Organisational culture can be defined as ‘a shared set of values, behaviours, habits, assumptions, and unwritten rules that shape how work is done in an organisation’. It is visible in everyday moments: how people make decisions, respond to mistakes, treat customers, collaborate across teams, raise concerns, and behave when senior leaders are not in the room.
I met with a charity CEO who was concerned about this last point as they had noticed that if they were in a meeting, all decision making was deferred to them. Despite encouraging others to make the decision, they thought this culture was limiting performance.
They were right – by running some training sessions with the charity leadership team, it was obvious there was a ‘HIPPO in the room’ i.e. everyone defers to the ‘HIghest Paid Persons Opinion. We introduced programmes that changed this and enabled growth.
Culture is not a poster on a wall or a list of stated values. I remember one departmental head from healthcare sector handing each of their staff a piece of paper with the company values on and telling them they would be disciplined if they did not know them in a week when the regulatory inspectors arrived!
This demonstrates there can be a large gap Ibetween what an organisation says matters and what it consistently rewards, tolerates, and models. A healthy culture helps people perform, learn, and belong; a harmful one can undermine even the strongest strategy.
In this blog, I explore causes of your organisation culture and some ways you can lead a positive, thriving culture in your staff.
Causes of Negative Culture
1. Inconsistent or poor leadership behaviour
Culture deteriorates when leaders say one thing but do another. For example, an organisation may claim to value respect, wellbeing, or openness, yet tolerate bullying, blame, unreasonable workloads, or dismissive behaviour from high performers. Employees learn quickly from what leaders actually reward and overlook.
When accountability is applied inconsistently, trust declines. People may stop raising concerns, avoid taking sensible risks, and focus on protecting themselves rather than contributing to the organisation’s wider goals.
2. Poor communication and lack of trust
Unclear, delayed, or overly controlled communication creates an information vacuum. In that vacuum, employees often fill the gaps with speculation, rumours, and anxiety—particularly during restructures, changes in strategy, or uncertainty about jobs and technology.
A lack of trust can also arise when people feel they cannot question decisions, admit mistakes, or share a different perspective safely. Over time, this creates silence rather than honest dialogue, meaning leaders receive less accurate information and problems remain hidden until they become more difficult to resolve.
3. Excessive pressure without support
High standards and ambitious goals are not inherently negative. The problem occurs when relentless pressure is combined with inadequate resources, unclear priorities, little recognition, and no realistic space to recover or develop. This can result in burnout, conflict, absenteeism, disengagement, and high turnover.
A culture of overwork may appear productive in the short term, but it is rarely sustainable. People are less likely to innovate, collaborate, or make good decisions when they feel exhausted and unsupported.
Causes of Positive Culture
1. Clear values lived through behaviour
Positive culture begins when values are translated into observable actions. If “respect” is a stated value, employees should see leaders listen, give credit fairly, challenge poor behaviour, and make decisions with dignity. If “customer focus” is a value, systems and targets should make it possible for employees to solve customer problems rather than simply hit internal metrics.
Consistency matters more than slogans. When people can see that values influence recruitment, recognition, promotion, performance conversations, and day-to-day decisions, culture becomes credible.
2. Psychological safety and open feedback
A positive culture allows people to ask questions, offer ideas, raise risks, and admit mistakes without fear of humiliation or retaliation. This does not mean avoiding accountability or lowering standards. It means addressing performance issues fairly while making it safe for people to learn, challenge constructively, and improve.
Research and practice on learning cultures emphasise psychological safety, candid feedback, learning from mistakes, and opportunities for development as core conditions for sustained growth and adaptability.
3. Meaningful development and recognition
Employees are more likely to contribute fully when they can see how their work matters and believe they can grow. Organisations build positive culture by providing fair access to learning, mentoring, stretch opportunities, feedback, and recognition that is timely and specific.
Development should not be reserved only for a small group of “high potentials.” Making time and space for learning, aligning development with business strategy, and rewarding knowledge sharing can make learning part of the organisation’s everyday environment.
Three Leadership Actions
So what can you do to improve the culture of your organisation? This comes down to how you behave – not how technically good at a task you are. Consistently, across all sectors we support, when employees are asked to name ‘great leaders’ it is based on how they treated others and presented themselves.
1. Model the culture you expect
Leaders improve culture first by examining their own visible behaviour. Every interaction sends a signal: how a leader responds when someone makes a mistake, whether they listen to challenge, whether they share credit, how they behave under pressure, and whether they honour commitments.
A leader who wants openness can begin meetings by inviting dissenting views and thanking people who raise risks. A leader who wants wellbeing can set realistic expectations, avoid celebrating constant overwork, take breaks themselves, and discuss workload openly. A leader who wants accountability can clarify ownership, address missed commitments early and fairly and take responsibility for their own decisions. Culture changes when employees see these behaviours repeated, especially when conditions are difficult.
2. Create regular listening and feedback loops
Leaders should make listening a routine management practice rather than an occasional staff survey. This can include one-to-one conversations, team check-ins, anonymous pulse surveys, listening groups, retrospectives after projects, and informal “ask me anything” sessions. The important step is to close the loop: explain what was heard, what will change, what cannot change immediately, and why.
For example, if a team reports confusion about competing priorities, a leader could simplify the team’s top objectives, stop or defer lower-value work, and review workload at weekly meetings. This shows that feedback leads to action. Open communication and the freedom to share ideas, questions, and mistakes are practical foundations for a stronger learning culture.
3. Make learning, recognition, and wellbeing part of work
Culture improves when leaders treat development and wellbeing as performance enablers, not optional extras to be considered only when time allows. Leaders can set individual development goals, provide stretch assignments, encourage peer mentoring, protect time for learning, and invite team members to share lessons from successful and unsuccessful work.
Recognition should reinforce the behaviours the organisation wants more of—not merely short-term results. A leader could recognise a colleague who helped another team, raised an early risk, improved a process, supported a customer, or openly shared a lesson from a failed experiment. Practical approaches include embedding learning into team meetings, using short skills challenges, supporting peer knowledge-sharing, and reviewing progress regularly.
How LearningWell Can Help
LearningWell is as a training and wellbeing centre providing professional-development workshops, culture consultancy, and wellbeing support to private, public, and non-profit organisations. Its stated focus includes helping employees and teams develop skills related to health and mental wellbeing at work.
For leaders seeking to improve business culture, LearningWell could provide support in three connected areas:
- Culture diagnosis and consultancy: Helping leaders identify the behaviours, communication patterns, pressures, and systems that may be supporting or undermining the desired culture. This can create a practical starting point rather than relying on assumptions about employee experience.
- Leadership and team development: Delivering workshops that strengthen the capabilities behind a positive culture, such as effective communication, emotional intelligence, feedback, conflict management, resilience, and inclusive leadership. Leaders can then practise the behaviours they want their teams to adopt.
- Wellbeing and mental-health support: Supporting leaders to recognise the relationship between workload, psychological safety, wellbeing, and performance. This is especially relevant where teams are experiencing stress, change fatigue, or low morale. LearningWell’s culture consultancy and mental-health workshops are intended to help organisations develop supportive workplace practices and peer-support approaches.
Culture Is a Leadership Practice
When working with a Chief Constable of a UK police force, his best advice for his leaders was “Never be the last to know what the issues are for your staff.” Frequent, meaningful engagement builds trust and provides opportunity for you to model desired values, act on employee feedback, and making learning and wellbeing part of everyday work.
You can can shift culture from something employees endure to something they actively help build.