The story and the reality

The values were impossible to miss. They appeared in town halls, onboarding sessions and carefully designed graphics covering office walls, distilled into three or four reassuring words that promised a workplace unlike every other workplace. The details varied from company to company, but the themes rarely did: curiosity, courage, collaboration, authenticity, empowerment. Long before I understood the business itself, I understood the story it wanted to tell about itself. It took considerably longer to discover whether the story and the reality occupied the same building.

I’ve thought about that contradiction often because it seems to have become one of the defining characteristics of modern corporate life. Organisations have become remarkably good at communicating culture, yet often seem less certain that employees experience the same thing. Once enough careers, leadership narratives and strategic priorities depend upon a particular description of the organisation remaining true, evidence that complicates the picture starts feeling less like useful feedback than something to be explained away.

The things nobody needed to explain

One of the healthiest organisations I worked for had a simple phrase that everyone understood: a Bainie never lets another Bainie fail. Having spent seven years leading global recruitment marketing and employer branding for the firm, I saw first-hand how little effort was devoted to talking about culture because so much effort went into living it. I don’t remember posters explaining it or campaigns designed to reinforce it because none were necessary. Colleagues challenged one another openly, asked for help without embarrassment and expected support because those behaviours were embedded in the daily life of the firm rather than its communications strategy. Looking back, what strikes me most is not the phrase itself but the absence of any need to explain it. The slogan survived because it described reality rather than aspiration.

When I started work in the 1990s, companies certainly had cultures, some collaborative, some intensely competitive and others almost tribal in the way influence flowed through personal relationships, but very few spent much time describing them. You learnt how an organisation worked by watching it work. Meetings taught you more than mission statements ever could. Promotions revealed more than values documents. Within weeks you understood which behaviours genuinely advanced a career and which merely appeared attractive in recruitment brochures.

The limits of communications

Large organisations now employ Chief Culture Officers, employer branding teams, culture specialists, engagement platforms and consultants dedicated to embedding values across global workforces. The assumption underpinning much of this work is that organisations can communicate themselves into becoming something they are not. If these teams were to disappear tomorrow I suspect no-one would notice.

I’ve worked somewhere where curiosity appeared with remarkable frequency in presentations, leadership speeches and internal campaigns. The curious thing was that genuinely difficult questions became noticeably less welcome at roughly the same time. Speaking up was encouraged until somebody chose the wrong subject (and then quietly disappeared), while employee surveys were promoted as opportunities to listen until the answers proved sufficiently inconvenient that improving the narrative became easier than improving the behaviour.

The organisation beneath the organisation

The longer I’ve worked inside large organisations, the more convinced I’ve become that employees inhabit a subtly different organisation from the one described in presentations and employer branding campaigns. One exists in values statements and leadership narratives; the other reveals itself in promotions, meetings and the quiet calculations people make about what is really rewarded. It is this second organisation, passed from colleague to colleague in private conversations rather than leadership presentations, that determines whether people stay.

The most corrosive workplaces are rarely the busiest or the least well intentioned. They are the ones where employees gradually conclude that professional judgement matters less than political judgement and where exceptional work carries less weight than visibility, political instinct and proximity to influence. Once that calculation takes hold, people adapt accordingly. They become more diplomatic, more careful and less candid, editing observations before meetings because experience has taught them which opinions are welcome and which merely happen to be correct.

By then, the gap between the culture being described and the culture being experienced has usually become so familiar that few people think to question it. Curiosity survives as a value, speaking up remains part of the leadership narrative and collaboration still features prominently in presentations, yet the behaviours that once gave those words substance have quietly retreated from everyday working life.

The story on the wall

The longer I spend around organisations determined to communicate their culture, the more I find myself wondering what employees experience once the presentations finish and the posters come down. Employer branding has become increasingly sophisticated, but prospective employees instinctively trust former colleagues, recruiters and private conversations because they understand that culture belongs to the people who experience it rather than the people who describe it.

Perhaps that explains why the healthiest organisations I’ve encountered rarely seemed interested in persuading anyone that their culture was exceptional. They assumed employees would discover it for themselves through meetings, promotions, disagreements and the ordinary behaviour of leaders.

The values on those office walls were beautifully designed and, I’m sure, entirely sincere. What strikes me now is not that they were wrong but that they confused description with reality. The strongest cultures I’ve known never seemed especially interested in describing themselves because employees encountered them every day in meetings, promotions, disagreements and ordinary acts of leadership. They behaved in ways that made the description unnecessary.