The night an incident taught more than a year of speeches

For years I talked about error culture. Failures are part of building things, it is safe to make mistakes, we do not blame people for honest errors. I meant it, and I said it often, and I have no reason to think anyone disbelieved me in the moment. None of that is what actually moved the needle.

What moved it was a night I got paged for an incident affecting an important customer. I joined the call. There was the usual early scramble to work out whose fault it was, and I moved the blame out of the conversation, helped work the problem, and dealt with the customer so the people fixing it did not have to. Nothing heroic. I just behaved the way I had been describing in speeches for a year.

The part that stayed with me was the feedback from someone who had joined recently. They told me they had never seen a person at that level behave that way. They were used to leaders who talked about error culture in the calm and then, the first time something actually broke at three in the morning with money on the line, started shouting and looking for someone to blame. One incident, handled the way I had only ever talked about, taught the team more about what we actually valued than any all-hands ever had.

That is the asymmetry. A year of saying "it is safe to fail" is undone by a single blame-storm when it counts. And a single calm, fair response under real pressure does more than the year of saying it. The speech is cheap and everyone knows it. The behaviour under pressure is the expensive signal, and that is the one people trust.

This is, more or less, how Edgar Schein describes culture actually forming. Among the handful of primary mechanisms by which leaders embed culture in an organisation, he puts how they react to critical incidents and crises near the top, well above any formal statement of values [1] . I arrived at it from the receiving end of an incident rather than from his book, but it is reassuring to find the lived version and the studied one agree.

It scales beyond a crisis

The same thing holds for the duller, everyday values. Everyone agrees that product and engineering should collaborate. Most organisations say it constantly, and then the two functions blame each other behind closed doors. Telling the teams to collaborate harder changes nothing.

What changed it in my experience was the teams watching the most senior product and engineering people actually do it: disagree well, weigh trade-offs in the open, reach a decision without either side keeping score. That propagated downward far better than any directive, because it was a demonstration rather than an instruction. Not every collaboration in the department was suddenly healthy, I will not pretend it was, but the visible ones at the top set the pattern that the rest measured themselves against.

Act first, then let the team do the talking

So the order matters. Act the way you want the culture to be, consistently, especially when it costs you something. Then talk about it, but be careful about who does the talking. Your own speech about how great your error culture is remains weak, because it is management talking about management. The strong version is a peer telling another peer how things actually went when it mattered.

People believe their peers far more than they believe a leader with an agenda, which is the other side of hierarchy exists. So the most effective thing you can do after behaving well is to let the people who experienced it carry the story. The new employee who watched the incident handled without blame will tell the next new employee, and that is worth more than anything you could put in a deck.

Summary

What you do is the message. What you say is, at best, a label on it, and at worst a contradiction your people will catch immediately. If you want a culture, demonstrate it under pressure, when it is expensive and inconvenient, because that is the only version anyone believes. Speak less. Act in plain view. Let the people who saw it do the talking afterwards, because they will be believed where you would not.

References

1

Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership. Schein lists "how leaders react to critical incidents and organizational crises" as one of the primary mechanisms by which leaders embed culture, alongside what they pay attention to and how they allocate rewards, and ranks these well above secondary mechanisms such as formal statements of philosophy.