The more you talk about culture, the less people believe you

Today’s conversation is with Professor Benjamin Laker, someone I’ve long admired for his cutting edge work on the evolution of culture. His article on Meeting Free Days is probably the piece of research I’ve shared the most in the last 5 years.

Laker is Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School, which is part of the University of Reading. As well as writing multiple bestselling books on work like Too Proud to Lead and Job Crafting, he’s also published dozens of articles in HBR and MIT Sloan Management Review. He’s worked with government helping to develop policy on work and it’s evolution.

I could have chatted to Benjamin about dozens of things but I specifically wanted to dive into a sensational piece he wrote in Harvard Business Review at the end of last year about changing culture inside of organisations.

Along the way he mentions several big thinkers on culture and I’ve linked to them in the transcript. We talk about the role of leader as explainer in chief, how communications needs to play a role but that ‘culture isn’t a campaign’.

As Laker is an advisor to governments we end with a discussion of the medium term effects of a Universal Basic Income meaning the end of work as a route to social mobility and the societal consequence of that.

Actions speak louder than words: Most culture programmes fail because they focus on communication campaigns rather than actual behaviour. Employees are highly attuned to consistency and will quickly spot when a leader’s actions contradict their statements.

Geographical divides shape how we work: There is a distinct difference between American individualistic culture, which often focuses on capitalistic metrics and speed, and European collectivist culture, which prioritises employee well-being and how a workplace actually feels.

Trust requires radical transparency: Rebuilding trust within a cynical workforce depends on pulling back the curtain. When leaders openly explain the data and reasoning behind difficult decisions, staff are far more likely to accept the outcome.

TRANSCRIPT

Defining Organisational Culture

Bruce Daisley: Benjamin, thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could just introduce who you are and what you do.

Benjamin Laker: Thanks for having me here. I’m Benjamin Laker, Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School, which is part of the University of Reading in the UK. As a professor there, I am very interested in contemporary work, particularly how decisions are made and how individuals navigate some of the most pressing challenges of today. Whether that is AI, culture within matrix organisations, or simply understanding how work can be not just productive—because clearly companies want that—but also meaningful for those who undertake it and bring themselves into work every day.

Bruce Daisley: It is a big-picture question, but when you are thinking about workplace culture, what do you understand workplace culture to be?

Benjamin Laker: Really, it is about the dynamics of an entity, whether that workplace is in physical, virtual, or hybrid form. Those conditions or dynamics inform the way that things are done. Sometimes you will hear the phrase, “It is the way that we do things here.”

That could specifically be about whether it is appropriate to drink coffee, take a lunch break, or how long that lunch break should be. At a more macro level, it could be about the type of people we hire, the type of people we retain, the contracts we offer, or how we bring people together on certain journeys to make decisions.

The US Flowchart vs The European Feeling

Bruce Daisley: I have always held a specific perspective on this. Having worked in both British and American organisations, it strikes me that there are “lost in translation” elements to culture. When you deal with American companies, they very much subscribe to what Reed Hastings said: culture is what gets rewarded and what gets punished. It is almost like a flowchart or the Highway Code of how the company operates. When you chat with most Europeans about company culture, they speak about something far less rational and far more emotional. They describe how it feels around here rather than the norms, practices, or the handbook. Do you recognise that distinction? If so, I would be interested in how you would evolve or change that.

Benjamin Laker: Yes, I definitely recognise that. Without turning this into too much of an academic or scientific lens, culture at its simplest form exists when you have two people with some sort of shared lineage or experience. For example, I really like Diet Coke. If another person who likes Diet Coke walks into the room, we now have a culture. I do not drink coffee, so if people who like coffee come into the room, I am outside of their culture.

Whether or not you are in the same multinational company, having a footprint in both the US and Europe means that despite an overarching company culture, the local experiences of individuals will create distinct regional cultures. Geert Hofstede would regard these as national differences, encompassing things like power distance, attitudes to work, and religious culture.

At a psychological level, it often comes down to why the company exists. In the US, if the very centre of why a company exists is rooted in purist capitalistic tendencies, then how it feels around here may not be perceived as important because it is not directly related to making a profit. Conversely, European tendencies are much more likely to be implicitly exposed to social democratic ideas: robust healthcare, extended paternity and maternity leave, and shorter working weeks. These policies infer that how people feel at work is highly important. This influences why, when you ask people what culture means, you get answers about policies and procedures versus how people actually feel. Policies and procedures do not feel particularly warming compared to shared parental leave for 12 months.

The Link Between Culture, Profitability, and Innovation

The Psychological Contract and Consistency

Bruce Daisley: By the very nature of that, do you feel that the American approach is more profitable? Is this all just an indulgence of business, or have you seen a straight line between a better culture and better business success?

Benjamin Laker: I think it depends on what your definition of “better” is. In my opinion, better simply means consistent. If a company explicitly states, “This is our culture and this is what you sign up for,” then people enter that environment understanding exactly where they stand, what the expectations are, and how they will be measured.

If a company says, “We do not tolerate X, Y, and Z; you have to be in the office five days a week; do not ask for extended leave or additional conditionalities, but here is the salary you will work for,” workers can make an informed decision. Typically, salaries in the US outpace those in Europe. As part of the psychological contract, a worker is able to either accept those conditions or not. Even in an environment with stripped-back benefits, if a person has taken the conscious decision to work there, they will often describe that as a better culture than someone who entered a workplace under the impression that it was inclusive, only to find out it was entirely espoused imagery with no consistency in the messaging. Henry Mintzberg and Hofstede would describe this as the friction between espoused culture and implicit culture.

Individualism vs Collectivism in Tech and Innovation

Bruce Daisley: It is really interesting because what you seem to be describing is the difference between an individualistic culture, where an association of people are all focused on their own objectives, and a collectivist culture, which we see on the European side and elsewhere. By its very nature, I perceive culture to be collective, so an individualistic culture seems slightly at odds with that. In an individualistic culture, we might see the stack ranking of employees, individual targets rather than collective ones, and performance management based on individual goals. The consequence is that very few people do things for the collective because it is seen as an altruistic waste of time. Do those elements stem directly from these different cultural perspectives?

Benjamin Laker: They certainly can. Although the counterpoint would be that the American model is highly renowned for innovation precisely for those reasons. You are driving opportunities for individuals to be quite distinctively rewarded. If you look at the tech sector, most innovation originates in Silicon Valley where the primary AI conversations are happening, whereas the European counterpoint appears to move slower.

Sometimes you need speed to achieve a first-mover advantage, and an aggressive, individualistic approach seems to produce those results. Of course, that is not necessarily a play on culture alone, but rather on innovation and entrepreneurialism. If a founder starts a business, the core idea usually comes long before the setting of the culture. Established entities with a European-centric mindset often focus on the culture to begin with, thinking about what they want the environment to feel like before launching. In contrast, an American founder might say, “This is the app, this is the business idea, this is the problem I want to solve. Culture will come later when we have employees and we will work it out then.”

Why Cultural Change Programs Fail

Culture is Not a Comms Campaign

Bruce Daisley: You wrote a fabulous article with a few collaborators that was published last August in Harvard Business Review. I was really taken with it, and it was one of the reasons I wanted to get in touch. You discussed why culture change programs do not really work, and my main takeaway was that most cultural change programs are just communication exercises. They are just changing the messaging. If there is any real way to think about culture, it is behaviour. At the start of the year, we see endless books about habits and changing individual patterns of behaviour; culture is just a collective habit made up of rituals and shared actions. Of course a communication plan isn’t going to fix that. Is my take on that correct?

Benjamin Laker: Yes, exactly that. The working title of the article up until publication was actually something like, “The More You Talk About Culture, the Less People Believe You.” It was very much a piece about communication. What we were trying to suggest—and this is not necessarily a novel idea, but our findings were highly consistent with previous structural thinking—is that in order to change anything, whether it is an individual habit like trying to stop drinking too much Diet Coke, or a company trying to change logistics, supply chains, or behaviours, there is a lot of surface window dressing that gets changed because it is easy. Truly drilling down to change habits, behaviours, mindsets, attitudes, and beliefs is incredibly hard, and it is equally hard to communicate.

In order to demonstrate immediate output or short-term success, leaders want to communicate the things that are easily translatable. The problem is that you end up only communicating surface-level attributes. The assumption then becomes that those surface elements are the culture itself. For example, a company might state, “We want to become more inclusive, therefore we value people.” But what does that actually mean, and what are you doing differently? Drilling down into the necessary structural changes is difficult because the process is nuanced and often ambiguous. Because it is difficult to communicate, leaders revert to communicating what people easily understand, misleadingly framing those updates as genuine cultural change.

The 72% Failure Rate and Employee Cynicism

Bruce Daisley: The article states that your research found that across companies that had launched formal cultural initiatives, 72% showed no meaningful improvement in employee trust, engagement, or retention one year later. That is pretty damning in terms of trying to change the behavioural patterns of large groups.

Benjamin Laker: Yes, and in a lot of these organisations, you are already fighting an uphill battle because of previous failed initiatives. There is very much an attitude of “here we go again.” Another document, another roundtable, another town hall meeting. The slogan is changing, the logo is changing, so what is the agenda going to be this year? Employees note that they have done this before, nothing actually altered, and nothing changed as a result.

For a lot of these organisations, you are not even starting from a place of neutrality; there is a negative connotation that this is simply a cyclical corporate exercise and that engaging with it on a superficial level is all that is required. That is why those failure scores were so high. Individuals were already looking to confirm their suspicion that this was not wholehearted, transformational change. As soon as they saw the first signs that this was true, they disengaged, resulting in that 72% statistic.

Bruce Daisley: That suggests the best way to think about any initiative, if you are a leader, is to imagine that your audience isn’t a crowd at a wedding waiting for the speeches, ready to gift you an easy laugh.

Benjamin Laker: No, definitely not.

Bruce Daisley: They are deeply cynical.

Benjamin Laker: Very much so, and potentially uncooperative because they have been here before. That may have occurred during the tenure of the current leader or a previous one. A lot of these individuals are quite burned out or indeed burned by prior negative experiences. It is highly difficult because the standard language a leader uses is, “I know in the past things were done differently, but this time it is different.” The danger is that every leader says that, so the core challenge is proving how this time truly is different.

Leadership Actions and Transparency

The Proximity Paradox

Bruce Daisley: Is this specifically because, as you mentioned in the article, employees notice when leadership actions contradict corporate statements? If leaders say, “We need to be saving money this quarter,” and then employees see senior leaders flying business class or going on a luxury trip, they immediately think there is one rule for leadership and another for everyone else. Is it because culture is ultimately defined by actions and behaviours rather than statements? Where are the pitfalls and where are the successes?

Benjamin Laker: It is absolutely defined by actions. As a leader, people often feel it is a very lonely position because there is no one around who fully understands your specific challenges. However, there is a danger in thinking that the loneliness of the role means you have no proximity to other people. In reality, everybody is watching you.

Every email you send is analysed. Everything you do and every conversation you have should be assumed to be replayed and circulated around the team. If there is the slightest inconsistency, it is going to be noticed tenfold. Leaders may feel that an action is a very small matter, or perhaps not an inconsistency at all. In the example of trying to save money while flying business class, the leader’s internal justification might be, “I can justify this because I am able to work on the flight, so I am being more productive.” That may well be true, but it is about how it looks and how it will be interpreted. Both things can be true simultaneously: the flight class may allow you to be more productive, but you cannot control how individuals feel when they process that information alongside being told that their own jobs are at risk or their budgets are being slashed. Actions you believe are consistent and fair will frequently be interpreted differently by those you are leading.

Leading by Example: Show, Don’t Tell

Bruce Daisley: You note that these initiatives work effectively when people witness explicit changes in leadership behaviour rather than a change in slogans or values on a wall. “Show, don’t tell” appears to be the best way to move culture. Could you elaborate on that or share an example where you have seen this in action?

Benjamin Laker: We wrote at one point in the draft that culture is not a campaign. It often is framed as one, but true structural changes must exist outside the confines of a polished corporate roll-out.

Take the common goal of becoming a more inclusive workplace. You often see setups where leaders refuse to step back from certain responsibilities. For instance, a hiring committee might be tasked with appointing diverse individuals to senior posts under an overarching rhetoric of inclusivity, yet the panel itself is entirely unrepresentative. In one of the organisations we studied, the leaders recognised this. Without being asked, they acknowledged that if they were deliberately looking to bring in a diverse individual, they needed to step back from the panel to make the committee more representative. That was an excellent example because stepping back meant willingly relinquishing a level of immediate influence. When the wider staff observed that, they realised management was taking the mission seriously, which opened their minds to the possibility that the change was real this time.

Hubris, Trust, and Multiple Cultures

The Pitfall of Grandiosity

Bruce Daisley: I have seen you speak about how hubris and overconfidence are massive problems for businesses, and culture seems to be a primary breeding ground for this. Companies often present their culture as superior to others. Rather than aspiring to create a functioning system where people work effectively together, they position it as a competitive advantage or a differentiator against the opposition. Could you talk about the pitfall of culture being shaped by grandiosity, where words, styling, and positioning replace the realities of behavioural change?

Benjamin Laker: The real danger is that a company can foolishly believe they have total ownership over their culture. In reality, culture is simply the manifestation of a group of individuals. As soon as you bring individuals together via a hiring body, a culture manifests. Therefore, culture is owned by those who manifest it, not the corporation. For a company to hubristically declare that their culture is better than their competitors is a massive overreach because it infers ownership.

To use a jarring but useful parallel, if a government stood up and said, “Our national culture is better than Nation X’s culture,” citizens would immediately see it as an overreach. The government does not own the culture of the people; it is owned by the collective manifestation of the people. Yet, in organisations, we treat culture as corporate intellectual property that can be copyrighted or protected. It is simply the baseline of what a specific group of individuals regards as acceptable. If the demographic shifts, you see internal pushes for change. If you replaced an entire workforce with a completely different group, certain existing behaviours would suddenly become unacceptable. It is subjective, based on the shared experiences, lives, and attitudes of the mass of people you employ. To make work fulfilling, conditions must be co-created to allow that specific group to thrive.

Group Identity and the Managerial Divide

Bruce Daisley: That comparison to a country is striking. The idea that anyone from the King to the Prime Minister could stand up and define “our culture” would be widely regarded as an overreach, yet organisations do it willingly. It brings to mind the Edelman Trust Barometer, which currently shows declining levels of trust in organisations. What you are describing confirms that culture is effectively a group identity where the employees hold a degree of ownership. A cultural breach occurs when employees no longer feel a shared identity with their leaders. This explains the trust deficit: executives who have seen massive increases in pay over the last decade no longer feel like they belong to the same group as employees whose wages have stagnated for a generation. Culture fails because the groups are entirely decoupled.

Benjamin Laker: A massive part of culture is rooted in group identity because members must hold a shared identity to sustain it. As soon as you step outside of that shared experience, a singular culture can no longer exist. What you end up with is an employee culture and a separate managerial culture. They become distinct entities because their constituent members operate under entirely different conditions, rewards, and attitudes.

Mintzberg talked about this structural division: the operators’ culture, the managerial culture, and the executive culture. In a traditional manufacturing example, the factory floor workers and the top-tier executives come from completely different walks of life and rarely interact, so it is easy to accept that they have different cultures. In today’s corporate world, we try to enforce a singular culture across the whole organisation. Yet you feel jarred when you realise that senior leadership does not see the world the same way you do, nor are they remunerated the same way. You realise the only conditions you share are that you walk through the same front door and share the same email domain. Other than that, you live in different realities because you are not actually in the same culture.

Practical Steps to Rebuild Corporate Trust

Radical Transparency in Decision-Making

Bruce Daisley: If we want to look forward, we know that culture is a nebulous thing that is difficult to evolve, but demonstrating behavioural change is a proven way to increase trust and respect. What practical steps or advice do you put in front of organisations looking to reenergise their approach?

Benjamin Laker: One of the most critical elements highlighted in our research was the issue of opaqueness. When a leadership team has to make difficult decisions—such as redundancies—if the information and supporting judgements surrounding that decision are transparent, people are far more likely to accept it. They will think, “I understand how you arrived at that conclusion.”

Too often, how executives arrive at a decision is entirely opaque. It is rarely explained why one person was hired over another, why two teams were merged, or why a specific M&A occurred. It can even apply to micro-decisions, like changing the office menu. Providing a brief justification detailing the leadership’s thinking does wonders for organizational trust. It provides a fair, objective explanation. Employees might not agree with the final decision, but they can clearly see the data and logic used to reach it. This completely demystifies the suspicion of corporate nepotism or hidden agendas.

We see this parallel in sports, such as the ongoing debates surrounding the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) in English football. When big decisions are made, consumers of the sport simply want the decision-making process explained. If you refuse to explain the process, people naturally conclude that something foul is at play. If an official is happy to come out and explain the exact steps taken, everyone says, “I might not agree with the interpretation, but I have the information, it was transparent, and I understand why you concluded what you did.” You cannot ask for more than that.

The True Role of Communication

Bruce Daisley: There is an interesting paradox there. It reminds me of the Mayor of New York describing his job as being the “explainer-in-chief”—focusing heavily on communicating and being transparent about difficult choices. The paradox is that this is still communication. What you are describing means communication absolutely still has a role in culture, but it must be used to explain tangible actions rather than serving as a peacocking gesture. We agree that culture change isn’t a comms campaign, but comms is vital for explaining the why behind the concrete actions taken.

Benjamin Laker: Yes, because that specific type of communication builds trust and allows people to have faith in institutions. Governments are tackling this exact issue because public trust is at an all-time low. Communicating the why and pulling back the curtain to show the data driving a decision is completely different from corporate peacocking. Peacocking is typically used to spin a narrative, distract, or direct attention toward a isolated success to hide a failure elsewhere. Honest communication is huge in the trust-rebuilding phase, which often needs to happen first, as well as at the end of a cultural initiative to show how things were measured and how the company plans to move forward.

The Future of Work, AI, and Identity Markers

The Threat of Automation to Self-Worth

Bruce Daisley: You have advised governments on how work is evolving, which is a rapidly changing landscape. In wrapping up, I would love your perspective on how you perceive work changing over the next five years, and how governments and individuals should navigate that.

Benjamin Laker: It is a fascinating time. When it comes to AI, I am firmly in the camp that we are nowhere near a technological singularity. Because of how generative AI is built, I am highly sceptical about us approaching Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) anytime soon for purely technical reasons. However, there is an undisputed appetite from organisations to automate a significant portion of contemporary tasks, which inevitably threatens a lot of roles.

Technological shifts have occurred throughout history, and many jobs undertaken today could not have even been conceptualised 50 years ago; there will always be new work. What people fail to acutely appreciate, however, is how much their job contributes to their personal identity. For some, it is explicit. A pilot introduces themselves by saying, “Hi, I’m a pilot.” The job is the identity, and even in retirement, they will say, “I’m a retired pilot” because that strong identity marker lingers. Other professionals, like data scientists, might not lead with it, but their career heavily anchors their self-worth.

The true threat of AI, even if it does not outright replace a specific job, is that it threatens the validity of that identity marker. If you possess a specialized skill that required years of education and you suddenly realise that Claude or ChatGPT can replicate it in seconds, it shakes your self-worth. Skills you thought were rare and valuable have been automated. Historically, people derived their identity from their geographic community, religious groups, or extended family. As those traditional markers have eroded, work has become the primary vehicle for self-efficacy and identity. Any challenge to it via AI automation is going to be psychologically difficult for populations.

The Universal Basic Income Dilemma

Benjamin Laker: Governments need to think deeply about this. If you listen to Elon Musk’s utopian view—which I try not to do—he suggests that people should not worry about the end of work because everyone will eventually be paid a Universal Basic Income (UBI). For most people, that prospect triggers a sense of dread rather than a sense of utopia. They wonder, “What am I going to do with my life if everything is provided but my primary identity marker is removed?”

Governments will have to figure out how citizens can lead fulfilling, meaningful lives when traditional identity markers are gone. At an individual level, people must ask themselves if they can accept that a job is just a job, even if they went to university for it and spent decades building a career. We must learn to channel our identities into alternative spaces—hobbies, family, or community—because without that shift, the mental health of enormous groups of people will suffer.

Bruce Daisley: Even if it was partially an illusion, the concept of social mobility framed work as the primary vehicle to elevate your position in society. If we move to an automated system where your position in society is effectively locked in from birth, you enter a functional caste system. Removing that idea of social mobility fundamentally transforms our relationship not just with work, but with the whole of society.

Benjamin Laker: It is incredibly damaging. People frequently talk about the “race to retirement” and all the things they plan to do once they stop working. In reality, after the first week of retirement, most individuals realise they need to volunteer or find structured activities to maintain a sense of purpose. If you bring that forced vacuum forward by 30 or 40 years via automation, there is currently nothing ready outside of the workplace to provide baseline fulfilment for the masses.

The cultural notion that you can be anyone you want to be and do anything you want to do is completely dependent on the vehicle of work. If you remove that, how is fulfilment achievable? Governments have never had to solve this because throughout modern history, the psychological contract of work has provided that social framework. Very few people have realised the structural downside of a UBI because they are focused solely on the financial benefits. Furthermore, the economic question remains entirely unanswered: who is continuously picking up the bill to fund it over generations? If you follow that line of inquiry to its logical conclusion, it does not point to a good ending.

The Reality of Implementation Speeds

Bruce Daisley: Exactly. You only ever hear about the beneficence of Elon Musk advocating for UBI in some distant future; right now, he does not appear remotely altruistic regarding his wealth. There was a headline last week claiming that all office jobs would be automated within 18 months. When you scratch below the surface, you find out the individual making the claim is heavily involved in selling automated office tools, making the timeline far less convincing. Work will undoubtedly evolve, but the implementation will not be as swift as Silicon Valley claims.

Benjamin Laker: I saw a similar commentary recently regarding the latest version of Claude putting vast numbers of people out of work immediately. A colleague quickly reminded me that there are major retail banks in the UK and Europe that are still actively using fax machines. Even if an AI application achieves incredible breakthroughs, the corporate timeline for implementation is incredibly long. The fax machine has been functionally obsolete for decades, yet it persists in slow-moving industries. The world does not move as fast as first-movers want it to.

Bruce Daisley: Benjamin, I have absolutely loved this conversation. I had incredibly high hopes because I respected your writing so much, and this has lived up to them. I will link your article in the show notes. I am deeply grateful for the depth of this chat. Themes of culture are never simple and you are never truly going to completely “solve” it, but being completely honest about the structural challenges is the vital first step.

Benjamin Laker: Absolutely. Radical honesty goes a long way within organisations. Many people working for companies right now recognise that simply surviving the current economic climate without entering a crisis is a win. Beyond survival, the only thing required from leadership is transparency. If we can just be honest about why decisions are made, and open about why certain benefits cannot be afforded, that honesty itself holds immense value. It costs an organisation absolutely nothing to be transparent and honest, yet the positive impact it has on how people feel—and the healthy culture it subsequently manifests—is entirely priceless. Companies will spend millions chasing the superficial benefits of a healthy culture, rather than just paying the nominal fee of being honest with their people.

Bruce Daisley: Love it. Thank you so much, I am really grateful for your time.

Benjamin Laker: Thank you very much for having me.