Leadership Lens: How to be effective together in the culture gym
Healthy culture doesn’t happen by accident, writes Mayers Consulting director Paul Mayers. It requires regular commitment, a shared understanding of what ‘healthy’ looks like, and the willingness to feel a bit uncomfortable while you’re working on it.
Organisational culture is a lot like our physical health and fitness.
We all know it matters. Most of us have felt the cost when it’s neglected. And, let’s be honest, many of us quietly wish it would just take care of itself.
But, just like physical fitness, healthy culture doesn’t happen by accident. It requires regular commitment, a shared understanding of what ‘healthy’ looks like, and the willingness to feel a bit uncomfortable while you’re working on it.
Time and time again, when I speak with retired senior leaders, they tell me they wish they’d realised earlier in their careers that culture is the ‘main game’. So, if culture is so crucial, how can we help leaders arrive at that realisation whilst they are still in role?
The reality is that even today, for many leaders, culture remains a background concern; important but elusive, eclipsed by the more urgent demands of strategy, performance, and delivery. But culture isn’t just the soft stuff. It’s the human infrastructure that enables everything else. And like any infrastructure, it either supports people or gets in their way.
The Culture Gym
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Working on culture is similar to joining a gym. Signing up doesn’t make you fit. Nor does posting a selfie next to the chest press. Healthy culture is what emerges when teams consistently practise how to be effective together. And just like the gym, consistency over intensity gives the best results over time.
The results can be highly visible; how we run meetings, how we give feedback, how decisions are made. Others are more subtle, like the energy in a room when someone challenges a popular idea, or how readily people admit to a mistake.
Like our physical fitness level, culture is constantly evolving whether we’re working on it or not. So, the question isn’t “Do we have a culture?” It’s “How is our culture helping us and holding us back, and what can we do about it?”
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The mantra problem
Many organisations try to shape culture through shared values or mantras. Pithy lines like “We bring our whole selves to work”, “We embrace diversity”, or “We speak up, even when it’s hard”. These phrases matter, but they can also be misunderstood, misused, or even weaponised.
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Take psychological safety. Properly understood, it means creating an environment where people feel respected and safe to take interpersonal risks, like asking a hard question or admitting “I was wrong”. But in some workplaces, it gets reinterpreted as “I should never feel uncomfortable,” or worse, weaponised into “You’ve made me uncomfortable, so you’re unsafe.”
The challenge for leaders here is to distinguish between safety and discomfort. Safety means people won’t be humiliated or punished for showing up authentically and in good faith. But discomfort? That’s often a sign that something important is happening; growth, challenge, clarity, honest dialogue.
A healthy culture isn’t about avoiding discomfort. It’s about building enough trust and shared intent that people can move through discomfort, rather than avoiding it. This takes maturity, clarity of purpose, and plenty of emotional fitness. These muscles don’t appear on their own – we have to work on them, together.
Culture work is leadership work
This might sound obvious, but the unfortunate thing about moving through discomfort is that it’s easy to say and uncomfortable to do. It’s true that a healthy culture won’t always feel good. But it will feel clear, and ‘clear is kind’.
If you’re doing it right, you’ll notice people taking responsibility, staying in dialogue, and giving each other the benefit of the doubt. To maintain this culture, leaders need to be fluent in both support and accountability.
Then, when something breaks, which it inevitably will, you’ll have enough relational muscle to regroup, reflect, and repair.
Culture isn’t something you get right once and then move on. It’s something you train, maintain and pay attention to. The work never really ends. But the payoff is a workplace where your people and your business thrive.
Paul Mayers is the director of Mayers Consulting and a respected consultant and coach working at the intersection of culture and process. He partners with organisations to reshape how they operate—helping them think boldly, act effectively, and stay true to what makes them unique. Paul believes that working well with people is fundamental to driving meaningful, lasting change in both organisations and communities.
Leadership Lens is a monthly column produced alongside the Leaders Institute of South Australia. Click here to read the series.
