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The Public Sector Executive Podcast is the new podcast bringing you closer to the public sector leaders in the UK. Covering everything from the environment to the economy to transport, our podcast will bring you the latest news, views and insight from the people responsible for shaping the country's future.
that awareness needs to come from staff, from customers and from other people. It doesn't just come from the leadership team. And I think when you look at it through those three lenses, it enables you to have a much more productive conversation and a much more insightful conversation. If you change your business processes without necessarily tackling the behaviour change that goes with that, the symbols that go with that, then it will fall.
This is the public sector executive podcast, bringing you views, insight and conversation from leaders across the public sector, presented by Dan Benn.
Today, I am joined by Lucy Truman, Managing Director at Truman Change, and she's a public sector change specialist with over 20 years of experience in and around the public sector trying to make change happen. She is currently studying a master's in organisational psychology. So we're going to be talking about culture and why culture matters in changing organisations. So Lucy, welcome. Thank you. So just the first thing in terms of culture, how do you turn a culture around?
I think, probably gone straight in there with the hardest question, though, Daniel, to be fair, I think that the starting point of turning a culture around in my experience is awareness of it, because a lot of organisations don't really take control of their culture, I would say, and it sort of develops over time in some kind of accidental way. So the one of the theories about what culture is and how it develops is that it is a series of cascading messages throughout an organisation, and that those messages are cascaded around to staff and people and partners and customers and whoever's involved with the organisation through different routes. And I think what happens is, people don't have awareness of that as a theory and then subsequently allow messages that are contradictory to kind of move around organisations. So what that means is that cultures become this thing, this magical thing in the air, which is what not people normally kind of feel culture is that nobody has any control over. And actually, that is not true. So everybody within an organisation inputs into what that culture is. So the first step in turning a culture around is very much around having that awareness of what the culture is, and what messages are going around the organisation and how that influences culture. So step one is definitely get awareness of it. And that awareness needs to come from staff, from customers and from other people. It doesn't just come from the leadership team, when you have that awareness, it's about and there's not a quick fix, it is really about taking a long, hard look at yourself as a leadership team in the mirror. And really understanding what it is about your actions, your messages, your behaviour, your systems, your rules, all of that, how that shapes that culture. And it's really about getting very mindful and purposeful about that. It's a very interesting time to be talking about culture at the moment, because we've seen a real spectrum. And we can talk more about that later Later in the podcast, where you know, people are using words like toxicity to describe cultures. And I think that there isn't a quick fix, there isn't an easy answer. But the first step is absolutely taking, I guess, responsibility for it and an understanding that as a leader, you are shaping it, and every single thing you do every day is shaping the culture. So it's less about the fixing, and more about what are you doing to shape it and is that by accident or on purpose?
That's a really good point. And you mentioned about recognising culture and it being in the air. But how can an organisation or a leader within an organisation shed some light onto the culture?
There are different models for this. And we've looked at a range of models and I have to say some models do categorise into types of culture, which can be helpful, but it can be a little bit kind of self diagnosing. So there are models where there are certain words and if you relate to those words, then then that's the culture for you. I'm not a huge fan of those. The model that we use is a sort of simplified version of eka shines work who is known by many as the father of culture, and actually sadly passed away this year. anybody that is interested in culture from an academic perspective, I would highly, highly recommend reviewing his work the model that we use, so his model has eight different aspects of what makes a culture we've tried to simplify it because we straddle both that sort of academic space as as you said, I'm studying at the moment In psychology, but also that very real practical, working in an organisation space. And my background is very much local government who really have the luxury of the time to get to academic in these things. So we wanted to make something that was much simpler and quicker and easier to use. So we look at culture through three lenses. The first one is systems and processes, which is normally what people look at through a lens of kind of business improvement, which is absolutely very valid. But I think when you include it, in a reflection of our culture, what it does is it forces you to answer the question. So the the rules, the systems, the processes, the structures that we have in place, how do they drive culture? How do they drive behaviour. So that's the first thing that we look at. The second thing that we look at is behaviour. So and that can be behaviour by leaders or behaviour by in local authorities, sometimes members, they can play a big impact on cultures of organisations, it can be behaviour of staff. So how are people behaving? And again, it's the same question, how does that drive culture behaviour people find easy to answer, because when they talk about culture, they're normally talking about behaviour of people in a group over there or not doing what I want them to do, when in actual fact culture is much deeper than that. And very much as I said, at the start about looking at yourself as much as looking at everybody else. So people find the first to the systems and the processes and the behaviour quite easy to answer, because everybody's quite happy to complain about behaviour and quite happy to complain about systems. The third one is a little bit more challenging. And we refer to that as symbols. Now symbols can be anything that sort of makes up the fabric of an organisation. And that is symbolic in its meaning. So examples of that can be the language that's used, the stories that are told, the length of meetings and how things work that meetings, when you look at people's diaries, how busy they are, that can be symbolic of a culture, a really simple one, which I do see in a lot of organisations, when you go into an organisation and you're there in person, when there are constant signs all over the walls everywhere saying do not do this, do not do that, that is really symbolic of a very kind of paternal sort of very overly directive, negative sort of organisation. And that's something that a lot of people do not even realise is there. So things that can symbolise something else. A really good example of that is an organisation I worked in where they wanted their managers to become much more working in partnership with each other and much less siloed. It's a really common problem in local authorities, because they're so diverse in what they do. So of course, they end up with silos. And they wanted to break that culture a little bit with with their managers. And it turned out that they had directorate management meetings that were weekly, for three hours every single week where they didn't invite anybody but their own directorate. So you can see there how that is a direct contradiction of the culture that you want to create. But you've got this huge symbol here of Yeah, but we have these meetings, and they take up a really significant proportion of time, and we don't invite anybody else to them. So it's about spotting those contradictions between what messages are in your organisation now versus what kind of organisation you're trying to build. So I think when you look at it through those three lenses, it enables you to have a much more productive conversation and a much more insightful conversation because we can ask questions like, What behaviour Do you see? And how does that drive other people's behaviour? What symbols? Do we see what language is used? What stories are often told? Those are much more specific questions than just saying to people tell me about the culture? Because you would get a million different answers to that. And when we do this, we can then sort of pull out through a thematic analysis. These are these are the common themes that are going on there for what does this tell you about the organisation that you're trying to build?
Absolutely. Thank you. you mentioned local authority, and you brought up the word toxicity? Do you think that those things being said, you're able to pull all that out? By doing that? Is that how you're able to get to the root of the problem?
The toxicity is more around. There's an awful lot in the news right now, where organisations are kind of uncovering decades, probably hundreds of years worth of toxicity around things like misogynist behaviour, racist behaviour, and a lot of that the, you know, the there's different ways of framing that and a lot of people do feel that, you know, it's it's a bad egg situation, which it certainly is, and I'm a big believer in that. Most people come to work wanting to do a good job, but people having to answer organisations are having to answer some pretty tough questions now around how is the culture of their organisation enabling that toxicity? So how is the culture of an organisation enabling power battles, bullying, things like whistleblowing, is that possible can people speak up. So I think that's why it's particularly crucial and important at the moment to be reflecting on culture as a wider thing, what tools like the one that we use enable you to do is identify much clearer and more concrete constructs of things that may or may not help or hinder. So for example, if an organisation you know, does have issues with sexism, then there are things that you that you can look at to see whether you know, things like equal pay, you can, that's a pretty concrete system structure process and symbol of how acceptable it is to be sexist. So there are things that are more institutional that can be looked at through the cultural lens. And I think that's why it's important to reflect on toxicity. But also, you know, if you kind of go down, yes, there are bad eggs. And obviously, we've got to fix the bad eggs. The danger that I see in some organisations at the moment is by fixing the bad egg and making a big deal out of fixing that particular bad egg and getting rid of that person doesn't necessarily fix the problem. In fact, in most people's experience, it almost never fixes the problem. So you have to do both, you have to consider the culture as well.
Yeah, that's a really good point, you've raised as well about seeing those symptoms with things like wages, misogyny, sexism, or racism in a culture and then going on to treat those symptoms. But is that sustainable in the long run?
You need both, you just really need both. I think that if you get rid of your bad eggs, but you keep all that systemic stuff, then more bad eggs are just going to keep coming through the system, because they've been unable to stay in the system and almost shaped by the system and shaped by the culture that certain behaviours are okay, if you just do the culture, and don't fix your bad egg, few bad eggs become symbolic. So if there are individuals that people know, are very toxic, and they've bullied people, or they've displayed really shocking behaviours, and they're not dealt with, that informs the culture in its own, right, so if you do one without the other, it falls. And actually, there's a risk that when organisations do some of the culture work, but not fix individuals behaviour, that individual behaviour not only becomes a symbol of that the old behaviour is still okay. But it undermines the efforts of any culture work you've done. So you have to do both, you have to tackle people on an individual basis, but also tackle organisational culture, I would say
100%. And from my point of view, as well, that's the crux of it, you need to break that cycle of the culture, and then the bad eggs spawning each other.
Yeah. And I would also say, you know, we're talking about this from the lens of toxicity. But actually, the majority of our work is doing this from the lens of we're trying to make a change happen. So it's from a more positive standpoint. And the reality is, if you're trying to make a change happen in your organisation, the behaviour that you want to stop may not necessarily be toxic, it might just be that it's not in line anymore with the organisation that you're trying to build. So some of the work that we do is much more around the kind of how were you let's let's imagine their dream employee of 510 years from now. And then what do we do to proactively create that culture so that that person is attracted to come and work here, they're happy to work here, they want to be here. And a lot, a lot of the work we do is around that sort of recruitment and retention piece with that exact starting point. So rather than looking at just the recruitment process, actually, what is this organisation like to work in? What does it look and feel like? And how do we therefore use that to make sure that we attract the best people, and if we're trying to change the organisation, we're trying to change what it looks and feels like doing that and doing a change programme without doing the cultural work alongside it isn't going to help you because people will always revert back to the mean. So if you change your business processes without necessarily tackling that behaviour change that goes with that, the symbols that go with that, then it will fall because people won't make that change happen. And we see a lot of organisations that invest a lot of money in either IT systems without doing the people side, but also invest a lot of money in in things like corporate pMOS, which you know, for the record, I'm absolutely not against. We've done a lot of work in that space. But if you only have that if you only have your structure and your plans around change and your project management methodology around change, and you don't do the culture work that you Change won't stick.
Yeah, you alluded to it there a little bit as well. And the fact that it is possible to change, and there are ways of doing it to me, and I don't know whether you'd agree, the pandemic was one of those times when you could see that change was really doable. But when an organisation feels stuck delivering that change, how do they then move forward?
It's about understanding why they're stuck, I would say so we tend to go in organisations that are stuck, because that they wouldn't need us if they weren't. So then we go into help. At the point when people realise that they're stuck. Sometimes people are stuck, because they just underestimated the amount of work involved in the change. And people usually underestimate the amount of work involved in change, to be fair, but I would say more often than not, it's stuck because of the culture. So it's exactly what we just said, people have invested a lot of money in setting up a change programme, putting some resource to it, having an intranet page about it, but they've not done the culture work. So then being met with a lot of resistance. That's not necessarily concrete, clear resistance, it's just almost a passive resistance. That's difficult to understand. And it's because they haven't done the culture work. So what's happening is, you've got a small group of people in the organisation that are the leaders of the change that are saying, this is the brave new world. And often it is a brave new world. And it's quite exciting. But then there are contradictory messages in all the ways. So for example, in the same organisation, I refer to where they were trying to reduce people working in silos, that was their vision that their managers of the future would collaborate. One of the things we found on the structures and process side was that their job evaluation process evaluates people and scores them higher, based on how many people they manage. So you can see there's a direct contradiction there, in that you've got on the one hand, a small number of people saying we've got a change programme, and you're all going to be much more agile and working in other areas, not just your own, but then you've got quite a literal reward process for empire building. So often change programmes get stuck, because that analysis of the culture to ask the question is the culture as we are now going to take us to that place that we want to go? Or are then conflicting messages. And I think that I do keep coming back to this thing around conflicting messages, because that's the most effective way to understand it and talk about it, because it also takes the personality out of it, it takes the the sort of, oh, I'm a bad leader. Well, it's not that you're a bad leader, it's that your staff are getting multiple messages all the time. And these are some of the messages that they're getting that you may or may not be aware of that actually it can be negative. And sometimes leaders are aware of the messages but not aware of the negative connotation. So another common one that we see is when people describe an organisation as a family, which people sometimes feel is a very positive thing that lead us feel proud of that. But there can be a negative connotation to that because families can be dysfunctional. And families are about favouritism, and relationships and not about getting a job done, which can create a whole other kind of conflicting message that the leader didn't intend. So it's got to come back to that place of are you purposefully driving it? Or are you driving it by accident? And often when change programmes get stuck? It's because there are these conflicting messages. So people just sort of carry on doing what they're doing and ignore the change?
Absolutely.
And I think that's one thing in particular, it's really at the heart of everything that goes on in the public sector. Communication is really key. So with those conflicting messages going back and forth, is it just important to sit, talk to the people that have been affected and kind of establish what's best for everyone?
It absolutely is. And we do a lot of work where we do that or facilitate that in organisations, we facilitate that kind of workshop environment and feedback, the thing I would say is, we have to remember that communication comes in different forms. So again, what a lot of people do is they set up a transformation programme, they have a comms page on the internet, they do an FA Q's, they do some lean, or maybe a row show where they go out and speak to staff, all of that is super good work. And I am not taken away from that all. The thing is though, if you are then contradicting those messages, because you telling people it's going to be a much more efficient organisation. But you still I spoke to somebody in an organisation recently who their job evaluation process was 70 pages long. Now, if you're telling people that you're that everything's going to be quicker decision making is going to be faster, but then you're asking them to adhere to systems that actually say the complete opposite of that doesn't matter what you put on your FAQ page on your lovely intranet with your nice logo for your new change programme. So it's that holistic view of not comms but how are we actually shaped Seeing the culture. And I think if we focus on comms, it's only a tiny thing. And if that comes is still contradicted by other parts of the organisation, then I think it will be, it won't go anywhere. It's the culture mapping that we said, I really do stand by it, we do a number of things. And, and we actually started doing that work before my masters. And I really, really stand by it, I really stand by it as being a really powerful tool. I think that holistic view is the best way to go forward as well, like you've pointed out there, you need to look at everything.
To me as a non expert, how you described it, to me, there seems like very much of a cycle, you can't have one without having the rest of it.
No, you can't. And and the other thing is, thing with this, there's a piece of work to be done, which we're a long way from nailing as a sector where this becomes part of leaders day to day job. So rather than the culture is a problem, we need to fix the culture, okay, we fix the culture, now we can go back to our day job, actually, as a leader, your job every minute of every day is shaping the culture. So it comes back to that, are you doing it on purpose? Or are you doing it by accident because you aren't doing it? So it's that mindfulness constantly and I am not sure we train leaders well enough in that I think that people become a manager. And I don't really want to get into the whole leader versus manager debate, because I do have some Maverick views on that. I have Maverick views on most things. I think sometimes distinctions are helpful, and sometimes not. But there is something about making sure that everybody understands, and even Junior managers understand how you behave, the decisions you make the processes you impose. All of that is proactively shaping the culture of your team at your organisation. And you either do that on purpose, or it happens without you being aware, but it will happen. I think that's a really powerful message to teach managers.
Definitely. And it definitely sounds important. And you touched on your masters before. How was that helped you to understand more?
Well, first of all, it's been awful. I don't know what possessed me. I have been self employed for far too long to be following other people's deadlines and writing reports in other people's ways. So yeah, it's been a challenge. But content wise, it's interesting, because one of my modules was change management. And at the start of the module, I was like, this is going to be either brilliant or awful. But I have to say, I'm with Birkbeck unit and the content is phenomenal. It's very, very recent, which is really powerful. Because there's so much to learn in organisational psychology in the last like three or four years. My research that I'll be doing for my dissertation is very much around how organisations while local authorities specifically manage change during the pandemic, because let's be honest, nobody picked up a print to manual people did actually do change in a completely different way and not in a way that change management professionals would say, and now sort of as we're coming out of that, and they'll and we're working on different challenges, how much of that learning has gone forward? So are people going back to more traditional ways of doing change? Or are they sticking with that much more kind of fast pace, but a less bureaucratic way of doing change? And I'm sure the answer will be mixed. But yeah, the content has been really powerful. One of the big things I took from certainly the change management module is the most popular change management, which I've always rallied slightly against. And as I said, I do have quite Maverick views, even within the change management community, but the very traditional step by step do these things, crucial resistance, that kind of approach to change management is one of well, they went through nine different perspectives on change management, including political perspectives, cultural perspectives, which is very much what we've been talking about today. You know, a real range of views on how to do change well, which was really powerful. The culture side, I didn't know quite a bit about culture anyway, because it's always been something that I've researched myself and been been heavily interested in, but it's definitely reinforced with a more kind of rigour without pulling too much academia in because, you know, our clients, our local authority, they can't afford to pay for consultants to be in there for years and years doing extensive research on work with staff. And you know, that there is a job to do that there's services to deliver. And so without pulling too much into that, I would definitely say it's increased my confidence in the work that we do in the area in that it is legitimate. But yeah, it's a range, a range of topics. At the moment, my last two modules I'm on around leadership and recruitment and selection, which is another area I have quite a bit Have Maverick views on. But we'll see I will reserve judgement on that one until I've finished this particular term in case they change my mind. We'll see.
One thing you mentioned there about kind of researching before you did your masters. With the culture side, do you think that in recent years, we're seeing a move from organisations and employees to focusing more on cultures than they were before?
Definitely a shift to more focus on it, with the caveat that people don't know what it means. So a lot of people, as I said earlier, talk about culture, and they really just mean behaviour of other people, they don't consider it in that lens of it's a form of cascading messages, which is the theory that comes very much from the academic world, which I do think is very powerful and useful. I think there is a lot of change in what people value in organisations, and it's quite hard to tell whether that is as come from the pandemic, because that was a reset for many people. But I will say, you know, with, again, the caveat there, it was a reset for many people with a certain type of job. So people like myself that, you know, kind of can work flexibly and work in a sort of professional environment and are able to work from home, you know, not everybody, most people are not in that situation, actually. And I do worry that some of the conversation around working life post pandemic actually focuses on a very middle class minority, I've just realised my dad will be turning in his grave if he knows that he's interviewing me say that I was middle class. They're very, very working class family. But you know what I'm saying that those, you know, the majority of people are actually in frontline jobs where they can't just work from home or work from anywhere. But we, you know, there are changes, there's a lot of work going on around the four day week. At the moment, I think some of the changes are generational as well, I do think that I can't back this up. This is just my sense. But I'm sure a lot of people would agree that younger people now value different things in the workplace than perhaps younger people did 2030 years ago, you know, there used to be a sense of you should be grateful to have a job. Whereas now I think there's an increased conversation around things like well being, it's interesting to see how that plays out to be honest, and how that plays out in cultures. Because, again, wellbeing is an area that I just I don't feel like I should comment too much on because I'm not an expert in it. I'm not a specialist in wellbeing. But there is a lot of nonsense stuff out there to do with well being that in my opinion, will not make a difference at all in organisations, you know, the sticky plaster culture of well, let's just put yoga on in lunchtime. Absolutely is not the right thing to do. But also, there's a lacking of nuance in those conversations, I think, and I say this as a complete self confessed workaholic. But when we talked about well being as part of my masters, you know, there are spectrums of there are people that operate very well and feel very well in very structured environments with clear boundaries. There are other people like me that actually put in that sort of very structured environment, it would affect my well being negatively. I don't want those boundaries, I want freedom. And so we're all on different spectrums in terms of whether we want to have that boundary or not, whether we want to have flexibility or not, you know, whether we want to be friends with people in work or not. And I think there's a lack of nuance in conversations around culture and wellbeing in organisations where there is a bit of a one size fits all, which is a dangerous approach, in my opinion. But I will say there are other people out there that are much more knowledgeable on wellbeing specifically than I am yeah.
I'd be inclined to agree with you there with my industry. It's very different right across the board. Workplaces offer different things to different people. But he does come back to do conversation argument and different things do suit different people.
Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of I feel like we're going really off topic and constantly, a lot of a lot of hate HR as a discipline that I always find it interesting when you look at the almost origins and foundations of certain professions, if you will, and HR, you know, the foundation of that was to make sure that rules were followed. It wasn't necessarily to get the best out of people. So the tendency in organisations is to is to put a load of rules in and actually I wonder do we need to be training leaders to be able to cope with ambiguity better in order to personalise the workplace for different people. And the challenge is to how you do that whilst retaining the fairness is something that I've certainly not figured out yet but that same tension between individualising it so that PE can get the best out of individuals. People versus meeting organisational need, and it being fair plays out whatever the topics are, whether that's wellbeing solutions, whether that's how hybrid working works, you know whether that's how flexible working works. It's that tension between the two that I think is yet to play out. And I think what COVID did was it accelerated all that and pull it up in the air and give us all like a bit of a blank canvas. On top of that, then you've got different expectations from different generations. So tensions there as well. And people sort of apply things blindly. So I hear a lot of people saying that for younger people, it's difficult for them to be in the workplace when they've not been able to learn from others because the everything has been remote. Now, that will be absolutely true for some young people, and it will be absolutely not true for others. And so I think there's a generalisation thing that we've got to be careful of, and that's a very long winded answer that says, I don't know. But But yeah, and all of that plays into your culture, because all of that is sending messages. You know, if you say staff have got to be in the office two days a week that's sending a very clear message. Are you mindful and purposeful as to what that message is?
Thank you very much for that was really insightful conversation. So thank you for joining me.
You're welcome. It's been a pleasure.
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