The one thing great cultures have in common
After profiling organisations across 60 countries over seven years, we have observed one consistent feature of the cultures that produce lasting high performance.
T he word culture has accumulated so much usage in organisational life that it has become nearly meaningless. It appears in values statements, mission documents, hiring materials, and leadership speeches in language that is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere present in every conversation, absent from most decisions.
In seven years of profiling organisations across 60 countries, The Victory Magazine has formed a more specific view. The cultures that produce lasting high performance where talented people stay, where the work is excellent, where the organisation adapts and survives are not the ones with the most elaborate values frameworks. They are the ones where a specific, ordinary, and deeply unglamorous thing happens consistently. People say what they actually think.
The mechanism
This sounds trivially simple. It is not. Creating the conditions under which the people inside an organisation consistently say what they actually think about the strategy, about the product, about the leadership, about each other – requires a set of practices and a quality of leadership attention that are genuinely rare. Most organisations do not have it. Most have instead an environment where people have learned, from experience or observation, that raising a difficult observation carries a greater personal cost than staying silent. The result is an organisation that is producing less information than it contains intelligence. operating with a fraction of its available
I am not looking for people to tell me what they think I want to hear. I am looking for the things that are true in the organisation that the organisation is not saying out loud. Those are almost always the most important things.❞
— Chief Executive, global professional services firm
What it looks like in practice
One chief executive we profiled described a practice maintained for fifteen years: a monthly meeting with the three most junior members of each function, conducted without department heads present. The purpose was not to bypass management. It was to access information that was unlikely to travel upward through normal organisational channels.
A chief operating officer we interviewed described building a “pre-mortem” practice into every significant project: before a decision was finalised, the team was asked to assume it had failed and to work backwards to identify the cause. The psychological effect was to make it permissible to raise doubts – not as disloyalty or pessimism, but as part of the formal process. Both practices are simple. Neither is common.
The leadership behaviour that enables it
The precondition for an organisation where people say what they actually think is a leader who demonstrably does not punish people for saying what they actually think. This demonstration has to happen repeatedly and visibly, in moments that are noticed. It is not enough to say, in a town hall, that you welcome difficult feedback. It is necessary to be observed receiving difficult feedback without defensiveness, and to be seen subsequently taking it seriously.
A leader who, on one occasion, visibly dismisses or penalises someone for raising an honest concern will find that this single incident does more to shape organisational behaviour than any number of speeches in the opposite direction.
The compound effect
The organisations that have built cultures of genuine honesty describe a compound effect over time: problems are identified sooner, solutions are better because they have been subjected to more rigorous challenge, and the people who thrive are those who are genuinely good at their work rather than those who are good at managing upward.
Building that culture is not a values exercise. It is a leadership practice. And it starts with a single, simple, deeply difficult thing: a leader who genuinely wants to know what is true, and who has built an organisation that believes they mean it.
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