Your Work Friends | Fresh Insights on the Now and Next of Work

Culture Under Pressure: The 5 Behaviors That Decide If You Scale—or Stall

• Francesca Ranieri • Season 3

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Most strategies don’t fail because leaders don’t know what to do—they fail because organizations can’t behave their way into it.

Pressure doesn’t break culture.
It exposes it.

Most organizations don’t fail because leaders lack strategy or intelligence. They fail because, under pressure, the behaviors required to execute quietly collapse—long before the numbers move.

In this episode of Your Work Friends, we break down the five observable behaviors that predict whether a company will scale, stall, or slowly undermine its own execution. These aren’t values or vibes. They’re early warning signals that show up in how decisions get made, how truth travels, and how work actually gets done.

Drawing from decades of experience inside complex organizations—and a clear-eyed look at what went wrong at Boeing—we unpack how pressure consistently fractures culture along the same fault lines:

  • Politics: when decisions depend on who, not what
  • Fairness: whether the system actually plays straight
  • Psychological safety: whether truth shows up early
  • Collaboration: whether work moves forward or in circles
  • Adaptability: whether the organization can change before it’s forced to

We also share a simple five-question diagnostic leaders can use this week to spot where drag, risk, and breakdown are already forming—while there’s still time to act.

If you lead a team, function, or organization—and you’re feeling the pressure—this episode will help you see what’s really happening beneath the surface, and what to do about it.


#Leadership #CultureUnderPressure #Execution #ExecutiveLeadership
#StrategyExecution #OrganizationalDesign #ChangeLeadership
#DecisionMaking #FutureOfWork

Disclaimer: This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered professional advice. We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host or the management.

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Setting The Stakes: Culture Under Pressure

SPEAKER_00

When culture is under pressure, these behavioral fault lines crack. And we have found out in our work that they're absolutely predictable. More than that, they're measurable. What's going on, Mel?

SPEAKER_01

Not much. What's happening?

SPEAKER_00

It is January 20th. Pretty excited. Aquarius season. What does Aquarius season mean though? For those of that don't follow like the Woo-woo astrology, what does it mean to be in Aquarius season?

SPEAKER_01

Disruption, transformation, things coming to light. I feel like we've had a whole year of that. Straight up weirdness.

SPEAKER_00

Great. All right. You're an Aquarius. My mom is an Aquarius. She's a January Aquarius. Yeah, I've got a lot of lovely Aquariuses in my life. You're surrounded.

SPEAKER_01

You're surrounded. I don't mind. I don't mind. All right. This is your work, friends, where we break down the now and next of work. So you stay ahead. I'm Mel Plett.

SPEAKER_00

And I am Francesca Rineri.

SPEAKER_01

What are we talking about today, Francesca?

SPEAKER_00

So today we're talking about culture under pressure and the five behaviors that signal whether you'll scale, you're going to sustain, or you're going to stall as an organization. And if you've been a listener of ours, and you know that Mel and I are very obsessed with the now and next of work. When culture is under pressure, it breaks among five specific behavioral fault lines. And these are everyday singles that tell you if your culture will scale, will stall, or quietly undermine delivery before it shows up in engagement or attrition data. It's behavioral. So when culture is under pressure, these behavioral fault lines crack. And we have found out in our work that they're absolutely predictable. More than that, they're measurable.

Why Behavior Is A Leading Indicator

SPEAKER_01

Leading talent and strategy. We've been in the seat. We've been in the room with the executive teams through scaling, restructuring, major transformational shifts. And we know what it feels like when you're carrying these performance targets and people decisions at the same time. It can be pretty freaking intense. And we're really going to use that experience to help leaders and organizations align how that bus how the business runs and how people actually work by covering these things. Sometimes that looks like a signals diagnostic, which shows you exactly where the drag is happening. And most of our work is in that strategy space: people strategy, learning strategy, defining what the next of work look like and looks like in orgs. At the end of the day, we're really wanting to help leaders build teams that work better together and move faster without compromising your humanity here. So today, here's what we're going to talk about why these behaviors matter. The five behavioral signals that you should be looking out for, especially if your organization is feeling like it's under a lot of pressure right now. The impact of those behaviors, we are going to talk about a real life case study you all will recognize, and the impact and the cost of not tracking these behavioral signals. And there's a real microdiagnostic that you can try this week for yourself that we're going to share. What do you think, Brian Jesca?

SPEAKER_00

That sounds like a plan to me. That sounds like a plan to me. All right. Let's dive into why this matters, right? And the thing is, organizations rarely fail because they don't know what to do. They typically fail because they can't get the behavior required to do it. And we've all seen this where we know where we want to go, we know the work that needs to be done, but we can't get the human behavior to make that happen, even though the plan is there. IE, failure is something that where you can't hold under pressure. And pressure these days is constant. Market shifts, reorgs, the business grows faster than systems, leadership train changes. A crisis hits like COVID. If you look at the last five to six years in general, what most HR teams and what most organizations have gone through is just constant pressure. And your culture will continue to be under pressure. And all of these things test that cultural foundation. You and I see this daily.

SPEAKER_01

Never mind the last five years. What about the first two weeks of January?

The Five Load-Bearing Behaviors

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Super fair. Letter to Greenland. And allow us just to be your CFO for a second, because why this matters is that behavior is the early morning signal. Let me give you an example of why behavior is an early warning signal. If you go back to safety research back in the day, teams shifted from counting accidents, like safety accidents, which are lagging indicators, to measuring safety climate, which are leading indicators. Those work because they predict risk better than retrospective data. And in business, the same is true. Things like turnover, rev misses, customer problems, we measure those all the time, but they're lagging. And if we don't track behavior, we see problems too late. So this is our safety dance that Mel and I have come up with, which are the five leading behaviors that are the foundation of cultural health, or whether they'll break under pressure. And as we go through our five load berry beams, we'll walk you through how to spot them and how to map them to performance and what to do it when you do see them. Because we want you to leave with really tactical ways to spot it and do something about it. We go down rabbit holes, especially when we start seeing trends. And every failure we've seen over the last 25 years, whether you're talking about Boeing, Will Spargo, Uber, Blockbuster, Nokia, Equifax, we can predict, and we can also, by the way, predict who's about to be added to that list. Every one of those was a failure of strategy second and a failure of the five behaviors we're going to talk about first. Pressure just made it super obvious because under pressure, every culture breaks along the same five fault lines, not seven, not 23, not five. They are the foundational load-bearing beams of an organization. And again, you can measure them, they're leading, and you can fix them before they hit the PL. And they determine one thing. Can this company do what it says it wants to do? So what are those five behaviors? Number one, politics, how decisions get made when the stakes are high. If you've ever worked in a highly political organization, you know this and you feel this. Number two, fairness, whether people believe the system plays straight. Three, psychological safety, whether truth services early, that aspect of psychological safety. Collaboration, whether teams can actually execute. If you've ever had to do cross-team collaboration and it didn't feel like the collaboration was part of that, there you go. And number five, adaptability, whether the org can change before it's forced to. And we invite you to flip the script because they tell it, all of these things tell us how well the organizations will perform when it's stressed and under real-world conditions. They are the root performances of execution resilience, risk management, decision quality, integration, value preservation. The headline here is if these five are healthy, your strategy is executable. If these five are weak, strategy fails. And even the best leaders and the best ideas will fail along with it. And so that's why you want to be paying attention to this.

SPEAKER_01

Absolutely. All right, let's get into it. Politics. Our favorite topic these days. So what is politics? It's when how much decision making depends on who, capital W H O versus what. We don't need we don't know a single leader who says they're good at navigating politics, by the way. I would say every single person you speak with, including your, and you're probably nodding along as you listen to this, like F politics. Nobody likes politics. Most of us hate it in the workplace. It's sneaky because it rarely looks like backstabbing. It hides in things like we're in alignment, stakeholder buy-in, in decision making. We see this a lot, mergers, reorganizations, especially in the six months pre and post. People start to get super tribal about things. Just bad behaviors come out to play. People start protecting their turf, titles start becoming shields, relationships start to become currency. And Francesca, you've known this, right? You're always like, all right, who's the decision maker behind the real decision makers here that I need to get this from? That's what politics looks like. If you have to ask that question, you're in the thick of politics. Your truth starts to get filtered because someone's thinking about what this means for their job or their headcount or their power within an organization. Politics isn't about people being bad necessarily. It's about people being scared. Because at the end of the day, when things are under pressure and in pressure-like environments, people start to get scared. Think about the last year alone when you see headlines like a million layoffs by October. What does that trigger in people? Am I safe? And under pressure, you start to deregulate. And fear makes us protect what we think we might lose. Francesca. You've seen this, right? What have you seen? How's this shown up?

Politics: Decisions Slowed By Fear

SPEAKER_00

Yeah. Listen, you can take somebody who who normally would not play politics, would not necessarily throw somebody under the bus, would not do that normally. But under the job market and the labor market we have right now, under the amount of pressure organizations face every day, we're seeing people that typically wouldn't act very politically. Again, they're trying to save their job, they're trying to save their team. And sometimes the system sets up an us versus them, and people will play politics to get shit done, to get their way, to save their team, to get the budget. When things are scarce, to your very good point, people get tribal.

SPEAKER_01

Yeah, they do. And they don't always make the best decisions in those moments either. So here's the thing the biggest tell you could tell today. Just take a pulse on your own team within your own org. People spend more energy managing relationships and perception than they do focusing on the work or making the work better. That's your biggest tell. And that breaks down decision velocity. And slow decisions are actually the number one reason that strategies underperform. And if you're a PE firm, for example, it kills opportunity cost and delays revenue. High performing organizations make strategic decisions in 50 to 70% less time than low-performing organizations. If you're curious about where your org or team stands for reference, healthy decision making happens within three to seven business days. At risk decision making happens 10 to 14 days. Erosion is 14 plus. This maps to business outcomes. It impacts execution. Everything's going to take longer. When decisions depend on who, not what, it impacts risk. Decisions get distorted or hidden. It impacts your speed. It's slowing influence pedaling and slowed by influence pedaling and approvals. Profitability slows or incorrect decisions. These are the most expensive failure modes in business. Politics is also the number one predictor of merger and acquisition friction. So if you've been going through that yourself, you probably have picked up on that. And it looks like information that's being withheld as a form of power. We've both been in rooms like that where someone won't send something to you. You've asked for it 45 times. People start to ask who's in the room before they actually share what they're really thinking or feeling or seeing. Promotions and decisions are consistently surprising everybody because they were made in the shadows. And you're just like, when did that happen? So if work is starting to feel like a game of social navigation, it's likely that politics is currently running your business. And going back to the decision piece, like if it feels like it's like turning a cruise ship to get anything done around here, that's your big uh-oh moment to pay attention to.

SPEAKER_00

All right, politics number one. Number two, fairness. Because if politics is about power, then fairness is about whether the system plays straight. And when people start believing the rules are not the same for everyone, I'll tell you right now, things fall apart and they fall apart really fast. It's not just do we treat people nicely? I don't want people to think, oh, okay, oh, fairsies and everybody gets an award. That's not what we're talking about. It's about where fairness shows up in things like promotions, recognition, pay, visibility, opportunity, who gets labs or cool projects, who gets feedback, who gets forgiven, who gets invited in the room, who gets a seat at the table. These are career making or breaking decisions. That's fairness. Where we see this all the time, and you'll see this as well. During performance reviews or layoffs or promotions, people will see exactly who the system rewards and who it forgets. And the brutal truth here is that the moment someone thinks that the game is rigged, they're gonna stop playing it as hard as they have before and they're gonna start looking elsewhere. Or worse, they're gonna stay and become completely disengaged and disconnected from the org, which is something you don't want because that typically will evolve into a cancer on your team. A good question to ask yourself here are who are the people in your company everyone knows the rules don't apply to? And what story does that create? We all have those people, whether or not they didn't get their hands slapped for something that they should that everyone else did, or they didn't have to jump through all the promotion hoops that someone else did. Where have you seen fairness come to play, Mel?

SPEAKER_01

Everywhere. Yeah. It comes into everywhere when you think about equity for people. If you're thinking about succession planning or comp structures, it's everywhere within the organizations. There's a good pulse check that you can be doing by asking yourself those questions to say, where are we being really unfair? Where are we creating unfair environments that we need to address?

unknown

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

You might think people don't notice. Everybody notices. It's almost like let's say you have two kids, and the number one question when you're handing out candy is what did I get the same amount as that of the same candy? The same candy. It's not fairsies. Like that is absolutely the same thing that happens, right? Let's here we go. Some of the deets here. The biggest tell with fairness is people don't believe the rules apply equally. Did they get more candy than I did? That's what your people are constantly thinking. And what it really drives from a business perspective is turnover. Fairness is not a nice to have. It's literally your retention cost center because fairness is the most predictive factor of turnover intention. Fairness. It really is. Turnover costs range from 100 to 300% of someone's annual salary, even more, depending on your executives, with your tech and your professional services also up in the upper range. Turnover is a natural part of any business. We understand this. But when we look at some thresholds, if you have less than 12% annual turnover, you're probably in the healthy range. If you have more than 20, no bueno. And we see this in orgs all the time. And when you have that level of turn, or where you're etching up above 12, looking at fairness because it maps to outcomes in terms of risk. Unfair environments generate compliance, legal, and reputation risk. Profitability, retention loss equals performance drop, which equals a margin drag. Decision making, here showing up again. People stop participating when they believe the game is rigged. Let me give you three signals of low fairness. You're gonna hear it depends on who you are, or some people get away with it. If you start hearing or seeing those types of behaviors, fairness issue. The same behavior is punished in one person and rewarded in another. And high performers quietly stop trying because the system is rigged. Here's the big headline that I would love everyone to remember about fairness. If fairness dies, effort dies. Period.

Fairness: When Effort Quietly Dies

SPEAKER_01

Yeah. If you want to let your trust on fire, then don't address it. But you don't want to do that. No psychological safety. Number three, let's get into this. Psychological safety is one of those concepts you hear a lot about, especially over the past few years. It's one of those concepts everyone thinks they understand until something is truly at risk. It's about whether someone is able to speak an uncomfortable truth while the lights are on. In that meeting, they feel like it is safe to say what they really think. There aren't going to be repercussions for doing that. One of our favorite tells is watching what happens when bad news is walking into a room. Are people getting curious about that bad news, or is it defensive? Are leaders leaning in or are they shutting it down? Are teams raising that signal early on? Or are they waiting until a client or the market actually forces them to share their truth about what's happening? The absence of safety is often really quiet. It's the silence that you hear in meetings. We've all been in those meetings where it's just crickets. It's the watered-down feedback that you get. It's the, I'm not sure this is the right forum to talk about this kind of comments. Companies don't avoid risk by avoiding conflict. They create risk by hiding it. So that's why this is so critical. The biggest tell here is when you recognize people aren't feeling safe to speak up. It is shutting down the most important thing for your strategy to be successful, for your org to be successful, your teams, and just you as an individual to be successful. It's risk surfacing, the importance of identifying those blind spots early on. Safety isn't about feelings. It's about information flow and early risk detection, leading to quality issues, compliance, and crisis cost if you don't. Some of the details that we look at when we're paying attention to psychological safeties. Teams with high psychological safety actually have 50% higher productivity, 76% more engagement. They report risks much earlier on. It maps to things like innovation. This is the single biggest enabling variable. Imagine the innovation you're missing out on because people don't think they can share their ideas. Listen, I'm gonna go back to the story about the hot Cheeto. That's because someone felt super safe to share their idea. And I'm super glad that exists.

SPEAKER_00

Wait, I don't think you've told the story. Wait, tell the story again.

SPEAKER_01

There's a whole movie. There's a whole movie about the discovery of the hot cheet. This is why our prediction for 2030 is elevation of frontline worker voices because they know the shit that's going down. Okay. And Hachitos came from frontline workers who understand the client market, who saw this gap. Like, we can address it. We should. Introduce this flavor to the marketplace. It is like one of the number one sellers. Hot Cheetos. So, anyway, you got to pay attention to this because it opens up innovation. Risk. Risks go hidden. They don't go away. That's a huge problem if you're trying to transform as a business. It impacts speed. Bad news shows up earlier when you have psychologically safe environments where people can share things. If you have greater psychological safety, it helps with execution. Higher error detection happens, faster adjustments for things. There are three signals of low psychological safety that you should be looking out for. Problems are always showing up late. So then you're dealing with a ton of fire drills. Leaders are surprised by issues, they're surprised by turnover. They're surprised by the big misses that are happening. Meetings are just full of updates, but not discussion. That if your meeting is an update, it could have been an email. That's all I'm going to say. So, what it really looks like is organizations acting like they're allergic to reality a little bit here. Silence is a symptom of that, but risk for your organization is the consequence of that silence.

Psychological Safety: Truth On The Table

SPEAKER_00

There's an interesting backlash I'm seeing around psychological safety, by the way. And I'm curious. Honestly, I'm seeing a lot of bros be like, oh, psychological safety. I think this is the buzzword. Friends, this is not a buzzword. Okay. When you look at the ability that they can raise things early, that they can bounce ideas off of you, that your intent is positive and you won't get clobbered in a meeting for bringing something up. That is psych safety. I have worked in organizations. I've had bosses that have allowed me to fail right in front of them and been like, cool, keep going. And I've had bosses that have literally been like, unless I'm hearing anything bad about you, that's the only time I'm gonna talk to you. Oh yeah, same. We've all been there. So we've gone through politics. Yeah, we've gone through fairness, we've gone through psychological safety. Let's talk about the fifth one, which is one of my favorites of collaboration. All right. Number four. Number four. Quattro for magi. Yes. Number four. Listen, everyone says they collaborate. We'll tell you right now, there's a few that do really well, but most don't because collaboration isn't exactly easy because it's not we all like each other. We're all nice here. It's about whether work travels across teams without breaking. That's not easy for all the other reasons we talked about politics, fairness, psychological safety, they all show up in collaboration. That's why these are all five load-bearing beams. Here's where collaboration always reveals itself in the seams, in the handoffs. The project that looks like progress from one department but looks like utter chaos in the next, the cross-functional initiative that dies, not because the strategy or the idea was bad, but because the teams just can't frickin' get aligned. When collaboration breaks, the company slows down, period, because we can't ship. Meetings replace decisions. You've had have you ever had like 15 meetings, or I'm exaggerating. Have you ever had six meetings about the same goddamn thing? And you're like, we can't even make a decision about this. Oh no, I've had the 15.

SPEAKER_01

Let's be real. I've also had 15 meetings, and then the meeting with the other department that was completely siloed, working on the exact same project, and both had already invested thousands of dollars into the work. And then it was who owns this and who's gonna fight over that turf.

SPEAKER_00

Those are always fun. Those are always fun. Yeah. That's when I get the popcorn out. I'm like, man, this is like collaboration is the difference between a company that scales and a company that just reorganizes its problems every quarter. Why this is so key, especially now, is because everything is cross-disciplinary. There's no way in hell you can work in your silo anymore and not touch another team that is outside your PL, that is outside your domain, period. So we have to learn how to do this really well. This is something I think everyone should ask is where does work get stuck in your organization? What function or process becomes the bottleneck? Potentially it's tech, potentially it's procurement. It could be anything in your organization. But there are typically some teams that stand out more than others where things just get bottlenecked in. When you're looking at do we have a collaboration problem? Start with the biggest rocks in the room. Where's work getting stuck? That's a place to start. Fun times with collaboration. Listen, plain speak here with collaboration. What this really looks and feels is work is moving in circles instead of forward. You're like, didn't we decide that? Are we talking about that again? We're still not freaking done with it. Holy shit, we've been on this project for 18 months. That's a lack of collaboration. And again, this drives execution drag. We can't ship anything. Nothing fucking gets done. Now that is such a suck on your soul, not only on your piano. And the cost of rework can be up to 30% of your revenue. So this is a real big issue. Again, why we're saying this is a load-bearing beam, not only for now, but for the future. You cannot execute anything without collaborating. Three signals of weak collaboration is that everything requires multiple meetings, multiple reviews, multiple escalations, multiple negotiations. If you're just like, if it feels like multiple that didn't need to be multiple, can someone just make a GD call? That's a collaboration issue. Here's another way two teams can't align without a VP or an SVP or a big mucky muck intervening. If you have to call mom because we're not playing nice, that's an issue. Another one, decision making has more friction than momentum. Like it just feels like we're in West Side story fisticuffs all the time as opposed to moving forward. I'd be down for a dance off, though. Or like the anchor man scene with the news. But we've all been there and we see it. And again, your organization is most likely under pressure right now. You're probably feeling this, or some part of your organization's feeling this more. And when Kaka hits the van, these are the load-bearing beams that feel it, right? If execution feels like pushing a boulder uphill, your collaboration's probably broken.

SPEAKER_01

Yes, Houston, we have a collaboration problem.

SPEAKER_00

All right, I'm gonna bring us home with the last load-bearing beam, adaptability and readiness. A lot of companies say they're adaptable until something changes. And by the way, something always changes. Something always every day. We want to be clear here. Adaptability isn't about enthusiasm for change. This is so great. It's gonna take us into the future. But that's not what adaptability is. It's about capacity, it's about the ability to shift the plan, to pivot the approach, to rewrite how work happens. Not six months later, but in real time. Are you turning around a cruise ship or are you a jet ski? And what we're asking you is what's your capacity here to be a jet ski? Where we see adaptability fail the most is when leaders cling to what worked in the past. We have legacy beliefs, legacy processes, legacy leaders. Let's say you've had a five firms that have merged into one big firm, right? And everybody is doing the way the things that they used to do at their old firm. And they're being asked to come into one process, one belief, one leadership model. If you've ever experienced something like that, you've experienced multiple people's lack of adaptability, their capacity to pivot, because it is very hard to let go of what worked in the past. Most companies die because they keep doing what worked yesterday. And what got you here won't get you there. Think about a change your company delayed or resisted, and what was the cost of waiting? That's what we're trying to ask you right now. The biggest tell if you have an adaptability readiness problem is your organization keeps doing the same thing even after it stops working. Obviously, this breaks change readiness, strategic flexibility, and resilience. And this isn't necessarily just a cultural problem, especially right now. It's existential because organizations that can't adapt full-on freeze. And especially when we're talking about this AI race. We know human behavior stops us from changing, especially around this adaptability piece. And we're going into probably one of the biggest uh organizational changes that we've ever experienced in our lifetime. Don't know what else to say to that, but it's a lot. That's a huge drop. That's a huge drop. So your people are changed fatigued, but we need people to move. What it looks like new initiatives stall almost immediately. Past change initiatives failed, and people expect this one to fail too. If you ever work with execs or work with people that are like, yeah, we've tried that. It's not gonna work. Like that's an adaptability issue. The reflexes let's slow down, pause, let's study it more, let's admire the problem instead of moving forward. You can literally feel the drag that they don't want to move. Change is resisted even when the status quo is visibly failing. You have an adaptability issue. Let's talk about the impacts. It's a lot, Mel. It's a lot.

SPEAKER_01

It's a lot. So, Francesca, you and I did analysis of post-Y2K organizational collapse. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00

Very fun time.

Collaboration: Work That Moves Forward

SPEAKER_01

Or a fun time over here. And what we learned is the single greatest predictor of execution failure and PL impact is the structural health of your culture under pressure. The science behind that cascade is clear. Here's what we know from multiple research streams. These five things do not work in an isolated fashion. These variables have very directional influence. For example, politics influence fairness. Fairness influence psychological safety. Political climates predict perceived injustices, strongly predict lower psychological safety. And psychological safety impacts collaboration, which also impacts learning and information flow. Probably the most well-documented pathway of the last 20 years, collaboration impacts adaptability, and it also impacts the readiness for change. Cross-functional communication, trust are leading predictors of change readiness. These are not isolated variables. These are things that we need to pay attention to. And we've seen the patterns in the headlines. Boeing, politics, led to safety issues, led to hiding risk, led to failure. Wells Fargo, pressure in politics, impacted fairness erosion, which led to psychological safety collapse. Uber, fairness in politics, plus safety collapse, impacted integrity, and executional breakdown. Blockbuster, Nokia, Blackberry. Damn it, Blackberry. That was a fun time. Blackberry, I miss my keypad. I still miss the keypad. I like the little clicks. I still have it. I know. All right, moving on. Sorry, I get distracted pretty easily. Okay, here's what we know. If one behavior is weak, decisions get slower, talent starts to drain, risk stays hidden, silos are forming, change stalls. Got a little onesie going on. It's all right. It's not great, but it's it's you could still operate a little bit. If you have two of these issues, if these structural pieces are cracking, culture starts to turn defensive pretty quickly. If three are weak, growth is going to become impossible. If four are weak, crisis is inevitable. And if all five are present in your organization, you're getting an Enron, a Boeing, a Theranos level failure here. Let's say it in the positive. If you're at a five, if you're operating strong in all of these areas, you're scalable. If you're at four, you're strong. If you're at three, it's getting fragile. If you're at two, you're high risk. If you're at one, this is deal-threatening failure pattern. These are the leading indicators for whether your value creation plan is going to fail or succeed. This is why it's important to pay attention to these five structural behaviors. Let's give a signal, a real life use case, shall we? Ripped from the headlines. We picked Boeing because it's a story everyone recognizes. At one point, the brand line was if it's not Boeing, I'm not going.

SPEAKER_00

I love whoever you tagline, by the way. Amazing tagline. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01

Listen, that brand didn't fall apart overnight. It eroded one decision and one behavior at a time over 30 plus years. Okay. This isn't a blame session. It is a clear window into what happens when a strong culture, because I'm sorry, if you have a slogan like, if it's not Boeing, I'm not going, you have a strong brand and culture going on, meet sustained pressure to go faster and cheaper. So what you will see in Boeing is exactly what we see, Francesca and I, in scale-ups, in transformations in MA work. Strategy looks great on paper. And then the everyday human behaviors quietly pull it off course. We're going to zoom in on the five behaviors, and you're going to hear them in the Boeing story. And you're probably going to recognize them in your own world as well. And as we walk through this timeline, we want you to think about where versions of these same trade-offs might be happening or quietly playing out in your own organization. All right, Francesca, want to get into it? Yeah. Yes. Absolutely. Let's get into it. Okie dokes, some background. Boeing merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997. And this marked a major turning point in the company's culture and their management ethos. Here's what that merger actually did over time. Power shifted. What is that? Politics. Power shifted to finance and schedule over engineering. It became more about politics. Before the merger, engineers had real power within the organization. After the merger, the center of gravity moved to finance and program leaders who were rewarded for hitting earnings and delivery dates. The shift and who got listened to changed the conversation. Safety concerns started to sound like someone's being difficult. Someone doesn't want progress. And cost and speed became the winning conversation, the conversation that got rewarded. Speaking up got super risky. Psychological safety was compromised. In that new power structure, people learned quickly that pushing back on the schedule or raising quality issues could hurt them. Managers who speak up get sidelined or ignored, and that quiet message is clear. What's that message? What's that quiet message?

SPEAKER_00

We don't want to hear any risks. We don't want to hear any issues. We don't want to hear it.

Adaptability: Jet Ski Or Cruise Ship

SPEAKER_01

Yep. And then what do you do? You don't raise any more risks or any more issues. That's right. You keep your head down. You're an ostrich with your head in the sand. Do not be that person who slows the line because that does not get rewarded. Once that happens, folks, real risks start to stay hidden. Let's talk about fairness. Winners and losers started to be defined. Fairness eroded. Executives and shareholders saw the upside in stock price, buybacks. Frontline teams, again, frontline workers, those are your folks. Start elevating them. They saw more pressure, more overtime, more accountability when things went wrong. When people that were closest to the work feel like they carry all the risk and none of the reward, trust and leadership drops really fast and they start to recognize this is not a fair playing field. Teamwork splintered, collaboration breaking down. Listen, if you don't, if you're playing with politics, now you have a fairness psychological safety problem. Nobody trusts each other. And so collaboration breaks down real fast. Bowen used to be famous for their working together model. After the merger came, more with less and a huge push to outsource and spread work across sites and suppliers that splintered teams. Communication gaps grew. Solving problems started to feel like passing a hot potato around instead of getting everyone around a table. Which then led to short-term fixes. We had an adaptability problem. When pressure from competitors and investors ramped up, the company kept choosing tweaks to old platforms over investing in clean sheet designs. That's adaptability narrowed down to patch what we have rather than rethink the system that works in the short term until it really doesn't. These are not ancient history things, by the way, folks. They are long-running signals that showed up in the 737 max crisis and beyond. And when those signals go unaddressed, the bill for that eventually comes due. And for Boeing, that bill has been huge in a very public way, not just in dollars, but in people, reputation, and strategic positioning as a business. All of those things are part of the expense when you don't pay attention to these behaviors. Here's the cost that we clocked for Boeing, human cost. Number one. This is the part that never belongs in a spreadsheet. It's also the part we hate to talk about, but you can't not talk about it. Two crashes happened. Hundreds of lives were lost. Families and communities were changed forever. Thousands of employees then carry the weight of knowing that their work was connected to that outcome. And no one goes into their job thinking I might have this kind of impact. As an organization, Boeing certainly didn't go out for that. They want safety for everybody. But now they're all carrying the weight of that human cost, which is a result of a culture problem. It's one of the most extreme, but every single industry has a human cost potential to it. There's no industry without that. Just something to think about. There was a direct financial hit. The 737 max crisis alone cost Boeing tens of billions of dollars that grounded fleets, redesigned work, penalties, compensation to airlines all stack up, then layer on the legal settlements, ongoing crisis management. This is not a rounding error. It's a real balance sheet event for that company. Value and trust gone. Boeing went from the gold standard to a case study. The stock has never recovered to its pre-crisis highs. That's hundreds of billions in potential value that just evaporated. Investors now price in more risk, more volatility, less automatic trust and leadership. Regulators trusted them last. Oversight was tighter. Every new program faced more questions, more friction. That slows everything down. It's a tax that they're gonna pay on every future certification because of choices that were made years ago. And these aren't always big choices. These aren't the big C-suite choices. These are the everyday cultural micro choices that happen on single teams, in single business units across an organization. And this is why it's so important to pay attention to this as an employee, as a team leader, if you're in the C-suite, and just as an overall organization, right? The daily operational grind became super costly because every time a quality issue hits, a halt in deliveries happened, a massive reworks happened, the 787 quality problems, all of that is time, money, and talent tied up in fixing what should have been done the first time. When you start to normalize shortcuts, you eventually pay for them three times over and rework and delay. And then there's a real strategic cost. There's seeding advantages to the Airbus, direct competition. Boeing was the uncontested heavyweight for decades. Not anymore. While Boeing was patching and firefighting, Airbus kept stacking up competitive products and orders. That is a strategic cost of short-term fixes. You lose the window to build the next thing, and then a rival walks in and they take it over. So strategic cost isn't just Airbus winning orders, right? It's also who's no longer inside your walls. You start to lose your most incredible talent. Senior engineers retire early. Mid-career talent moves to competitors. New grads think twice about joining. So you lose the very people who would help you innovate your way out of the mess to begin with. The point here is not to dunk on Boeing in any way. It is to show that there is a true price of treating culture as a side project or a soft thing to have. It is not soft. It is probably one of the most critical and most important things to pay attention to because none of these costs showed up their first quarter. They compounded quietly for years within the organization.

SPEAKER_00

Boeing, obviously, an extreme case, but the signals aren't unique. The good news is it's completely fixable if you're willing to treat them as real risks versus treating them as background noise or something that's soft. So here's the deal we have five questions that every executive should ask. Bell and I do very deep cultural due diligence for companies. But if you want to know the quick and dirty, the five questions you should be asking yourself, we wanted to give you those so you can get going on this today. So here we go. Number one, are decisions made without politics? Do you have evidence of them? Number two, are the rules applied equally? If in the back of your head you're thinking, take a look at that. Number three, do people tell the truth early? If you're a manager, if you're a leader, how many times are you surprised by something happening? Do your people feel like they can come to you early and often? Number four, does work move forward or in circles? Are you having a meeting about the meeting about the meeting? And number five, do we pivot when things stop working? Part of this is are we having the courage enough to recognize and to admit that things are aren't working? And then are we uh courageous enough and adaptable enough to do something about it? These behaviors are again, they're not uh soft. They are leading indicators of human cost, of financial hit, of strategic loss. And if you're only tracking Rev, margins, EBITDA, et cetera, you're really flying half blind if you're not tracking these leading indicators. We are recommending that you treat these behaviors as risk, that you prioritize your signals and you own them. And you can design small, repeatable plays to make sure that these aren't risks anymore. Again, these are all things that are very fixable. Yeah.

How Behaviors Cascade Under Stress

SPEAKER_01

And listen, as we said, what happened with Boeing is just one example that didn't happen overnight. It's all of the micro moments that happen on every single individual team and within every one-on-one interaction. Don't try to boil the ocean. Pick one or two critical behaviors that matter most for your strategy, make them someone's job to watch and shift. If you're the leader, by the way, that's always your job. So maybe an accountability partner to help you on that. And sometimes you, if you can't influence the an entire organizational change in one of these behaviors, you can start with your own one-on-one interactions and with your own team first. If you haven't been listening for a while or you're catching up, or you're new here, we launched a newsletter. If you want one meaty insight-driven email a month where we share this kind of work, frameworks that you can implement for yourself, for your team, for your org, sign up for our newsletter over on your workfriends.com. And you can listen to the pod every Tuesday. We drop new episodes. So check it out, subscribe, leave us your feedback, and reach out to us if you're wanting to have a conversation. You can book time with us on the website or just shoot us a note at friend at your workfriends.com. Bye, friends.

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Francesca Ranieri

Co-host
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Mel Plett

Co-host