“The Choice Is Yours.”
One of the things I have learned about organizational culture is that it rarely collapses all at once. There is usually no single meeting where trust disappears, no announcement that causes everyone to disengage, and no particular Tuesday when employees collectively decide the culture is no longer what it used to be. Culture tends to deteriorate more quietly than that. It bends before it breaks, and if leaders are paying attention, it usually gives us plenty of evidence along the way.
That is why a line from Black Sheep’s 1991 hip-hop classic “The Choice Is Yours” has always seemed appropriate to me: “You can get with this, or you can get with that.” The song was not about workplace culture, of course, but the idea behind that refrain applies surprisingly well to leadership. Long before a cultural problem becomes a crisis, leaders are presented with choices. We can investigate what we are seeing, or we can explain it away. We can address an inconsistency, or we can make another exception. We can listen to the person raising an uncomfortable concern, or we can quietly decide that person is the problem.
Those choices rarely seem consequential in the moment. That is part of what makes culture so difficult to manage. A side conversation after a meeting does not look like a crisis. A respected employee becoming quieter does not immediately affect the quarterly numbers. One executive receiving an exception to a stated value can usually be explained by circumstances. Yet over time, those moments accumulate. People begin drawing conclusions about what leadership actually values, what behavior the organization really rewards, and whether bringing their best effort to work is still worth the investment.
After more than three decades of leading people and teams in government, healthcare, and the private sector, I have come to believe that culture gives leaders plenty of early warning. The challenge is that we often do not recognize the warning signs until they become expensive.
Listen to Where the Truth Goes
Years ago, I began noticing something about meetings that changed the way I think about organizational culture. Sometimes the most useful conversation happened after the meeting was over.
The official meeting might have been cordial and efficient. The presentation was made, questions were invited, and everyone appeared to understand the direction. Then people walked into the hallway, returned to their offices, or called a trusted colleague, and the real conversation began. Suddenly there were concerns about the strategy, questions about the timeline, and observations about problems nobody had mentioned while the people with the authority to address them were sitting at the table.
I used to think that was simply what people did after meetings. The longer I have led, the more I have come to see it as information about the culture.
People rarely stop talking altogether. They change where they talk.
When employees believe leadership is genuinely interested in what they know, information tends to move toward the people with the authority to act. When employees become uncertain about how honesty will be received, information begins moving sideways instead. The concern goes to a trusted colleague. The frontline employee tells the supervisor, but the supervisor decides not to tell the vice president. The manager knows what the team really thinks but spends the executive meeting reporting something much safer.
This is why a quiet meeting should never automatically be interpreted as an aligned meeting. Sometimes people agree. Sometimes they have simply decided that the room is not where honesty belongs.
Leaders who want to understand the health of their culture should pay attention to where the most candid conversations occur. If the truth consistently becomes clearer after leadership leaves the room, that is not a communication quirk. It is an early warning about trust.
Culture Changes One Exception at a Time
Most organizations have values they are proud of. They talk about respect, accountability, integrity, inclusion, teamwork, excellence, or employee well-being. I believe those statements matter because leaders should be clear about the standards they want the organization to represent.
The real test, however, comes when following those values becomes inconvenient.
Suppose an organization says respect is nonnegotiable, but its highest-producing executive routinely humiliates people and leadership looks the other way because the numbers are good. Perhaps accountability is a core value until the person responsible for the problem has enough power to avoid it. Maybe work-life balance is celebrated publicly, but every important quarter somehow becomes an exception that requires people to sacrifice it.
There is almost always a reasonable explanation for the first exception. That is what makes exceptions so dangerous.
Leaders tell themselves the circumstances are unusual, the person is too important, the deadline is too tight, or the business requires flexibility. Sometimes those explanations are legitimate. Leadership requires judgment, and treating every circumstance identically is not the same thing as treating people fairly.
The problem develops when the exception stops being exceptional.
Employees are remarkably good at noticing the difference between what an organization says and what it repeatedly permits. Once they see the pattern, they begin adjusting their own behavior around the rules they believe are real. The values statement may still be hanging on the wall, but the culture is being shaped by something else entirely.
This is how credibility erodes inside organizations. Usually not through one dramatic act of hypocrisy, but through a series of reasonable explanations that eventually teach people the standard does not apply when following it becomes expensive.
High Performers Often Leave Long Before They Resign
When leaders think about disengagement, they often look for visible evidence. Performance declines. Attendance changes. Deadlines are missed. Someone who used to be dependable becomes noticeably less reliable.
Those things matter, but they are often late indicators.
Some of the earliest signs of disengagement are much harder to see because the employee may still be performing well. What disappears first is not productivity. It is discretionary contribution.
The person still attends the meeting but stops offering the observation no one else has made. They answer the question they were asked but no longer volunteer the solution to the problem behind it. They continue completing assignments but stop raising their hand for the difficult project. The work remains good enough that leadership assumes everything is fine.
I have seen talented people remain in organizations for months, sometimes years, after they have stopped giving the organization their best thinking.
That distinction matters because organizations do not simply employ people’s labor. The strongest organizations benefit from people’s judgment, creativity, initiative, relationships, and willingness to take responsibility beyond what the job description requires. Those contributions are discretionary. Leaders cannot demand them into existence.
When capable employees conclude that speaking up changes nothing, they conserve their ideas. When additional effort consistently earns additional work but not additional trust, they become more selective about where they invest their energy. When thoughtful risk-taking is punished while safe repetition is rewarded, people learn to become excellent at doing exactly what was requested and nothing more.
By the time one of those employees submits a resignation, leadership may believe the organization lost them that day. In reality, the organization may have been losing them in small pieces for a year.
Pay Attention When Managers Become Full-Time Translators
Middle managers occupy one of the most revealing positions in any organization. They are close enough to senior leadership to understand executive intent and close enough to employees to experience how those decisions actually land.
That makes them extraordinarily useful indicators of cultural health.
Some translation is a normal part of management. Good managers provide context, connect strategy to daily work, and help their teams understand how organizational decisions affect them. Problems begin when translation turns into repair.
The manager leaves an executive meeting and spends the next hour explaining what the senior leader “really meant.” A message about accountability lands as blame, so the manager softens it. Leadership abruptly changes priorities without enough context, and the manager has to convince the team there must be a larger strategy somewhere. Employees become frustrated, and the manager absorbs that frustration while trying to preserve their trust in leadership.
If this happens occasionally, it is part of organizational life. If it happens constantly, the institution has a problem.
Managers cannot indefinitely serve as shock absorbers between executive intent and employee experience. Eventually, they are forced into an impossible position. Do they protect leadership’s credibility, protect the trust they have built with their team, or acknowledge that the gap between what leadership intended and what employees experienced is real?
When an organization repeatedly puts managers in that position, it is consuming one of its most valuable resources. Those managers spend their leadership capacity repairing communication instead of coaching people, improving performance, developing talent, and solving problems.
That is not merely inefficient. It is another early warning that the culture is beginning to strain.
Pressure Reveals Which Values Are Real
Anyone can lead according to their values when doing so is easy. The meaningful test comes when honoring those values has a cost.
Do we still listen carefully when the deadline is tight? Do we treat people with dignity when their performance disappoints us? Do we share credit when recognition is scarce? Are we willing to tell an uncomfortable truth when doing so may delay a decision we desperately want to make?
Those are cultural moments.
Pressure does not suddenly create an organization’s culture. More often, it exposes the culture that was already there.
I have worked in environments where the stakes were extraordinarily high and decisions had real consequences for people’s lives and livelihoods. What I learned in those settings is that values are most valuable precisely when circumstances make them difficult to practice. If integrity only guides decisions when integrity is convenient, it is not much of a value. If respect disappears whenever leaders become frustrated, employees will eventually understand that respect is conditional. If inclusion matters until speed becomes important, people learn who gets excluded when leadership feels pressure.
Employees remember those moments because they answer a question every workforce eventually asks: What does this organization actually stand for when it has something to lose?
The answer shapes culture far more powerfully than any values statement ever could.
You Do Not Need a Survey to Know Something Is Wrong
Culture surveys can be useful. Exit interviews can reveal important patterns. Turnover data, engagement scores, employee relations cases, and performance metrics can all help leaders understand what is happening inside an organization.
But leaders should not need to wait for those tools to tell them everything.
Much of the evidence is already available in everyday organizational behavior.
Where does the truth travel? Which exceptions have quietly become normal? Who used to contribute ideas and now simply completes the assignment? How much time are managers spending translating or repairing messages from senior leadership? Which values become negotiable whenever pressure increases?
Those questions are not complicated. Answering them honestly can be.
The instinct of many executives is to wait until they understand the entire problem before acknowledging it publicly. I understand that instinct. Leaders do not want to create anxiety unnecessarily or announce a solution they cannot yet deliver. Yet there is a difference between prematurely declaring a crisis and honestly naming a pattern.
Sometimes leadership needs to say, “I have noticed something, and I want to understand it better.”
That sentence can open a very different conversation.
Ask people what you are missing. Listen without immediately explaining why the situation exists. Protect the people willing to answer honestly. Then identify one visible inconsistency between what the organization says and what employees experience, and correct it.
Do not try to repair the entire culture in one announcement. Culture did not deteriorate in a day, and it will not be rebuilt in one.
Trust returns when people repeatedly see leadership making different choices in the same kinds of moments that taught them not to trust leadership before.
The Choice Is Still Yours
This is what brings me back to Black Sheep.
“You can get with this, or you can get with that.”
Culture is constantly presenting leaders with choices, most of which will never feel important enough to define the future of the organization.
A respected employee grows quiet. Do we assume they are busy, or do we ask what changed? A high performer violates a cultural standard. Do we protect the performance, or do we protect the standard? Managers are spending too much time cleaning up executive communication. Do we praise their adaptability, or do we examine why so much repair is necessary? Employees are having the honest conversation after the meeting instead of during it. Do we blame them for lacking courage, or do we become curious about what leadership has taught them?
Those are the moments when culture is built.
They are also the moments when culture can begin to break.
After thirty years of leading people, I have become less interested in whether an organization describes itself as having a strong culture and more interested in what people do when the organization is under pressure. That is where the truth usually lives.
Most workplace cultures do not suddenly fall apart. They send signals long before the crisis arrives. The responsibility of leadership is to recognize those signals while trust is still repairable and while different choices can still change the outcome.
The culture is talking.
The choice is whether leadership is willing to listen.
Build the Culture Before You Have to Repair It
World-class workplace cultures are built through the choices leaders make long before turnover, disengagement, or workplace conflict becomes a crisis. Through keynote presentations, executive retreats, and strategic advisory engagements, I help organizations identify the leadership behaviors that strengthen trust, reduce workplace injustice, retain talented people, and build cultures where employees can do their best work.
If your organization is beginning to see the warning signs, or if you want to strengthen your culture before those signs appear, let’s start a conversation.
