Workplace culture and human resources consultant Natalie Lewis explains why an organisation’s culture can make or break the long-term business strategy.
“[You] can have the best strategy in the world. You could have a solid five-year plan, and everything looks bulletproof on paper. The numbers all add up, and everything is solid.” Lewis said. “But if the culture of your team doesn’t support that strategy, then it’ll never get delivered.”
Lewis explains how to ensure that employees are a good culture fit and offers strategies to better communicate company expectations to employees.
Lewis also sets out some of the expectations that can make middle manager’s roles more challenging, what it means to be a self-aware leader, and simple steps for improving feedback processes.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- Traits that separate high-performing teams from poor-performing ones.
- A fast-track route for culture-fit hiring.
- Why leaders need to build an intentional culture early.
- Some ways that psychological safety can be destroyed at work.
- Expectations that can make managers’ roles more challenging.
- Tips for becoming a better communicator.
Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: Hi, listeners. Welcome to the FM podcast. We’re recording live from UK and Ireland ENGAGE. This is your host, Steph Brown. I’m catching up with Natalie Lewis after her session, “Building high performing teams: Why most teams fail and how to fix it”. Natalie is a workplace culture and human resources consultant for Dynamic HR. And today, we’ll be diving into the secrets behind high performance, steps to improve work culture, and the balancing act of middle management.
Natalie, welcome. I suppose having a performance culture can be a difficult concept to define depending on the needs of the organisation, who you speak to in the organisation, too. But are there any consistent hallmarks you have observed in organisations with high-performing teams?
Natalie Lewis: Yeah, so the work that I do, I tend to be brought into poor-performing teams. Generally, because they need my help. I think, if I look at those, then I would see a lack of consistency, a lack of clarity, no expectations, no standards, poor performance throughout people. If we turn that around and look at what makes a high-performing team high performing, then we’re looking at clarity, so everyone knows their roles, their expectations, and the outcomes they need to achieve. There are no grey areas.
We’re looking at standards being consistent, so we’re looking at standards and feedback that are fair and applied to everybody. We’re looking at trust, so that’s a really big one. People feel like they can speak up and challenge ideas and admit mistakes without repercussions. And then recognition, effort is noticed; it’s rewarded, and behaviours are aligned with the company values that are celebrated, and then the values are lived and not just some words on the wall.
Brown: Thanks, Natalie. You mentioned in the session that a lot of the issues with performance and culture come from leadership. How do leaders go about making the necessary changes to improve both their culture and their performance?
Lewis: I think self-awareness and awareness of what’s happening around them is the first place to start. Because, I think, all too often, leaders that I work with are running around doing their business- as-usual stuff, they’re doing [the] day-to-day and they’re focused on what the company’s making and how many customers they’ve got coming in and just delivery of work, and they don’t stop and look around and they don’t take that helicopter view and look and think, “Actually, is this working as well or efficiently or effectively as it could do?”
I think that’s the first starting point, really, is to actually just stop; take five minutes and look and assess what they’ve got and what’s happening and who they’ve got working for them. Once you’ve established what’s going on, it’s then looking at what we can do next. Again, the first place I always start is, what are the company values? Leaders without company values are about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Set your company values and there’s plenty of exercises that you can do around that. But actually, set them, live them — or choose ones that you can actually live. Once you’ve done that, then you can actually start to look at what behaviours do those values drive?
We’re looking at behaviours that are values in action, basically. Once you can start to identify the types of behaviours you want to see in your business, then you can reverse engineer and start to encourage those behaviours. Probably more importantly or equally as important is having really good company expectations and standards and outcomes. Without your people and you knowing where you’re trying to go and what you’re trying to achieve, you’re going to drift, basically. You need to understand where you’re trying to go. What are the standards that you expect? What are your expectations?
What does good look like? — is how I put it to clients. Go away and define what does good look like in your industry and also your organisation. That’s in terms of targets, outcomes, measures, but also in terms of behaviours and what you want to see from people and write them down.
Brown: I find it interesting that you mentioned in your session that it’s easier to train people not performing as well as they should just now, if they’re a good culture fit. How can organisations better assess whether an employee is a good culture fit to avoid measuring potential strictly by key performance indicators?
Lewis: I’m a big believer that if someone is a good performer but doesn’t show the values and behaviours that you expect in your business, then they should not be in your business.
Salespeople are the worst for this. You can have some really good, high-performing salespeople that are bringing tons of money into your business, but they treat other people like dirt and they don’t show the behaviours and values that you would expect in your business.
There are always people in businesses like that, and those are the toxic ones. Because yes, they’re high performing and they’re doing really well for the business. But if they can’t treat others nicely or they show poor behaviours, then ultimately that’s going to create toxicity. Because you end up rewarding them, yes, for the good work, but you are also then rewarding them for the poor behaviours, and then that encourages more poor behaviour in other people.
Best way to evaluate a person’s culture fit is to, first of all, look at how well they’re performing, so that’s a given. Let’s assume that you’ve got all the right standards, expectations, and measures and whatnot in your business, so you’re going to measure them against the performance. Then you’re going to look at, are they showing the values and the behaviours that you need in your business and do they align with the business’s?
Now, one of the fast-track routes to that other than observing them day-in-day-out for months is psychometric testing. Psychometric testing, depending on the ones you use, will measure lots of different attributes and characteristics in a person, including certain values. And then, you’ll be able to use those to assess whether they are showing the correct values for your business.
Brown: Going back to the performance culture element. You mentioned in your session the importance of having an intentional culture in terms of driving value and promoting engagement across teams. What is an intentional culture and how can companies build one?
Lewis: More often than not, businesses are just built and come from nowhere. Generally, someone has an idea, they’re like, “Let’s make a business out of this.” Like I did. I can’t be an employee ever again — I made a really bad employee, right. So, I set up a business. More often than not, that’s what happens and then that business owner will take on a couple of employees and everything’s rosy and then the business grows.
Once you get past about five or six employees, if you don’t start to set an intentional culture; know exactly what you want your culture to be like and the type of behaviours and standards that you want your people to show and abide by, then things can fall by the wayside very quickly. That’s what I mean by setting an intentional culture.
It’s intentionally thinking, what type of culture do I want in my business? What does that mean for the behaviours and the standards and how I want my employees to show up? Then, reinforcing that through performance feedback processes. Maybe it might be psychometric testing; making sure you got the right people in and rewarding the good behaviours that you want to see.
If you don’t do that, you end up with a culture and performance that is basically the lowest performing person, or the poorest behaviour is what sets the standard and that’s not what you want in your business, right?
Brown: No, definitely not.
There may be occasions, particularly if there are cultural problems where employees find it difficult to ask for help and provide honest feedback as well. How can leaders ensure that they’re creating a psychologically safe environment that supports those things?
Lewis: That’s a really interesting one because psychological safety is massive, and that can only come from the leaders.
Some of the ways that psychological safety is destroyed is, for example, when you have people who raise questions, or raise concerns, or issues, or perhaps make a mistake and then those people get reprimanded, or not listened to, or questions and issues are glossed over and not rectified. That’s when you start to break down trust or mutual trust and confidence, basically, which is part of the psychological contract. Then that leads to people not wanting to talk about mistakes or own up to any mistakes or not put any ideas across the table, and that can happen very quickly.
In order to reverse that, it can be really hard, especially if it was the leaders that are still in the business who created it in the first place. I guess it’s about self-awareness and a lot of reflection from the leaders to admit their mistakes and start actually modelling the behaviours that they want to see from their employees. Going from there and trying to rebuild that trust, which is a long and arduous journey, to be quite frank. It’s much easier to start it from the beginning.
Leaders, if you are moving into a new business or you’re starting a new department or whatever, it’s great to start it from the beginning and make sure that everyone understands that they can be honest and open and transparent about issues, ask questions, and if they’ve made a mistake, then to own up to it and we’ll just sort it together rather than somebody being reprimanded.
Brown: Thank you, Natalie. You cited findings from Gallup in 2023 that found that 76% of UK workers were not engaged at work.
A 2025 survey report from Gallup found that staff in middle management roles are becoming increasingly disengaged, I suppose. They’re feeling the strain from dealing with conflicting expectations from the executives above them and the employees that they manage.
What can middle managers do when it’s becoming increasingly difficult to please everybody?
Lewis: That’s really interesting and I think this is a reflection in society, to be honest. We have got multiple generations that are all wanting different things, all want to work in different ways and show up in different ways, and it can be really hard to make everything gel. It’s very difficult for leaders, especially leaders who perhaps have got a foot in both camps where they probably had their managers in the early days in their career path were probably command-and-control managers.
So, people who were like, “Here’s a task. Go away, do it, come back to me,” and were probably more inclined to be micromanagers. But they’re being encouraged and asked to be the complete opposite. Bear in mind that human behaviour often mirrors the way that we’ve been treated. For example, I was treated badly by managers. I was micromanaged more often than not. I had the old school command- and-control managers, and I’ve had to be very intentional in the way that I show up and lead.
I’ve done a lot of self-development, and I encourage managers to do that. Because employees these days certainly do not want to be micromanaged. They want loads of flexibility. They want, for example, the dreaded, “I want to work from home”, as managers are like, how do I deal with that? It is difficult. I think we have to acknowledge that middle managers have a really difficult job to do here because it is trying to gel everybody together. There’s a lot of expectations from younger employees on their managers as well because there’s a manager who follows processes and just manages people. Then you’ve got the leadership side of management where those managers need to inspire and motivate and coach and that’s a really difficult thing.
Anyone can follow a process and manage another individual or a team. But to lead, inspire, coach and all the rest of it is more difficult and it takes a lot of self-reflection. I would always encourage businesses to invest in their middle management in coaching and give them time to develop. But also, I think we all have to understand that different generations are not always going to want the same things and are not always going to get on, basically, so we have to provide for that.
Brown: You listed six reasons why teams fail: unclear roles and expectations, company values don’t exist or ignored; as we’ve covered, inconsistent leadership and processes. Those things, I suppose, in some ways, can be due to very poor communication throughout the organisation.
In your experience, what soft skills are leaders lacking that is leading to these breakdowns in communication that they really need to develop?
Lewis: Communication is a big one. First of all, I don’t think generally leaders and managers are given the tools to lead and manage correctly. I think, first of all, the soft skills that you need is definitely around the communication side of things. Let’s set up a leader for success by having boundaries, expectations, standards, and then it’s about encouraging that person to communicate effectively. You’re going to have a lot of difficult conversations, you’re going to have some nice conversations, and it’s about really knowing how to get the best out of your team and the people that you work with.
There’s a couple of things. I think it’s really important that anyone in a management or a leadership role goes and get some coaching, as in, how to coach. A; coaching for themselves but B; I think it’s about teaching people how to coach and ask the right questions. That, I see as a soft skill is being able to ask the right questions and to coach others. A fast-track to good communication would be reading the book, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. Because that’s a really good book that helps managers to understand the best way and the best form to communicate: being open, transparent, and with clarity.
Being clear with their communication expectations. For example, if you’re trying to praise someone, you can say, “That was great work, well done.” Or you can say, “Hey, that was great work. I really liked how you delivered that project and the conclusion to that project was really good. I liked how you pulled out some stats.” There’s a way of being just, “Hey, well done.” Or you can actually say, “Well done,” and also pull out the bits that that person did really well so that you can reinforce those things and positively praise them for those things, and hopefully they will do those things again.
Brown: Obviously, when we think about negative feedback, people will be very specific, but not necessarily when it’s positive.
Lewis: Absolutely. But actually, I see that quite often negative feedback is not given back correctly either. They’ll be like, “That project wasn’t done very well.” Well, what was wrong with that project? Or, “You didn’t communicate clearly on that.” OK, where was it that communication got lost?
It’s very important to be specific one way or another, whether it’s positive or from a negative point of view, if you do have to give negative feedback. It’s about being specific in what you’ve seen, then also giving actions of how you want to see it done again next time.
Brown: That sounds like great advice for anyone listening.
In closing, is there anything you would like to leave listeners with; anything that you would encourage them to take away?
Lewis: Where I would leave this would be is, I’m pretty certain most people will have heard the phrase, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. It gets used a lot, but it’s really important. Because you can have the best strategy in the world. You could have a solid five-year plan, and everything looks bulletproof on paper. The numbers all add up, and everything is solid. But if the culture of your team doesn’t support that strategy, then it’ll never get delivered.
I’m a big believer that strategy lives on paper and culture lives in people. I think it’s really important to say — this will bring everything together, really. Culture is being created in your business every single day, whether you’re intentional about it or not. Every decision you make, every behaviour you tolerate, every standard you set or let slide, that is your culture. And over time, it will either drive performance or it will quietly destroy it.
Brown: Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Natalie.
Lewis: Thank you very much.
