CoachCultureSAMPLE

20
Coach Culture
Campbell (see references worksheet). We pretend that we
are anthropologists that have been dropped into the rainforests
of Brazil, and have come upon on a new tribe that
we’ve never discovered before. We ask them all kinds of
questions of the organization: Who are the elders? What
are the rites of passage? What do we go to war for? It’s
amazing to hear the answers that these people provide.
I debrief with the leaders, and they’re always shocked.
They don’t understand. “What do you mean that it’s not
safe? What do you mean that they won’t support me?”
They have no clue that this culture has developed beneath
them. Culture can be explicit—published in company literature—or
simply inherited based on how the leader operates,
how coffee breaks go, how communications trickle
down.
New leaders especially fall prey to this. They don’t realize
that they have a different management style than
the last leader. They just assume that everyone will fall
in line, even though the team has no idea what they’re
thinking. It’s not unlike how we operate with romantic
partners: we expect them to know what we’re thinking,
even if we never say it out loud.