Every organisation has experienced it.
A new person joins. They ask different questions. They move at a different pace, and they challenge assumptions that others have stopped noticing.
The instinct is often to ask whether they fit the culture.
A more difficult question is whether they are helping the organisation see its culture more clearly.
A recent Harvard Business Review article explored the idea that organisations can be too quick to diagnose individual leadership failings, arguing that the real issue may sit elsewhere. We would take that conversation one step further.
Perhaps the real question is not whether the employee is creating friction. Perhaps it is what that friction is revealing.
Organisations develop habits over time. Decision-making becomes predictable. Meetings follow familiar patterns. Consensus builds around accepted ways of working. Eventually, these behaviours stop feeling like choices and start feeling like common sense.
Culture has a habit of becoming invisible to the people living inside it.
Then, somebody arrives and does things differently. They make decisions more quickly. They challenge assumptions that others have stopped questioning, and ask why a process exists rather than simply following it.
Who is to Blame?
The immediate reaction is often to focus on the individual.
Are they collaborative enough? Do they understand how things work here? Would they be more effective if they adapted their style?
They are reasonable questions. But they are not always the most useful ones.
Sometimes friction is not evidence that somebody is failing to fit the culture.
Sometimes it is evidence that the culture itself deserves closer examination.
This is one of the reasons culture measurement matters.
Many organisations measure financial performance, operational performance and individual performance with considerable sophistication. Yet organisational culture is often judged through anecdote, reputation and assumption.
That creates risk.
Leadership teams can end up reinforcing behaviours that feel comfortable rather than those that move the organisation forward. Over time, cultures become very good at protecting themselves.
The strongest organisations do something different. They recognise that culture is not there to eliminate challenge. In many cases, healthy cultures create space for challenge because they understand that progress and discomfort often arrive together.
That does not mean every difficult leader is effective. Nor does it mean organisations should tolerate behaviours that undermine trust or performance. It simply means leadership teams should be cautious about jumping to conclusions.
Not every leadership problem is a leadership problem.
Sometimes what appears to be individual friction is actually organisational friction that has gone unnoticed for years.
Leadership team alignment plays an important role here. The best leadership teams create enough trust to have honest conversations about whether resistance is protecting the organisation or protecting the status quo.
The organisations that sustain performance over time are rarely the ones that avoid uncomfortable questions. They are the ones prepared to ask whether the friction they are experiencing is something to remove, or something to learn from.
What’s next
Liked this? Next, discover which business attributes are signals of culture, versus what are just performative perks.
Prefer your content in audio form?
The Culture de-cooded podcast recently welcomed fellow podcaster and best-selling author, Damian Hughes, who discussed the learnings from his work with several high-profile sports organisations.
Potential, realised
At Coode, we look at strategy through a human lens because success depends on how people work together. When leadership teams achieve real alignment in how they lead, they unlock performance that may have been present all along but not yet fully realised.
To explore how Coode helps leaders define culture and align it with their strategy and context, visit our services page or get in touch here.
Stay in touch and subscribe to de-cooded, our regular digest of business insights from the perspective of leadership and culture.