Get People Right Not Metrics

I once worked with a leader who said: “People here should feel safe speaking up.” But in meetings? The same 3 people spoke. Everyone else stayed quiet. One person challenged a decision once. They were shut down in front of everyone. They never spoke again. Mistakes were called out publicly. Feedback went nowhere. And slowly… good people stopped trying. Not because they didn’t care. Because they learned it wasn’t safe to. 📢📢 𝗚𝗲𝘁 𝟭𝟳𝟱+ 𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗶𝘂𝗺 𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗹𝗶𝗳𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 — 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘁𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗱𝗱𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗳𝗿𝗲𝗲. 🔗https://payhip.com/b/I5oaj No subscriptions No renewals Just one smart decision. Right now, it’s available with 95% OFF. If you work with projects, dashboards, reports, or planning in Excel, this isn’t a cost — it’s long-term value. 👉 Get Lifetime Access now: https://payhip.com/b/I5oaj Pay once. Use forever. That’s when it clicked: Culture isn’t what leaders say. It’s what they allow to continue. Every ignored behavior becomes permission. Every tolerated disrespect becomes normal. Every silence from leadership sends a signal. And teams notice everything. If leaders avoid hard conversations, toxicity doesn’t explode… It spreads quietly. If leaders reward politics over integrity, trust doesn’t break… It disappears. If leaders tolerate burnout, people don’t complain… They disengage. Healthy cultures don’t happen by accident. They’re protected. Daily. A few things great leaders do differently: ✅ They address issues early (Silence compounds problems) ✅ They reward the behavior they want repeated (Recognition scales faster than rules) ✅ They hold everyone to the same standard (No exceptions = real trust) ✅ They remove toxic high performers (Talent never outweighs damage) The best leaders understand this: Culture isn’t what’s written on the wall. It’s what people experience when nobody is watching. And teams always know the truth. __________ ♻️ Repost if you believe culture is shaped by what leaders tolerate. 👋 Follow (Dr. Chris Mullen) for one practical idea.

Leadership and Culture. Once a friend asked me why does most Root Cause after incident Investigation point to System and Management and not the culprit. I said 88% of incidents is an unsafe act which is the surface cause. Now the 10% which is by unsafe condition is often what underlay most of the incident. Human Behavior can be modelled sometimes and monitor to prevent repetition but often the condition which might have triggered it may be out of the reach of the culprit. He report a tool needing repair and is asked to try it for today and will be replaced tomorrow and it works and is not replaced for like a month and it finally gives in and an incident occur. Which ever RCA tool being used will go deeper to fish out that there is not maintenance system in place and not just point to pre-use inspection. It may point out to the system failure in the procurement and warehousing for not keeping spares or spare part. It may point that someone in Leadership role is not providing budget or only seeks result with resources. Culture is always tied to Leadership.

Most leaders think they’re productive. A lot of us are just busy. Kevin O'Leary shared a concept on The Diary Of A CEO that he observed firsthand working with Steve Jobs in the early '90s. Signal vs. noise. Forget 2 years from now. Forget 6 months. What are the 3–5 things only YOU can do to move the business forward today? That’s the signal. Everything else? Noise. Every interruption. Every meeting you didn’t need to be in. Every project you micro-managed. Every opinion you gave that nobody asked for. All four, raising my hand — guilty. As Jobs said in 1997: “Focusing is about saying no.” Jobs operated at 80% signal, 20% noise. It made me ask: What is my percentage - Signal vs Noise? Heck, what even are things that are signal for me? So I built my big signal list: • Defend the brand. • Be in every leadership hire. • Share our story. • Own the cash plan. • Protect time to build/create. Then I ran the same exercise with one of our Area Leaders. His signal: • Develop GMs and Leaders. • Protect the culture. • Drive consistency. Different roles. Different signal. Same discipline. Here’s what I realized: The signal changes as your role changes. The signal changes daily, week to week sometimes. BUT if you identify your big bucket signal indicators, it helps you stay in tune and on focus. It helps fight the noise and identify it more easily throughout the week. But too often, our roles don’t evolve—they just get buried in noise. I’d bet most of us are closer to 30/70 than we’d like to admit. What’s ONE thing in your role right now that’s signal?

Most leaders misread silence. They think low conflict means high trust. It usually means people have stopped believing speaking up changes anything. This clip is about the third cost of fake harmony inside teams. Not turnover. Not disengagement. Energy leakage. Because pretending everything’s fine takes work. People start managing emotions instead of solving problems. Meetings become performance. Feedback gets watered down. The tension goes underground instead of getting resolved. Then the language changes: • “There’s no point.” • “Let’s keep our heads down.” • “I’m tired.” • “It is what it is.” Leaders often miss this stage because nothing looks broken on the surface. No arguments. No disruption. No difficult conversations. Just a slow drift into detachment. Human beings quietly cosplaying as “aligned teams”. Corporate theatre. Expensive tickets. Weak plot. Real culture work is not keeping the peace. It is building environments where people tell the truth early enough to improve outcomes. I’m Sharon and I help business Leaders build thriving teams where every voice is heard, and employees feel part of something bigger. Ready to cut through the noise and drive real engagement? Follow me for actionable insights on #InternalComms, #EmployeeEngagement, #LeadershipCommunication, and #CultureStrategy. 💬 Drop your thoughts below or share this post with someone who’d benefit.

Most organizations try to solve pressure with strategy. They invest in frameworks, performance systems, leadership models, and operational improvements hoping culture will naturally improve alongside them. Yet beneath all of it, something far more powerful continues shaping the organization every single day: the nervous system state of the people leading it. Because culture is not created only through vision statements or leadership principles. It is created through repeated emotional experiences inside the environment. People remember: — how meetings feel when tension enters the room — whether disagreement is welcomed or subtly punished — whether leaders stay grounded under pressure — whether mistakes trigger learning or defensiveness — whether urgency consistently overrides humanity — whether calm disappears the moment results are threatened Over time, teams adapt around those emotional patterns. Some cultures slowly build trust, creativity, ownership, and psychological safety. Others unintentionally build hypervigilance. Employees begin over-explaining. Avoiding risk. Withholding ideas. Watching leadership moods before speaking. Staying emotionally guarded to avoid unpredictability. Most of this happens beneath awareness. Not because people lack resilience. Because the nervous system continuously scans the environment for safety. A leader who cannot regulate pressure often transfers that pressure into the culture without realizing it. Tension spreads. Reactivity spreads. Emotional inconsistency spreads. Unprocessed stress spreads. Eventually, organizations start questioning why collaboration feels fragile even when highly capable people are in the room. But people rarely perform at their highest level when their energy is organized around protection instead of contribution. This is why leadership development cannot focus only on communication, execution, and strategy. Leaders also need the capacity to: — regulate themselves under pressure — remain emotionally present during conflict — create steadiness during uncertainty — respond consciously instead of reactively — build environments where people feel safe enough to think clearly, contribute honestly, and lead fully Because every organization eventually reflects the emotional patterns its leadership repeatedly normalizes. And sustainable leadership is not built through intelligence alone. It is built through the ability to create clarity, safety, and grounded presence when pressure rises. #Leadership #SomaticLeadership #OrganizationalCulture #EmotionalIntelligence #NervousSystem

💥 If you are a manager: "I notice what you deliver, not when you are online." is the cultural signal that you want to send to your team. I’ve met many leaders who don’t do this intentionally but who still tend to notice what is most visible first, rather than what actually creates impact. And because of that, they end up recognising and rewarding visibility more than outcomes. Over time, that behaviour gets repeated and that’s how culture is formed. And yes, visibility does matter. You can’t be recognised for work no one sees. But as a leader, there are a few simple things you can do to shift what gets noticed. Here are a few things you can start with if you want to shift to making performance visible: 🌱 Reward outcomes over hours 🌱Remove “late meeting bias” and “always online = committed” signals. If this is something you normally praise, you can stop and instead 👇🏿 🌱 Explicitly recognise impact, not availability 🌱 Start asking “who created impact this week?” ⚠️ Make it explicit in: 1:1s, team reviews and recognition moments. When you start doing that you will start signaling “I notice what you deliver, not when you are online.” 📌 Follow Jean Jönsson for more on workplace culture — because work takes up too much of our lives to get it wrong. And send me a DM if 👉🏿 If you’re a manager, don’t keep this to yourself — share it with your team or another leader. Culture changes when we start naming what actually drives performance.

The conversations you avoid set your standard. Not your values poster on the wall. Not what you say in the team meeting. The stuff you let slide, week after week, because you're too busy to deal with it or you just don't want the awkward moment. Timesheets being wrong. Jobs not getting followed up. People doing the bare minimum and nobody pulling them up. That's not a team problem. That's a leadership conversation you haven't had yet. Here's the part most owners don't want to sit with: when you keep fixing it yourself, you're not solving the problem. You're teaching your team that they don't need to. You step in, it gets sorted, and everyone learns the same lesson. The owner will handle it. Again. So the standard doesn't come from what you expect. It comes from what you accept. If your business only runs to a certain level when you're watching, you haven't built a business. You've built a job where you're the one person who can't clock off. Real leadership isn't cleaning up the mess. It's building the people who won't let it become one. The hard conversation you're avoiding right now? That's where your culture is being decided. Comment LEADER below and I'll reach out to chat about what that looks like in your business.

The conversations you avoid set your standard. Not your values poster on the wall. Not what you say in the team meeting. The stuff you let slide, week after week, because you're too busy to deal with it or you just don't want the awkward moment. Timesheets being wrong. Jobs not getting followed up. People doing the bare minimum and nobody pulling them up. That's not a team problem. That's a leadership conversation you haven't had yet. Here's the part most owners don't want to sit with: when you keep fixing it yourself, you're not solving the problem. You're teaching your team that they don't need to. You step in, it gets sorted, and everyone learns the same lesson. The owner will handle it. Again. So the standard doesn't come from what you expect. It comes from what you accept. If your business only runs to a certain level when you're watching, you haven't built a business. You've built a job where you're the one person who can't clock off. Real leadership isn't cleaning up the mess. It's building the people who won't let it become one. The hard conversation you're avoiding right now? That's where your culture is being decided. Comment LEADER below and I'll reach out to chat about what that looks like in your business.

Have you ever wondered why some teams are able to overcome the crisis together? While maybe the crash collapses when it encounters a minor problem? The answer is always "Team Morale", and the key to building morale is empathy. Empathy is not just "compassion," it's when leaders try to "understand" the perspectives, feelings, and context of their team. Doing so directly affects morale. Because: 1. Build Trust: When employees feel that the leader is listened to and understood, they are not allowed to do so. They feel safe to tell the truth. Do not hide the problem. 2. Increase Engagement: Understanding makes employees feel valued, not just a tool to make money. 3. Reduce Burnout: Leaders with empathy will notice signs of stress and adjust their workload in time before morale breaks down. Many people see empathy as an immeasurable "soft skill". But scientific and business data proves that: • Gallup found that employees who feel their managers "care about them as a person" are 59% less likely to leave. • The Harvard Business Review reported that employees with managers with high empathy reported 76% less burnout compared to those with low empathy. • A study by Catalyst found that teams led by empathetic leaders are 61% more likely to innovate because employees feel safe to propose new ideas. Transforming the organization to be sustainable must start with transforming command-control into empathic-leadership to maintain morale, which is the most important resource of the team. #Empathy #Leadership #TeamMorale #PeopleManagement #OrganizationDevelopment #ChangeManagement