Your Culture Isn't Static. It's Either Improving or Decaying Right Now.
Inc.'s Kevin O'Brien argues culture never holds steady on its own. It drifts, and the clearest early signal is whether people reach for ownership or blame when something goes wrong.
Prompted by “A Healthy Workplace Culture Requires Intentional Leadership”, Inc. (Kevin O’Brien).
Kevin O'Brien's core claim is uncomfortable precisely because it's true: culture doesn't hold steady on its own. Left alone, it drifts toward disorder — and most organizations don't fail from one bad event, they fail from small, unaddressed compromises piling up until yesterday's strengths quietly become today's weaknesses.
His most useful diagnostic is simple: watch whether people default to ownership ("what could I have done better") or blame when something goes wrong. That single habit, repeated daily across a team, tells you more about where the culture is headed than any values statement on the wall.
Why does this move faster at your size?
For a company your size, this is arguably higher-stakes than it is for a large enterprise. A big company has HR processes, layers of management, and enough redundancy that one team's eroding standards can stay contained for a while. In a 40-person company, one manager who's stopped modeling ownership — or one leader who's stopped being reachable when things go wrong — shows up in the culture within weeks, not years.
Test it out: sit in on one meeting this week you wouldn't normally attend, and just listen for whether problems get met with "what went wrong and why" or with blame aimed at someone absent from the room. Don't intervene — just notice which one you're actually hearing, and whether it matches what you'd assume.
Building ownership habits across a leadership team is the work in Team Coaching.
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Originally posted on LinkedIn ↗