Organisations don’t have a culture problem. They have a tolerance problem.”
Behaviour Spreads. You Don’t Manage It.
Organisations still believe that if you tell people how to behave, they will. They won’t.
Write the policy. Run the training. Send the all-staff email.
Somewhere in HR, this is called a strategy.
Everywhere else, it quietly doesn’t work.
Because behaviour doesn’t spread through instruction. It spreads through contact.
As Leandro Herrero puts it: “ behaviour is social before it is rational. Collective before it is individual. Contagious before it is controlled.”
You don’t manage behaviour. You catch it.
This isn’t an HR problem
We treat behaviour like a compliance issue and hand it to HR. Write the policy. Run the training. Hope for the best.
As if a workshop can compete with what people see rewarded every day.
It can’t.
People learn how to behave by watching:
That’s the real rulebook. And everyone knows it.
Most organisations don’t have a culture problem. They have a tolerance problem.
The behaviour we pretend not to see
Ask people what frustrates them at work and the answers are familiar.
Teams don’t listen. Information is hoarded. Functions mistrust each other. “Us and them” is the default.
We call this “culture” as if naming it explains it.
It doesn’t.
It just describes behaviour that is widely understood, quietly tolerated and occasionally rewarded.
Every organisation has two lists: what it says it won’t tolerate — and what it clearly does.
Guess which one shapes behaviour.
Social contagion at work
Behaviour spreads the way colds do. You don’t attend a briefing on how to catch one. You pick it up from the people around you.
If protecting your patch gets you ahead, people will protect their patch. If speaking up carries a risk, people will stay quiet. If collaboration slows you down, people will go it alone.
You don’t get the behaviour you expect. You get the behaviour that works — and then spreads.
Some behaviours are super-spreaders. Bullying that delivers results. Silence that avoids risk. Cynicism that sounds like experience.
Good behaviour spreads more slowly. It needs backing. It needs protection. It needs to be seen working.
Most organisations underestimate this. They try to roll out behaviour change as if it were software.
It isn’t.
It’s closer to an infection.
The middle matters more than the message.
One review of the Metropolitan Police Service made a blunt point: frontline culture reflects the sergeant.
Good sergeants, good officers. Poor sergeants, poor behaviour.
Not the policy. Not the training. The sergeant.
Most organisations have their own version:
Team leaders. Supervisors. Middle managers. The people everyone watches before deciding how to behave.
Senior leaders talk about culture. Frontline staff live it. But the middle layer spreads it.
If that layer is inconsistent or quietly tolerating the wrong things, nothing else sticks.
You can have the best values statement in the world. It won’t survive contact with a poor manager.
Most culture change programmes fail in the gap between what leaders say and what managers do.
Why telling fails
Organisations act as if behaviour is a rational choice made after reading guidance.
It’s a social response to what works.
If the system rewards individual wins over collective effort, you will get silos. If difficult behaviour delivers results, you will get more of it. If no one challenges poor conduct, it becomes normal.
You can’t instruct your way out of a culture you are still reinforcing every day.
What actually works
Culture changes locally or not at all.
If your middle layer is wrong, everything else is theatre.
What happens after the meeting matters more than what’s said in it — who is backed, who is challenged, who is ignored.
Keep promoting brilliant individuals who undermine others and you are actively spreading the problem.
People copy people like them. If the informal influencers aren’t modelling the right behaviour, don’t expect others to.
One tolerated exception can infect the whole system.
A better way to frame it
This isn’t about better policies or more training.
It’s about understanding how behaviour actually spreads.
Think less programme and more proximity. Less communication plan and more who people watch. Less HR initiative, more social dynamics.
Because culture doesn’t change when people are told what to do.
It changes when different behaviour becomes normal — and starts to spread.
Organisations don’t struggle because people don’t understand the rules. They struggle because people understand exactly what works.
And like any contagion, that behaviour spreads.
Whether you like it or not.
