Marmon Holdings

Molly J Endres

Organizational Culture Architect

Ask any organization “what’s the culture like,” and you’ll get a confident answer. Collaborative. Innovative. People-first. It’s usually sincere, and it’s almost always on the career page.

Then you walk in the door. The company that calls itself innovative has a sterile office and an approval process for ordering sticky notes (true story). The one that says it values its people offers lackluster benefits and a wellbeing “program” in name only (also true story). Leadership is describing the culture they want. Everyone else is living the culture they have.

I learned just how wide that gap can get from a healthcare logistics client years ago when I was a consultant working on transformational leadership and culture transformations.

The client called us in because of quality issues. Orders were going out wrong and the conclusion from leadership? People didn’t care.

So, we went and listened. I sat in break rooms and talked to people who had worked there anywhere from 3 to 32 years. Some were moved to tears just talking about their work and what it used to feel like to be part of the team. That’s not what indifference looks like.

The people hadn’t changed. The organization had. Overtime, it stripped away the little moments of recognition that made it special to work there. No more privileged parking spots for employee of the month. No more Thanksgiving turkeys handed out by the senior executives as a small act of kindness and appreciation. Nobody announced it. It just stopped happening.

“The people hadn’t changed. The organization had.”

Meanwhile, the performance indicators measured on-time deliveries, not how many products came back because an order was incomplete or broken. People did exactly what the system asked of them – they got it out the door on time.

The heart of the culture problem wasn’t quality. Quality was the symptom.

The experience shaped how I think about culture. It’s how we treat each other, vendors, clients and the partners we serve. It’s how decisions get made and what we choose to measure. It’s the values, beliefs and behaviors underneath how work actually gets done. And it shows up everywhere that matters: engagement, results, whether change sticks and what talent stays.

It also taught me that culture never lives in one place. Johnson and Scholes’ cultural web describes six interrelated elements: stories, symbols, rituals and routines, control systems, organizational structures and power structures. At that client, it was evident that several of these were pulling against each other. The ritual of recognition was gone. The control system rewarded speed over accuracy. And the story that leadership told itself, that people didn’t care, was driving decisions more than any data.

No quality initiative or new learning was going to fix that. A new inspection step or yet (another) poster about getting it right would merely pull on one lever and keep others pulling in the opposite direction.

Real transformation works several levers at once and is built from the top-down and bottom-up. In organizations that have mature Lean business systems, leaders may set the signal from the top, but it’s the people doing the work who decide whether it’s real. And when what they’re told and the experience doesn’t match, experience always wins.

That’s where leadership development earns its rightful seat. Leaders are the most visible symbol in any organization. The routines they run become everyone’s routines. The capability is about judgment, coaching and asking what’s really going on before making a conclusion that people don’t care.

The next time someone asks what your culture is like, talk about what they might see, feel and experience if they spent a week with you. And if you don’t like the answer, it’s time to close the gap.