Every organization has two cultures.
The first is ‘intended culture’. It is created in boardrooms and strategic planning sessions to reflect leaders’ aspirations and expectations.
The second is ‘experienced culture’. Employees encounter it every day. Customers find the culture through interactions that no policy can prescribe. Experienced culture exists in the decisions people make and the actions they take when no one is reminding them what the intended culture is. The challenge for leaders is ensuring that their expectations become the experienced culture.
Why? Culture is merely an expectation until evidence proves it has become an experience.
That single idea changes how leaders should think about culture. Instead of merely setting expectations, leaders need to ask: how can we gather the evidence necessary to know if the culture executives intend aligns with the culture employees and those we serve experience?
Evidence is culture made visible.
Evidence is found in the behaviors people repeat when values influence actions, and in the consistency of decisions made across departments, shifts, and locations. Put simply: evidence is culture made visible. But collecting evidence requires leaders to conduct inspections of their culture.
That is why executive inspection deserves a broader definition than it often receives. Inspection is frequently associated with compliance, audits, or the search for deficiencies. Those are important, particularly in healthcare where quality and safety demand constant attention. Yet executive inspection serves a different purpose.
Executive inspection is the disciplined pursuit of evidence that confirms an organization’s intended culture has become its experienced culture.
Leadership teams invest extraordinary amounts of time defining culture. Executive teams develop strategic plans, establish core values, and craft mission statements. They introduce new initiatives with the belief that, once clearly articulated, those will become part of the organizational fabric.
However, executives cannot rely solely on reports, dashboards, surveys, or financial performance to determine whether intended culture matches experienced culture. The outcomes those tools measure rarely explain whether culture is taking root. That calls for clear evidence.
Where evidence exists
Leaders must proactively seek out the evidence they need to inform strategic plans. That means stepping out of conference rooms, spending time where work is taking place, asking thoughtful questions, and paying attention to witness whether expectations have become habits. The objective is not to catch people doing something wrong but, instead, to determine whether doing the right thing is woven into the culture.
Without evidence, culture becomes an assumption. So leaders carry the obligation to continuously seek evidence that those principles are being lived. Years ago, in fact, I was introduced to a phrase that has remained with me throughout my career: Inspect what you expect.
Like many enduring ideas, its meaning is often reduced to a simple management practice. But I have come to believe it describes something much more significant: leadership’s responsibility is to conduct the inspection necessary to close the gaps between intended culture and experienced culture.
Why is that accountability so important? Organizations rarely lose their way because leaders intended the wrong culture. More often, the gap between intended culture and experienced culture widens gradually until leadership begins measuring success by the strength of its intentions, rather than the effectiveness of its execution.
Dignity does not leave through the back door.
