Culture Club #8 — Red Flags That Your Culture’s Off Track

Today we’re talking about the red flags that let you know your business culture is the root cause of your growing pains, not the result.

🏝️ We’re taking a break to recharge our batteries so no highlights this week.

Signs your business culture is the cause of your problems

You can smell it before you can name it.

The awkward tension in meetings. The silence on Slack. The leadership team acting more like referees than coaches. You tell yourself it’s just a rough patch, but deep down you know: something’s off.

As businesses grow, culture often slips through the cracks. It’s not that anyone planned it that way. But without conscious effort, what once felt energising becomes fragmented. Culture starts working against the business, not for it.

Here are the red flags we see most often:

🚩Teams working in isolation, guarding their patch.

🚩Blame passed like a hot potato.

🚩Decision-making bottlenecked at the top.

🚩Leaders stuck in constant problem-solving mode.

🚩Goals missed with no clear root cause.

🚩High staff turnover and low morale.

🚩Spiralling costs to hit basic targets.

These aren’t random symptoms. They’re indicators that culture isn’t just slipping—it’s malfunctioning.

And the answer isn’t another round of OKRs or a shinier marketing plan. It’s a shift in how you manage your people. Not through more meetings or more metrics, but through a cultural operating system that underpins how work gets done.

Introducing CORE OS™

Clarity of vision and purpose.

Operating principles that shape how people behave and make decisions.

Rituals that keep the rhythm of the business steady and human.

Evidence that shows whether it’s working—and how to course correct if it’s not.

Culture isn’t the icing. It’s the recipe.

Ignore it, and you’ll feel the cracks before you see them. Codify it, and you’ll have a system that scales.

We’ve built a new Culture Scorecard based on our CORE Operating System. It’s a quick, powerful way to assess the health of your business culture.

Take the Scorecard now →

See you same time next week.

Carl.