Culture and Trust

One of the highest-density themes in the archive — 199 episodes carry segments tagged culture/trust/values/belonging. It is the connective tissue beneath engagement, leadership, hiring and wellbeing.

What's been said

• Disengaged employees are the "fires." Leanne frames the cost of unchecked disengagement as people who stop following processes, go vocal-negative on change, and actively sabotage the work of engaged colleagues — "they're the people that cause the fires" .
• "Avoiding blame" is the hard one to make commercial. Al's practical challenge on the six characteristics of a positive culture: how do you forgive mistakes and hold people to account at the same time? The tension between a no-blame culture and commercial accountability recurs throughout the show .
• Culture, bad managers and the 3 R's. Culture is inseparable from management behaviour — a Silo 3 theme — and from Oblong's core "3 R's" framework (a recurring house concept) .
• Trust is the soil for everything else. Culture pages repeatedly link to psychological safety and leadership — culture is what tells people how to behave when the leader isn't in the room (see leadership and management).