Leaders · Culture Audits
The Culture You Describe vs. the One People Are Living In
Most leaders can describe their culture accurately. Fewer have actually checked whether their team would describe it the same way.
Ask a leader to describe their team's culture, and you'll usually get a coherent, positive answer — open communication, high trust, people who look out for each other. Ask the newest or most junior person on that same team the same question, and the answer is sometimes noticeably different. Neither person is lying. They're often just standing in different parts of the same organization, with different information about what actually happens when things go wrong.
A real culture audit isn't a survey with an agenda already decided. It's a genuine, structured attempt to find the gap between the stated culture and the lived one — often through anonymous, specific questions rather than broad ones: not "do you feel supported here," but "the last time you raised a concern, what happened next." Specific questions produce specific, useful answers. Broad questions produce polite, unhelpful ones.
The hardest part of an honest audit isn't collecting the information. It's staying non-defensive while reading it — resisting the urge to explain away an uncomfortable finding before actually sitting with what it's telling you.
A culture doesn't drift toward health by default; it drifts toward whatever gets rewarded and tolerated, quietly, over time. Checking in on that drift on purpose — not just when something's visibly gone wrong — is how a culture stays what it says it is.