13 Questions That Illustrate Your Shop's True Culture

Your shop’s culture isn’t a mystery.  It has evolved over time into whatever form it is now.  Today, it’s answering the 13 questions I’ve detailed below.  Whether you are listening or not, that’s the real question.

One of the topics that often comes up in my role as a business coach is culture.  Owners want to know how to fix it, measure it, and define it.  But culture can’t be found in a framed poster in the break room or painted words on the shop wall.  It’s the sum of every decision you’ve made, who you add on as a team member, how they are trained, tolerated, and even rewarded over the years.

That’s the part owners don’t want to hear.  Culture doesn’t happen to you.  You build it.  On purpose or by accident, with every decision you make.

Here’s what’s at stake if you get it wrong.  People worth keeping ghost you, and leave their jobs.  Employees stop trusting their department leaders or the company as a whole.  Worse, it is when you discover a problem because a customer brings it to you.  That last one should scare you more than the other two combined.

So, let’s skip the motivational speaker version of this conversation.  Below are 13 different patterns I’ve run into over the years, working both as a leader in a shop and as a consultant.  Trust me, you won’t have all 13.  But a few of these will land.  Maybe something similar happened in your shop yesterday, or a month ago.  You’ll recognize it when you read it.

Read each of these and answer honestly.  Then do the small exercise attached to it this week.

One: How often is an employee asking you to decide something that they should own?

One of your crew walks up to you, hands you a shirt, and asks, “Hey, is this good enough to ship?”  Or some variation of that.

It may appear on the surface that they need your judgment.  But most of the time, they are simply avoiding the risk of being wrong.  How come they don’t know the answer to the question?  Why do they feel they are not empowered enough ot make the call?

This is different from a REAL question.  The kind where someone genuinely hasn’t been trained yet, or where the stakes are so high it actually needs your sign-off.  That type of question is healthy.

The kind I’m pointing out here is a symptom.  Something is amiss.  A good chunk of the time, they know the answer.  You can test this by asking, “Well, what do you think?”  Test their knowledge.  Find out why they feel they need your approval on something they should own.

This week: Someone is going to seek you out and ask you a question about their job that you know they should already own.  Your mission is to judo-flip it back to them and get their opinion on the matter.  Try to find out why they are unsure of themselves.  The phrase “Help me understand…” is a great place to start without getting the person defensive.

Two: Does the REAL conversation happen after the meeting ends?

You just ended the meeting about something important.  Your team agreed to whatever was discussed.  Lots of head nodding.  Then they walk back to their departments or workstations and say something completely different to their coworkers.  “You won’t believe what we’re doing now,” they say.

That gap between what happens in the room and your shop floor is where the truth about your company actually lives.  If you’re only hearing the version delivered inside the meeting, you’re not hearing much.

People need psychological safety to speak their minds to build a strong company culture.  This means that if people are grumbling about something and those opinions weren't present in the room, you don’t have the solid culture you thought you had.  The question you need to ask is, why are they holding back?

This week: Ask, in the room, before people leave: “What would make this hard to actually do?” or “How will this affect your job?” or some other version of those questions.  You are not looking for agreement.  You want them to tell you what’s important, and why they think that.  If no one answers, that silence tells you something too.

Three: How long does it take for bad news to reach you?

It’s all about timing here.  Great news travels to your office the same day.  A missed deadline?  One of the machines is down?  A customer complaint?  Those take three.  If you hear about it at all.

That delay isn’t an accident.  It’s a direct reflection of what happened the last time someone brought you bad news.  How did you react?  I’m sure you remember.  Did you create your own issue with your reaction?

This Week:  If something doesn’t go as expected, use a different framework for how you react to the situation.  First, stay calm and maintain a neutral tone.  Your task here is to find out what happened, identify options for resolving it, and list the best action steps to resolve it.  Ask your staff for their suggestions or opinions.  Ultimately, you want to be involved with circumstances before things become a crisis.

Four: Who’s Actually Checking The Math?

In our industry, a lot of what we do is math-based.  But in this case, I want to focus on sales.  Let’s assume your pricing matrices are solid.  (If they are not built on your actual costs, that’s another story)  I constantly see a lot of margin invisibly disappearing because someone quoted it incorrectly.  You’ve seen this.  They forgot about the art fee or rush charge, didn’t understand the number of colors in the design, underestimated the stitch count, didn’t include the rush freight to get the inventory into the building in time to meet the event date, or any other pricing that should be included. 

I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it: profit is decided when someone who works for your shop says yes to an order and enters that job into the system.  It’s not decided in production.  From an accountability standpoint, do you have processes that are built on math and are focused on the outcome you want to achieve in your business?  Are they being followed?

This week:  Do yourself a favor and come up with three or four challenging quoting examples.  Give them to everyone who quotes.  For each person taking this quiz, their quotes should match the correct way to do it for the shop.  What I’ve actually found is that, in many cases, everyone arrives at the final price differently.  How much money is that costing you in margin a year?

Five: When’s the last time your business core values actually changed a decision?

I’ve been in a lot of shops around the world.  Commonly seen are the shop's values emblazoned on the wall in the hallway, hanging from banners in production, or framed in the breakroom.  Respect.  Integrity.  Honesty.  Teamwork.  Communication.  Trust.

Those are good words.  Yours might be different.

Now think back to the last genuinely hard call you had to make in your shop regarding one of your employees.  Maybe they had performance issues.  Maybe they keep missing their sales quota.  Maybe they have some sort of soft skill issue, like tardiness.

Did any of those words show up in the discussion?  Are they present in performance reviews?  Do you celebrate people exemplifying them in real life?  

Or are they just hanging on the wall, while the real decisions are made on gut feel or some other sort of pressure?

This week:  Put your core values to the test.  Think back to how a decision about one of your employees went.  Would that decision have gone differently if your core values were actually in the room?

Six: Who owns it?

Let’s say there was some sort of mishap with a customer’s order.  The explanation you keep hearing is that several people worked on the order along the way and had the opportunity to say something or find the problem, but didn’t.  “Everyone touched it.  Nobody owned it.”

Vague ownership isn’t a communication problem.  It is an accountability problem.  It repeats until someone raises their hand and says, “It’s my fault.”

This week: Talk about who owns the results in your shop.  Everyone should understand that they are directly responsible for the story our customers tell about us.  Are we delivering a predictable outcome at a minimum?  Better, are we delivering an outcome that surprises and delights our customers?  Don’t ask if they are doing their job.  Ask if they are proud of the job they are doing.

Seven: Did your best person complain before they quit their job, or did they just stop trying?

If you have trouble with employee retention, this one is for you.  Think about someone who recently left their job, especially if they were a strong employee.  They may have complained to a coworker in the break room, but they will rarely say anything to their supervisor or the business owner.

At some point, they stopped seeing a path forward in their career with you, or they grew tired of something cultural happening in the shop.  People rarely quit over money.  They quit because the shop stopped giving them a reason to stay engaged.

By the time anyone notices, they have been working somewhere else for two weeks.

This week:  Start conducting “stay interviews” with your staff.  Ask them why they show up every day and why they like working for you.  What would make them leave?  This is the stuff you want to find out proactively.

Eight: When did an employee last tell you that you were wrong?

Can your team speak truth to power?  Feedback flows one direction in a lot of shops: from the owner down.  Never back up.

Psychological safety isn’t a soft skill.  You have to work on it.  It matters because it is the difference between finding out about a problem while it’s still small and finding out about it when it is a flaming disaster.

This week:  Ask for feedback on something.  Don’t argue or defend the decision or fill any silence yourself.  You want to hear what’s on their mind.  The goal here is to find out the other side of the coin.  As a leader, you need that.

Nine: Is there something happening in your shop that you’d only learn through the grapevine?

This is related to number 8.  Rumor fills whatever space honest communication leaves empty.  Is there information moving through your shop currently that will reach you through gossip before it reaches you through one of your leaders? That’s not a people problem.  That’s a structural problem.

You might have a better relationship with a few of the line workers than you do with your leadership team.  Maybe they have worked for you longer, or their kids are in school with yours.  The point here is that you need a strong leadership team that operates candidly and openly with you.

This week: Ask one of your supervisors, managers, or leaders what they’d never bring you unprompted by you.  Their answer tells you exactly where you stand with them on a communication level.

Ten: Is your newest hire still asking questions, or did they stop being curious around week six?

New hires show up curious and wanting to learn.  Both parties have expectations about success, how the training should go, and what is meaningful.  Are you both in alignment?  Is the experience based on a clearly defined outcome, with measurable results, dates, and engagement?

Or does the excitement wane after the training turns out to be a rushed ten-minute afterthought?  When the questions stop and the spark in their eyes diminishes, so does the sense that this new job will lead somewhere, that there is mastery to build or a reason to stick around beyond a paycheck.

This week:  Do an audit of your onboarding and training process.  Interview the last set of new hires and get feedback from them on how they learned their roles, how your company set them up for success, and what they see as a career path in your shop.  If you currently have new hires, make sure you do this early, before the questions stop.

Eleven: Do your staff nod their head in agreement, then do something completely different?

You’ve seen this one, I’ll bet.  Nodding in agreement in a meeting costs nothing.  It’s meant to end the discussion quickly because they would rather be anywhere than listening to you.

Actually changing the behavior costs effort.  Sometimes more than someone is willing to give.  The gap is exactly where good plans go to die.  The chasm here is where your shop culture is raw and exposed.

If you study change management, there is an acronym that fits: ADKAR.  Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability, and Reinforcement.  The desire part is where mediocre employees won’t level up and get better because they are not willing to do the work.  People have to want to change.  It is that willingness that gets in the way of a lot of efforts to make things better.

This week:  When you are discussing some sort of improvement with an employee, ask questions that are focused on their emotions around the change you want them to make.  How do they feel about it?  What are they afraid of?  How can you support or incentivize them?

Twelve: Who gets praised, and who gets blamed?

Culture in a business is defined by the people in it.  Is your shop handling staff evenly?  Effort gets applauded in a lot of shops.  Someone who stays late to make sure an order is finished and shipped gets a thank you and an attaboy.  But someone who flags a real problem correctly and before it gets expensive somehow gets treated like they caused the problem instead.

This is a surefire recipe for training your staff to stop telling you the truth.

This week: Take a mental assessment of how you treat and talk to your staff.  Be cognizant and present with your team, and understand that whatever comes out of your mouth and even your body language is turned up to volume 15 on a volume 10 knob just because you are the boss.  What you say and how you act can influence future interactions.  Be aware.

Thirteen: Is there something everyone knows but is unwilling to say out loud?

In your shop today, what is the elephant in the room that none of your staff wants to talk about?

Is your biggest customer a jerk?  Are your team members worried about AI?  Did you just hire your twenty-year-old nephew to be a manager?

What is the thing nobody wants to talk about with you?  (But you can bet they are all talking about it at home at the dinner table)

This week:  If you really want to know, ask one trusted person, directly and privately, what that thing is.  Then, actually do something with the answer.

The Mirror, Not The Report Card

Whatever your customer eventually experiences, a late order, a mispriced job, or an awkward phone interaction may have started with one of these 13 patterns first.

The good news is that most of the 13 questions above can be traced back to one or two root patterns in your shop.  They don’t all occur at once. And they are fixable if you work on them.

The bad news is that you have some of these floating around in your shop right now.  This list isn’t a report card on your staff.  It is a mirror image of you.  On the standards you’ve set.  The behavior you’ve tolerated.  And whatever you have rewarded without meaning to.

Did any of these hit hard and feel familiar?  Don’t try to fix it alone in your office.  Bring one of these up to your team this week.  Culture problems get diagnosed solo.  They only get fixed with other people working on them.

Here’s the biggest question: Which one of these is costing you the most right now, and how long have you actually known about it?

If one of these questions is sitting with you and you want help figuring out where to start, let's talk it through.