286 | Are Your Leaders Killing Your Culture?

Too often, organizations promote high performers into leadership roles without equipping them for the responsibility that comes with shaping culture. The result? Disengaged teams, high turnover, and a struggling work environment. In this episode of the Lead Culture Podcast, Jenni Catron unpacks why leadership is the linchpin of a thriving culture—and how poorly trained managers can unknowingly sabotage it.

Jenni shares four key strategies to develop and empower people managers, ensuring they have the skills and mindset to lead effectively. You'll discover why employees depend on their direct supervisors more than ever, how bad leadership contributes to employee turnover, and why modeling culture at the top is non-negotiable. If you want to build a culture where leaders thrive and teams stay engaged, this episode is a must-listen.

🎧 Key Takeaways:
✅ Leaders set the tone for organizational culture.
✅ Promoting individuals without proper training can backfire.
✅ Employees leave bad managers, not bad jobs.
✅ Leadership development is essential for long-term success.

Tune in now to learn how to equip your leaders and build a culture that lasts!

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Transcript

Jenni Catron (00:01.934)
Hey, leaders, welcome to the Lead Culture podcast. We're a part of the Art of Leadership Network. I'm your host, Jenny Catron, CEO of the 4Sight Group. We're a company dedicated to helping leaders develop thriving teams. Each week, I'll be your guide as we explore practical strategies to equip you with the tools you need to lead with clarity, confidence, and build unstoppable momentum in your organization. My mission is to be your trusted coach, empowering you to master the art of self-leadership so you'll learn to lead yourself well so you can lead others better. Each week we take a deep dive on a leadership or a culture topic. You'll hear stories from amazing guests and leaders like you who are committed to leading well.

So let's dive in and keep learning on this leadership journey together.

Leaders, today I want to talk about a topic that has been standing out to me in the work that I'm doing with organizations on the health of their culture. And here's my question for you. Are your leaders killing your culture? Are your leaders killing your culture? This is one of the things that I'm seeing stand out pretty significantly is that for all of our great work on culture building,

If we're not equipping our leaders, we start to continue, or we really continue to see breakdowns in our culture. One of the most common places where culture erodes is with your people managers. So the question is why, right? And in fact, as I've been working with leaders, I've been trying to unpack this and make good sense of why I'm seeing this pattern consistently across the organizations that I work with.

Jenni Catron (02:05.024)
One of the reasons that I think we see this is that we put people into leadership roles without really equipping them with the new skills required to lead people. I'm going to talk about that here in a bit more, but we put people into leadership, but we haven't actually equipped them with the new set of skills required to lead people. Another thing that I think is causing this is we promote highly competent individual contributors.

Right? So people who are really good at whatever role they were previously in. And then we expect them to succeed in a role that is no longer about individual contribution. So you have somebody who was a fantastic graphic designer, just amazing at their craft, their skill, their creativity. And then we put them over the whole creative department where they're doing less creative work and they're doing more people management, more team work.

And so we promote these highly competent individual contributors and expect them to succeed in a role that is not about that individual contribution at all. And there's plenty of reasons why we do that. We want to reward great performance. We all see those promotions as progress. And I actually think that is an unhealthy component in our cultures. If we highlight promotions on the hierarchy,

and treat them as if that is the end all be all, like that is the goal. Because I think what we do is we promote people out of their strengths and out of their gifts, and then we set them up for failure. Different topic for another day, but you get it. So as a result, these new managers feel overwhelmed and ill-equipped. We put them into roles without giving them the skills. We promoted them and then expected them to succeed in a role that's completely different. And their staff are not getting the support they need. And everyone

is frustrated. Does that make that feel familiar to you? We've all done it. And this is, I'm pointing the finger back at myself because again, it's the natural thing to do. So it seems the natural thing to do. Over the last few years in particular, over the last few years, mid-level leaders have absorbed more responsibility either by attrition or promotion. So some of you, you've had a lot of attrition in your organizations and so

Jenni Catron (04:27.052)
You've promoted people because they've stayed and they're good and they're good people. And you've promoted them because you're hiring in people that are new to your organization. And in some cases, they've stepped into new roles of leadership and they need equipping for their responsibilities. So, you know, they have good instincts, they just need some equipping. In other cases, experienced leaders have simply taken on more scope of responsibility. So maybe it's not a complete

shift of their role, but just an addition of responsibilities. Either way, they need to be supported. Either way, when we are adding people management responsibility onto our team members, we need to be conscious of the support they need to succeed. A recent Harvard Business Review article shares this. said, between the great resignation, a lingering pandemic, employees demanding flexibility, skyrocketing mental health challenges, a looming recession,

and general uncertainty, more and more employees are turning to their direct supervisors for direction and support. So here's what this is saying. This is saying that all of those factors, and we've all felt them, all of those factors are contributing to employees looking to their direct supervisor. Like their direct supervisor is their go-to person. And then the database that bears this out, a recent poll at Salesforce revealed this important insight.

that while employees once considered top executives their most trusted source of company information, now employees rate their immediate supervisor as most important to understanding the organization and its priorities above the executive team. So here's what that is saying. This one is super fascinating. Historically, employees looked at the top executives, like the most senior leaders in the organization. They looked to them for the source of information, vision, et cetera.

Now employees rate their immediate supervisor as more important to understanding the organization and its priorities. So again, it reinforces that Harvard article that said people are looking to their direct supervisor for more support, insight, direction, et cetera. So this is placing an exorbitant amount of pressure on your mid-level leaders, your people managers and your organizations are being, there's an expectation from their team members that they have all the information.

Jenni Catron (06:52.27)
Studies continue to confirm what Gallup found years ago. Gallup has been doing this research for decades, that employees leave bad managers, not bad jobs. So we see this again and again. Good Hire surveyed 3,000 American workers and found that 82 % of them said they would potentially quit their job because of a bad manager. Again, leaders, I'm just giving you the data so you can go, okay, this is critical. This is important.

making sure our managers are well equipped to support their team is really critical, both for the manager's success and the rest of the team's success, and ultimately for the health of your culture. Unfortunately, managers aren't always prepared to meet this expectation because they're woefully under-trained and overworked while tasked with leading their teams during heightened turbulence. So again, every team is still trying to figure out

what in the world, like what's our baseline? And so our managers are feeling undertrained and overworked. In fact, new research by Future Forum found a record 43 % of managers say they're burned out, the highest of any job level. So your people managers, 43 % of them say that they are burned out. Now you might go, no, ours are good, we're good.

Again, have some healthy skepticism and say, could it be true? What might I not know? How are my managers feeling? And just digging into that might give you some really, really valuable insight that will help you determine how you can better support your people managers throughout the organization. To retain your managers and the employees who report to them, you need to invest in their development. So guys, this is what I want you to hear today. You know, we've spent a lot of time on

I've been spending the last six months or so as I've geared up to the launch of the Culture Matters book, really talking about organizational culture because I really do believe great cultures make or break teams. But at the heart of it is still equipping the leaders. That's why Foresight is all about leadership and culture. They go hand in hand. It's called the lead culture framework because you need great leaders to lead culture and you can't have a great culture without great leaders. They are intertwined and it is

Jenni Catron (09:17.984)
Inescapable. And as I said at the beginning of the episode, what I'm noticing is I'm taking leaders through the five-part framework is that the equipping phase, the fourth phase of the framework is the piece that is standing out to me that if leaders abandon the process there, like they get really excited, they do the assessment, they define the culture they aspire to, they even build a plan and then they think they're good. When in actuality that next phase, the equipping phase, equipping our leaders at every level,

to reinforce our culture is where I see teams either continue to flourish and thrive or get stuck. And so I wanna highlight this because again, I'm just seeing this growing issue with leaders being, our people managers, our people leaders being equipped in our organizations. So here's what I wanna do. I'm gonna give you four ways to train your people managers in order to protect culture. Now this is just good practice anyway.

but I want to give you four things that you can do to equip your people managers to protect your culture. So the first one is ensure your managers have a philosophy of leadership. What do you mean by that, Jenny? I mean, do they know why they lead others? Like if you've promoted them or given them additional responsibility to manage other staff and it's just been an add-on and you haven't stopped to really tell them the power of leading others,

If you've listened to me for any amount of time, you hear me talk about the sacred work of leadership. That leadership by definition, or Maxwell would say leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. Influence by definition means the power to change or affect someone. When you're in a people management or a people leadership role, you're changing and affecting the lives of people that report to you. So back to that people don't leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses.

Right? You are changing and affecting people. And so your people managers, your people leaders need a philosophy of leadership. They need to understand the weight and the responsibility of leadership. Years ago, when I worked at the record company, some of you have heard this story. When I worked at the record company, before they would promote you to a role of, promote you into a people management role, you went through, I think it was like six months of training to be a people manager.

Jenni Catron (11:44.748)
Like they wouldn't even put you into that role or give you other team members to lead until they had equipped you with some of the skills they felt like were essential for you to manage well. So leaders, you need to help your team members understand when you put them in a role where they are managing other staff, they need to understand the significance of it. It's not just another task that got added to their portfolio. Like it is a position of leadership and there's a stewardship. There's a sacredness that comes with that.

I'm not meaning being overbearing, but people do need to feel the weightiness of that influence. So make sure your people managers understand what leadership is, that they have a philosophy of leadership. Do they know why they lead others? Do they want to lead others? Guys, don't promote people into positions of overseeing a team if they do not want to lead other people. I know you feel like it's the solution to the problem that you're trying to solve right now and you're...

desperately trying to fill a role in your organization. But if you put somebody in a people management role who does not have a heart for leading others, it is a disaster. Like just don't do it. It's not worth it. So make sure that you are helping leaders understand the importance of the leadership responsibility they're bearing. Can't overemphasize that enough. That's the first one. Second one, equip your managers to model your aspirational culture.

So if you've engaged the Lead Culture Framework and maybe you've read Culture Matters, you've probably done the critical work in the defined stage, that's the second stage of the work, that provided the clarity for who you are and how you work together. So you've gotten really clear about who we are and how you work together. Now you need to spend extra time ensuring your managers really understand your culture and are reinforcing it.

in their one-on-one conversations, their team meetings, et cetera, you need to make sure your people managers get it. Like they're not just one of the pack that you're kind of hoping they get it over time. You need to spend disproportionate time making sure your people managers understand the culture you've defined, the culture you are aspiring to, because they are going to be key to that culture either growing and developing or not. So.

Jenni Catron (14:01.114)
If you do the work, and I really highly encourage you to do the work in the lead culture framework of defining the culture you aspire to, you've got to make sure you're doing the equipping work of making sure your leaders at every level get it, are modeling it, are reinforcing it. And the best way for them to do that is they need to understand like those values, beliefs, and behaviors that define how you work together.

so that they're having really natural conversations in their one-on-one meetings or in their team meetings that they're calling out somebody who lived out of value, that they're providing feedback and coaching to team members who maybe are not in alignment with the culture, right? That your people managers feel really, really just well-equipped. have a really good understanding of the culture you've defined. That's number two. Number three, determine what skills are critical for every manager in your organization

to have and then create a training program to consistently train for these skills. So you need to determine what are some key skills that every manager in our organization has. And these are probably not like, you know, radical or new. It's probably like time management. They know how to have a good one-on-one. They know how to give good feedback. They know how to have a hard conversation. You know, you fill in the blank. This is not, I'm not looking for you to create this list that's never been created before.

In fact, I think in the book, I give you eight critical skills for leaders to help lead culture. That's a great starting point. So, but I want you to determine what skills are critical for every manager in your organization and you could pull together your leadership team and you probably will very quickly whiteboard a list of the skills that you would like every manager to have. And then just simply create a program to do this. So start simple.

Simple and consistent is the key here. I see so many leaders go, we need a leadership development program, we need a leadership training, we need this, we need that. They never do it because they're thinking like way too complex. Create your list, come up with 12 things that you wanna train for, and then set a monthly like lunch for your people managers, and every month cover one of those skills. And you can find podcasts, you could find articles, you could find videos, like you can find so much material.

Jenni Catron (16:19.714)
that you could use as the starting point for that topic and then have a discussion around it. It can be that simple. And if you do that, or maybe you just pick a book, maybe there's a really great leadership book, Four Dimensions of Extraordinary Leadership is a great starting point. Pick a great leadership book and read that together for three or four months.

Again, this doesn't have to be complicated, simple and consistent is the way to get started in creating leadership development and training. Some of you have really big organizations and so you have mechanisms for building out all kinds of training resources. Some of you, your teams are small. You don't even have somebody that can give all their time and attention to it. If you will just lead it and lead the discussions, come up with those 12 topics, you could even spread out who leads it.

You could get other leaders in your organization to say, Hey, will you lead these three this year? And will you lead these three? And eventually, you know, you have everybody contributing and it's not taking an inordinate amount of time from any one person, but it's moving the needle. And then if you do want support and backup, that's one of the things my coaches at foresight can do for you is they can come alongside you, build out a whole leadership training program for you and your team. They can be the coach that facilitates it. will custom.

a leadership training program for you and your team, and then we will coach you through that. So if you want kind of a fractional leadership coach on your team, one of my Foresight coaches can do that for you. Just email me at jennicatron at getforesight.com and we will get on a call and we'll help you build that. Or you can do what I defined earlier, just start simple. Okay, that's number three. Number four, work personally with each of your people managers

to identify their areas for growth and then resource them with tools to address these growth needs. So here's what's different from the previous one. The previous one I'm saying, hey, all your people managers, what are the core skills all your people managers need? So you're saying, hey, every people manager needs these skills. Now I'm saying work personally with each of your people managers to help them identify their areas for growth. Some of them, they need a little more emphasis on time management. Some of them,

Jenni Catron (18:36.982)
have some fears or insecurities and they need some confidence building. You can fill in the blank. Maybe there's some self leadership. Maybe there is some relational skills that they need, but you're going to notice that one-on-one, these, people managers have some areas for growth that you want to personally help develop them in. So sometimes this is as simple as, you know, having a good conversation with them to say, where are some areas you want to grow? Here are some things that I see.

It's a two-way conversation. You want to give them an opportunity to say where they think they need to grow. And then you, course, can speak into that from your perspective as their manager. And then sometimes it's as simple as recommending a podcast, an article, or a course, and just having a conversation with them and then giving them some feedback and coaching as you see them work on it. Sometimes it's a connection with someone who might mentor them in this area. It might be some continued education or learning that's required.

You'll discover it as you go, but opening that conversation to say, hey, I know I just promoted you into this position of overseeing this team. Where do you feel like you need some support? What are some of the skills you feel like you need to grow and develop in order to lead well? Maybe it's somebody who's been in a people manager role for some time, but their team's not doing great. And you know, there's some development that leader needs in order to continue to lead their team well.

you unpack that conversation with them. Say, hey, you know, we've had some different hiccups with your team. Here's what I'm noticing. What are you noticing? Or you can reverse that. What are you noticing? Here's what I'm noticing. And here's a couple of resources that I think might help you with that. Let's keep having this conversation in our one-on-ones because I think it's in you. I think you've got the potential and I want to make sure we're equipping you so that you can succeed and your team can succeed.

They just need to hear that you're invested in their growth as well. That you don't have this impossible expectation of them figuring it out without any support. So leaders, this is the opportunity, is that just with a little intentionality, we can equip our people managers to lead better. And as a result, our cultures are going to be healthier. The more that I work with teams on the Lead Culture Framework, the more I find that this equipping phase of the framework

Jenni Catron (20:57.502)
is the make or break it. Equipping leaders at every level is critical for building and leading an unstoppable team. I'm going to say that again because I think it's incredibly true. Equipping leaders at every level is critical for building and leading an unstoppable culture. Invest in your leaders and your leaders will be key to the health of your culture. All right, I hope I gave you some

just ideas, maybe you didn't need to do all four of them, but maybe one of them stood out and you're like, ooh, that's a gap. We need to spend some time here. I want you to think about that. I want you to even have this conversation with the rest of your executive leadership team and say, okay, hey, what do we need to do? Where do we see gaps? Where could our leaders unintentionally be killing our culture? Because I don't think any of your leaders are maliciously killing your culture. But because of perhaps lacking some skill, lacking some development,

They are unintentionally not reinforcing the best of your culture. And leaders, you've got to pay attention to this because you could be having all kinds of crazy growth and it is masking a multitude of issues below the surface if your leaders are not leading well. All right, I hope that was helpful today. Thanks for engaging it. I hope it sparked some really, really good and helpful conversations in your organization. If it was helpful to you, please share it. Again, when you share the podcast, it helps more people.

connect with us and it gives us a better opportunity to keep investing in leaders and knowing what is helpful to leaders. So please share it, please rate or review it. Again, always super helpful. And then let us know how we can support you. I mentioned that if you need help building a leadership training and leadership development program, our Foresight coaches would love to help you with that. So just email me, jennicatron, J-E-N-N-I-C-A-T-R-O-N at getforesight.com, G-E-T.

the number four, S-I-G-H-T.com, we will help you build a custom training and development program to support your team and we'll even help coach you through that. So a great way to make sure you are leaning into the equip phase of the Lead Culture Framework. And if you are not signed up for our newsletter, make sure you go to getforsight.com and just click that button. It's usually a pop-up or it's at the bottom of the page.

Jenni Catron (23:19.432)
And make sure you're on our email list. We share lots of insights, lots of extra resources, and have just a remarkable group of people there that we are investing in week in and week out. And I would love for you to be a part of it. All right, leaders, thank you for listening today. Keep leading well, and we will see you next week.