted, how decisions are made.
But the best signal? Seeing the org internalize the language of culture and transparency. This means they catch themselves when things start to slip. They don’t need you anymore. They have their own framework for self-correction, which is how this gets sustained.
“Culture is a ‘wicked problem,’ meaning that it can’t be solved, it can only be worked on.”
And that’s the truth! Culture isn’t a project with a finish line. It’s an ongoing discipline. You’re never done. You’re just getting better at noticing when things are off and then getting them right.
Call to Action
Here’s what I’d invite you to try this week. Pick one value your team or organization claims to hold. Now ask yourself: what specific behaviors would I see if this value were truly alive in how we work? What behaviors would tell me it’s just a poster on the wall?
If you’re feeling brave, ask someone on your team those same questions. Not in a formal meeting. Just in conversation. “We say we value X. Where and how do you see that value in action?”
The gap between what they say and what you expect to hear - that’s your culture diagnostic.
I’d love to hear what you discover. Email me at heykev@kevinnoble.xyz and let me know!
Kevin
