Have you become, culturally numb?

Ann Stow
5 min readMar 4, 2024

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Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

What starts as an ‘innocent’ fudge in order not to disappoint…can become the first step to fully fledged fraud.”

When Warren Buffet called this out, he was talking about financial institutions, Wall Street, cold hard dollars. But this process, of ‘fudging’, of finding workarounds, of behaving badly, can cost not only £’s but reputation, rank, and in some circumstances can cost lives — think about military, police, building and diving (** I highly recommend looking at The Human Diver’s thinking on this — he talks about Counter-errorism and that’s something we should all be thinking about). You will have heard (& maybe used) the phrase ‘you allow what you walk past’, this is about behaviours, abuse of privilege, ‘skipped’ process. Once these things start to creep in, and people do not feel able to speak out, or don’t because they are more interested in immediate rewards to acknowledge the longer term problem.

Cultural numbness may start stealthily — you start a new job, try to fit in, you learn the language and the acronyms, you wear the ‘uniform’ or tribal colours, adopt the social norms — check — maybe is there a trade off between fitting in & being true to your values. Maybe everything started fine, but you start to notice a change in language, swearing, work arounds, or sales that don’t really align with the company direction (but hey, “it’s a commission right, who cares if we can’t service it, that’s down to ops, or tech”…).

I have been fortunate to work alongside some intelligent and service driven people and yet have witnessed some ‘give way’ to the “that’s how it is round here”, to the norms and standards that are displayed, rather than those that are espoused, expected — I am thinking here specifically of Civil Servants, Military and Security Forces. But, please read on and see if you have seen this in the City, in retail, hospitality, construction, charity, or any other sector. Tell me your story, I would love to hear it!

What starts as a quick workaround, a ‘just this once’, or a ‘I’ll ignore that for now’, soon becomes a tacit distancing and what is rapidly becoming normal behaviour. There is a negative strength to this, which can ruin an organisation for the people that work there. Where people are seen to get away with this, others start to slow down, to become transactional in their working, to look around for something new, or simply sit back & wait for their pension. I have seen this time and time again.

People continue to justify their neglect of what is expected from them, the values which attracted them to the organisation swept under the carpet to expedite, save, or alienate someone not like ‘us’. We become used to the new way of being, not necessarily in ourselves, but by distancing ourselves from those people who do start to change things, by withdrawing and ignoring, and we start to accept that this is “how it is” in reality. Then, months and years later the organisation is the lesser for it; it’s a bloody awful place to work and either retention is low, or people stay for the money and do the day job despite how it is being done, it’s a handle turn and at best people turn up.

The words on the wall may be the same, but reality is light years away. Employees, their families, suppliers and stakeholders all know there’s something not right and yet, in some cases, the senior team are not aware of the quagmire developing below them. They are out of touch and cosseted by the ‘yes‘ (or the ‘probably’) men and women of their middle management and outer office teams. I have spoken previously about the leaders that walk round to get a sense of how things are; Bill Marriott did it well in his ‘management by walking round’ — keeping his presence and profile he was able to hear, see & feel what was going on, and he espoused this throughout his business. If a leader is in-touch with their people, they’ll spot when something is going awry, if they rely on monthly reports and management briefings, they might want to reflect on how self-serving and ‘skewed’ these things can become (you can make numbers say anything).

Cultural numbness & justified neglect are stoked by ‘founder syndrome’ type behaviours & simply make for unethical, immoral and socially unacceptable behaviours which are exclusive (often intentionally and at someone’s expense).

There’s a spiral in behaviours from borderline to criminal which people need to stop being surprised by; speak out, speak loud and insist on change — do not sit by & watch, do not be that bystander, be the change. Lead by example, listen and hold seniors to account publicly (especially if that’s where their behaviour is happening) but also highlight the good, the beneficial the optimistic and inclusive.

Consider this next time you are in a meeting or on a call when someone says something hurtful, not true about process, or outside your team’s remit. Is this person’s language or behaviour undermining the values, culture, behaviours or process that you would expect in your organisation? How will you tackle this? Will you speak out in the meeting, individually after the meeting, will you raise something in a team meeting, or a 1:1 with your line manager or someone higher up? Or is it so systemic that the roots are intertwined and growing through the organisation like a weed & you feel powerless and alone.

Have you distanced yourself from certain groups, do you avoid some managers. I for one have avoided meetings with Team and Group leaders who were so toxic I didn’t feel able speak with them — only realising once I had left the organisation that it was their behaviours with everyone that were making the whole Group unhappy, not just me. But we didn’t speak to each other enough, and we had become resigned to how it was. They lost some great people because of it, but we had become culturally numb.

I am looking for examples of great places to work, and I would love to hear from you if you are willing to share your experiences (I’d also like to hear if your place wasn’t great to work to see the flip side). Please drop me a note in the comments, or contact me through LinkedIn.

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Ann Stow

Passionate about making organisations more human - one conversation at a time.