A Story About Culture That Is Actually Lived

I stop in the foyer and look at the new wall. Six words, white on blue, in large letters. Trust. Openness. Respect. I have my coffee in my hand and I am a little proud.

The campaign was three months ago now. We brought in an agency, ran two workshops, everyone in the building got a card for their desk. As managing director of Lindmann Kunststofftechnik I wanted something to change. Two hundred and forty people, three shifts, a tone that has grown rougher over the years. The posters were supposed to be the beginning.

Today, on a wet Tuesday in March, I walk past the wall and feel none of it. In production things run as they always have. In meetings the people who always talk are talking. At the coffee machine I hear the same sentence as before the campaign: “Better not say anything upstairs, it won’t change a thing anyway.” The words hang on the wall. In the building they cannot be felt.

Last week an angry customer stood at the door, a complaint about an entire batch. I told the sales director to keep the matter to herself for now, until we had a clean answer. Openness, two doors along, white on blue. At the time it did not even occur to me.

At ten I am sitting in the production meeting, eight people, the usual circle. We go through the figures; the reject rate on line four is too high again. My head is already half at the next appointment when Melanie speaks up, a young shift supervisor who joined a year ago. Cautiously she says that in her view the problem lies with the changeover time, less with the people on the line.

I interrupt her. “Melanie, we’ve checked that. Let’s stick to the facts.” It comes out sharper than I intended. She goes red, nods, looks down at her pad. The room is quiet for a moment. I carry on talking, hand out tasks, close the meeting. By quarter to eleven I am in the next meeting and have forgotten the whole thing.

In the afternoon Jonas knocks at my door, a young process planner who was in the room earlier. He brings me the printed figures and stops in the doorway. “May I say something briefly?” I nod. He is visibly wrestling with himself. “Earlier, with Melanie. The poster in the foyer says openness. And in here everyone still asks themselves twice whether to open their mouth.” Then he puts the sheets on the table and is already gone.

I stay sitting. The sentence lies heavy in the room. I think of the wall, of openness in large letters, and of myself two hours ago, dismissing Melanie with half a sentence. For the first time I see it clearly: the campaign was never the problem. The problem is sitting in my chair. I had posters put up and carried on exactly as before. People do not read the wall. They read me.

I call the last few months to mind. The two workshops in which I was the first to speak. The cards I handed out without ever picking up my own. I treated culture as a project, with a budget, an agency and a date in the calendar. And the whole time I was myself the loudest signal in the building, every day, in every meeting.

In the evening I drive home knowing that no further workshop will change this. Only one thing can change it: something I do differently tomorrow.

The next day I take on a single habit. In every meeting I hold my opinion back until everyone else has spoken. No grand announcement, just this one rule for myself.

It is hard. In Friday’s meeting I am itching to put the solution on the table straight away. I hold myself back and ask a question instead. Then I go to Melanie. “Your idea from Tuesday, the changeover time. Could you explain it to me properly? I was too quick.” She looks at me briefly, then explains her thinking, calmly and precisely. We set up a trial on line four. Two weeks later the reject rate has measurably fallen.

The first thing that changes is not the figure. It is the tone. In the next meeting someone speaks up who has been silent for months. In the one after that we discuss for longer than planned, because suddenly three people are thinking along who I have not heard from in a long time. Word gets round that the boss asks first and judges afterwards. Slowly, shift by shift, the air in the building becomes a different one. In the canteen the other day a foreman sat down with me and said outright what bothers him about the handover to the night shift. In the past he would have kept it to himself.

The poster in the foyer is still hanging, the same six words. Only now they mean something. The reason is not on the wall. It sits in every meeting where I keep my mouth shut until the others have spoken, and in every complaint I put openly on the table instead of covering it up.

Culture does not come from fine words on a poster. It comes from what I as a leader demonstrate every day, in the smallest moment, when nobody needs a poster to see what applies here. Culture is the sum of what leadership lives out, not what it says on the placard.