Culture is what people do when nobody is presenting. If your people do not talk to each other with honesty, you do not have a culture problem you can solve with another offsite slogan.
Talk is the culture
Meetings, corridors, Slack, the car park after. Those are the rooms. Connection is whether someone can say “this is not working” without being punished for it.
Three practices this week
- Open with a human check, not an agenda dump. One genuine question. Then listen.
- Name the tension in the room. Unnamed tension becomes politics.
- Close with a next conversation, not a vibe. Who talks to whom by when?
Use them with your executive team, your frontline, or a school staff meeting. The room changes. The product is the same: people who can still talk when it is hard.