Here’s what we see all the time in our work with creative organisations: leadership teams want to shape a great culture but are unconsciously dodging the very thing that would allow that culture to thrive - making space to be challenged and influenced.

Leadership isn’t a finished product. If your founders, directors or senior team believe they’ve arrived at “correct” and everyone else just needs to catch up, culture starts to calcify. The strongest cultures are the ones where leaders are willing to actively listen and go, “Huh, hadn’t thought about it like that”, and change their stance accordingly.

It doesn’t mean giving up control or becoming a culture-by-committee free-for-all. But it does mean making room for different perspectives, asking better questions, and not going on the defensive when someone sees things differently or pushes back, respectively. In fact, a healthy challenge from your team is a sign of trust, not disloyalty.

Too often we see organisations where feedback travels one way: top-down. But if you want your people to grow, your leaders have to model growth too. That means creating mechanisms for upward feedback and more importantly, actually listening to it. Skip-level conversations, anonymous pulses, reverse mentoring, even just informal “what do you think we’re missing?” chats over coffee can all help here.

Your team is watching how leaders respond to challenge. If it’s with defensiveness, shutdown, or worse, retribution, you’ve just trained your culture to stay quiet and conform. Not exactly what you’re hoping for.

Another frequent blind spot we see? Leadership teams stuck in indecision. Going round in circles when a matter is time-sensitive isn’t neutral - it actively damages culture. When employees are waiting for clarity and getting radio silence instead, it creates frustration, disconnection, and in some cases, serious legal risk.

We’ve seen it happen over and over again. HR raises a flag, outlines the options, provides the risk lens, but leadership hesitates, debates, delays. In the meantime, people are left without answers, uncertainty spreads, and what could have been a fairly simple decision snowballs into something bigger and more damaging. Not listening to your internal people experts or external consultants because it’s not the answer you want to hear doesn’t just undermine those individuals, it undermines the whole system. And while all that internal dithering is happening, you might still be projecting to the outside world a picture of “great culture” that’s out of sync with reality. People talk. Candidates notice. Communities watch. And that disconnect chips away at your employer brand from the inside out.

If you want to build a genuinely strong culture, you have to be decisive, transparent, and aligned in both message and action, even when it’s uncomfortable. Every interaction between an employer and an employee is quietly shaping an unwritten agreement - the psychological contract. It’s made up of expectations, perceived promises, and beliefs about how things work. And it’s very sensitive to inconsistency.

If your website or job ads say, “We value every voice”, but one of your juniors gets an idea or question overlooked in a team meeting, your culture just took a hit. If someone raises a concern about wellbeing or workload and gets told they need to “power through for the sake of the project”, your values just became optional. And trust? Trust just packed its bags.

Making space for influence and challenge feeds directly into a strong psychological contract. It shows that what you say and what you do actually align. And when that alignment’s there, magic happens: retention increases, creativity flows, and people feel safe enough to push boundaries (in a good way).

So What Can You Actually Do?

Here are a few non-obvious places to start:

• Train your leaders to receive feedback, not just give it. This is a skill. It takes emotional intelligence, self-awareness, and practice.
• Model curiosity, not certainty. “Tell me more” is a powerful phrase for a reason.
• Create intentional spaces for disagreement. Build forums or rituals where healthy challenge is expected and welcomed.
• Follow up with action. It’s one thing to say you’re open to feedback. It’s another to do something about it.
• Acknowledge your blind spots publicly. Vulnerability builds trust. Try it - it works.
• Make timely decisions (even when they're tough). Stalling creates confusion and breeds mistrust. Show your people that clarity matters more than comfort.
• Use your people experts. HR and Ops teams often have the expertise and perspective to help you act quickly and with integrity. Don’t sideline them, listen and collaborate.
• Be transparent about what’s going on. You don’t have to have all the answers, but leaving people in the dark erodes trust fast. Share what you can, when you can.
• Check your external messaging against internal reality. If you’re shouting about your great culture online, make sure it’s genuinely playing out behind the scenes. Authenticity over optics, always.

Strong cultures aren’t built through slogans, what your website says, your socials or providing cool spaces. They’re built by leaders who are humble enough to be influenced, brave enough to listen, and bold enough to change. The work is continuous, sometimes messy, but always worth it.

So next time you think about improving your culture, ask: are our leaders open to being challenged? If the answer is no, that’s your starting point.



Need help turning values into real, lived culture? We support leadership teams to build strong, human-centred cultures that actually stick. Reach out to us here for a chat.