How can leaders tell the difference between a genuinely broken culture and normal organisational friction?
How Do You Know Your Company Culture Is Actually Broken?
Culture problems are easy to feel and hard to diagnose. Six questions that separate genuine cultural dysfunction from the growing pains every organisation experiences.
The diagnosis problem
Every organisation feels dysfunctional from the inside sometimes. Miscommunication happens. Decisions get made without the right people in the room. This is not culture failure — it is the ordinary friction of complex human systems. But some organisations have something deeper: patterns of behaviour that systematically prevent good work, erode trust, and push out the people most capable of changing things. The challenge is telling the difference.
Question 1: Do people say different things in meetings and in corridors?
In dysfunctional cultures, the gap is wide — public agreement, private dissent. If you consistently hear one version in the room and another version outside it, that gap is a culture signal, not a communication problem.
Question 2: Who gets promoted, really?
The clearest signal of implicit values is who gets promoted. Look at your last ten promotions. If the pattern is people who deliver results, you have a performance culture. If the pattern is people who manage up well, you have a political culture. These should match what you say you are.
Question 3: What happens when someone raises a problem?
In healthy organisations, surfacing a problem is rewarded. In dysfunctional ones, the person who raises the problem becomes responsible for the problem. If your people are not raising problems, they have learned that doing so is unsafe.
Question 4: Are your best people excited about being here?
High performers have options. They will tolerate ordinary friction indefinitely, but not environments that prevent them from doing their best work. Restlessness in your best people is a culture signal.
Question 5: How does the organisation respond to failure?
Blame cultures hide failure until it is catastrophic. Learning cultures surface failure quickly and treat it as data. What has your organisation learned from something that went wrong in the last twelve months?
Question 6: Can people disagree with leadership and survive professionally?
This is the most direct test of psychological safety. If the answer is no, you have a culture that optimises for comfort over truth. Culture is not fixed with values workshops. It is fixed by changing what you reward, what you tolerate, and who you put in positions of influence.