Directors and board members
How should a board hold management accountable for culture?
Ask different questions. Most boards receive culture reporting in the form of engagement scores, turnover rates, and training completion percentages. These are useful, but they’re lagging indicators of culture — they tell you what happened, not what’s happening. Boards that hold management genuinely accountable for culture get underneath those numbers.
Framework: Brian Hartzer’s Leadership Star · Practices: Care, Context, Celebrate
Require the team-level data, not just the aggregate
An organisation-wide engagement score that’s moved one or two points tells you very little. The same data broken down by division, business unit, and manager cohort tells you a great deal. Which parts of the business have consistently lower engagement? Which managers have teams whose numbers are moving in the wrong direction? If management presents only aggregates, the board should ask for the distribution.
Ask about the decisions management didn’t make
Culture shows up most clearly in the decisions that trade short-term outcomes for long-term values — or vice versa. When a high-performing individual behaves in ways that are inconsistent with the organisation’s values, what happens? If boards only ask about the outcomes (revenue, market share, earnings), they create an incentive structure that treats culture as secondary. Asking directly about specific people decisions signals otherwise.
Look at what’s been tolerated
The most reliable indicator of an organisation’s culture is what it tolerates. Boards should ask management directly: what behaviours have we had to address this year, and what did we do about them? That question, asked regularly and honestly, creates accountability for the things that don’t make it into formal reporting.
Use what you see in the boardroom as data
The behaviour of the management team in front of the board is itself cultural evidence. Do people speak candidly or carefully? Do junior members of the team feel able to contribute, or does it all flow through the CEO? Is bad news shared directly or managed? Boards have more observational data than they typically use.
Where judgment matters
Culture governance is genuinely difficult. Boards can’t manage culture — that’s management’s job. But they can set expectations, ask hard questions, and hold management accountable for the signals they send. The board that treats culture as soft will eventually discover it’s the hardest problem they face.
Does your board ask about specific people decisions, or only about aggregate cultural metrics — and which of those would you find harder to answer honestly?
Books for your team
Special prices are available for bulk and organisational orders. Tell us the quantity, the delivery country and when you need them, and we will confirm the options.