Target culture, described in observable behaviour and derived from the strategy.
corporate culture
Developing corporate culture: culture change and error culture
Psychological safety as the foundation
The most important concept in culture work is psychological safety: the shared belief that people can ask questions, admit mistakes, voice concerns and propose ideas without being punished or exposed. It decides whether problems become visible early and whether improvement suggestions are made.
For Lean, it is a prerequisite. A shop floor board where nobody records a deviation is decoration. That is why culture work starts for me with the question of how safe it is to name a problem. Error culture, feedback culture and leadership behaviour follow from this.
Culture change does not begin with employees, but with the leadership circle. Only when leaders agree what will happen differently when a mistake occurs or someone disagrees does daily behaviour change. Everything else remains an announcement.
Sound familiar?
Culture usually only becomes a topic when it prevents something: a change, an improvement, an open discussion.
What you get
A culture you can recognise by behaviour, and managers who carry it:
A leadership circle that knows its role in culture change and has agreed concrete changes in behaviour.
Changed routines: meetings, feedback, handling of mistakes and recognition.
Stories and examples that people talk about and that carry the new culture forward.
Measurement through pulse checks and reviews, so culture change becomes demonstrable.
Frequently asked questions
Corporate culture: what I am often asked
Why is corporate culture important?
Because it determines what actually happens in a company, regardless of what is written in processes and instructions. Culture decides whether mistakes are reported or hidden, whether ideas come or fail to come, whether changes are carried or sat out, whether skilled workers stay or leave. Every Lean introduction, every change project and every digitalisation passes through the culture and is accelerated or slowed down by it. Companies with high psychological safety solve problems earlier, learn faster and keep their people longer. Culture is therefore not a soft topic but a driver of results that is simply hard to measure.
What is psychological safety?
Psychological safety is the belief shared within a team that you can ask questions, voice concerns, admit mistakes and propose ideas without being punished, exposed or excluded for it. The concept became known through the research of Amy Edmondson and is regarded as the strongest single factor for team performance. It is not harmony or conflict avoidance; in psychologically safe teams, people disagree more, not less. Managers create it by admitting uncertainty themselves, responding positively to questions and disagreement, and treating mistakes as learning cases. On the shop floor, it shows in whether deviations are entered on the board.
What is error culture?
Error culture describes how a company deals with mistakes: whether they are treated as blame to be punished, or as information to learn from. A good error culture does not mean that mistakes do not matter. It means that mistakes are reported quickly, analysed objectively and fixed at the cause, instead of a culprit being sought and the next mistake staying hidden. For Lean, it is the foundation: shop floor management, continuous improvement and A3 problem-solving require deviations to be made visible. Error culture is created by managers who respond to a reported mistake with thanks and the question about its cause.
What is feedback culture?
Feedback culture means that feedback is a matter of course in a company, in every direction: from manager to employee, the other way round, and among colleagues. Feedback is given regularly, not only in the annual review, it is concrete and related to behaviour, and it is understood as help, not as an attack. A feedback culture does not come about through appeals but through formats: short feedback rounds after projects, retrospectives, a fixed item in the employee review, managers who actively ask for feedback and visibly respond to it. It requires psychological safety, because without it, feedback upwards does not happen.
How do you change a corporate culture?
Through leadership behaviour, routines and examples, not through posters. First, leadership has to see honestly what the culture is like today, for example through conversations, observation and a short survey. Then it describes the target culture in concrete behaviour: what will we do differently in future when a mistake happens, when someone disagrees, when an idea comes up? Then managers visibly demonstrate this behaviour, change routines such as meetings and feedback, and create examples that people talk about. Culture change takes years, the first changes are visible after months, and it fails as soon as leadership itself does not play along.
How long does a culture change take?
The first visible changes in leadership behaviour and in routines are possible after three to six months. Until a new culture is taken for granted and holds up even without attention from the top, it usually takes two to three years. The duration depends less on the size of the company than on the consistency of leadership: a leadership circle that unanimously demonstrates what it demands changes culture quickly; one in which individuals tolerate the opposite never changes it. I recommend measuring with pulse checks after six and twelve months and anchoring culture work as a permanent task of the leadership circle, not as a project.