If this Is culture, why does it feel like survival? - Battle report

Months of looking for a job finally paid off. You got the position you wanted. Happiness and uncertainty are equally present as you approach the workplace. Basic introductions go fairly quickly, and you start your iPad training. Boring but necessary. Someone was meant to check up on you, but no one did. After a few hours, once you are done, the induction begins. The show begins. The person explaining everyday tasks and work culture could not care less — actually, that is their own word. You start to make excuses for them. Everyone has worse days, you think. The show must go on, and it does. The person responsible for your introduction starts to delineate the working conditions and culture within the organisation. This place is highly dysfunctional — I paraphrase to keep this report professional. That is the first sentence they say. This cannot be real. It has to be a joke, right?

3:30 a.m. You wake up to go to work. Another sickness, and you feel responsible for covering. One team, one dream — you reinforce yourself during the walk in. On the way, you receive a text message from your colleague: they are not coming in either, due to sickness. Two down. 4:40 a.m. This morning deserves a strong coffee. After a quick coffee, you start to work. Although not strictly in line with Health and Safety regulations, you reckon you can do something on your own for the next hour, until another colleague comes in to help. You run back and forth to ensure that as much as possible is ready. At 6 a.m., your colleague arrives — now it will be easier. Quick change of plans. This colleague is also sick; they only came in to tell you in person, because you did not answer the phone in the last hour while juggling hot trays of food. Anything could have happened. Two hours in, three people down. The next person arrives in another hour and a half. After this shift, you receive a disciplinary for not being able to finish production on time. The message is clear — you failed.

I witnessed both scenarios. Both happened in massive, well-established organisations — the kind that send you posters repeating, almost like a mantra, how important working culture is, or that if you feel bullied you can safely reach out for help. Is it organisational sarcasm? Is it only out of necessity? Where is the famous organisational culture?

The (harsh) reality

The academic research is unanimous. Edmondson's (1999) work on psychological safety, and Brown et al.'s (2005) framework of ethical leadership, both clearly identify these as factors that enable people — and consequently organisations — to perform better. So where is the problem?

Theory says one thing. The shop floor says another. After more than a decade working in UK hospitality — from line-level positions to multi-site management — I learned that the gap between what an organisation prints on its values poster and what it does at 4:40 a.m. on a Tuesday is often a chasm wide enough to lose people in. Now, working out of Warsaw, I can confirm something I quietly hoped not to find: the gap is not British. It is not Polish. It is structural, and it travels.

Edmondson (1999) defined psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. Brown et al. (2005) defined ethical leadership as the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships, and the promotion of such conduct through two-way communication. Twenty-plus years later, both constructs are in every reputable leadership textbook. They are also in many corporate "values decks." But values decks are not lived ethics. Treviño et al. (2003) sharpened the distinction: there is the moral person (what someone believes and how they behave) and the moral manager (how they communicate and reinforce those standards in others). An organisation that prints posters about respect while disciplining the person who came in alone at 4 a.m. is failing on both counts. The moral person is absent; the moral manager is a mascot.

A Stoic approach?

This is where Stoic thought stops being an aesthetic and becomes useful. Marcus Aurelius (ca. 180/2002) reminded himself, repeatedly, that he was not responsible for the conduct of others, only for his own conduct in response. Epictetus (ca. 125/2008) drew the dichotomy of control as a hard line: some things are up to us, most are not. Seneca (ca. 65/2004) wrote that what matters is not how long, but how well, we live — including how we choose to work. None of these men would have been surprised by what I witnessed. Disappointed, but not surprised. The Stoic position is brutally clear: an institution cannot be ethical if the individuals inside it are not. Culture is not something a marketing team prints; it is something each person, in each small decision, builds or erodes. Schein (2010) said it in modern language — culture is created and recreated by leaders' day-to-day behaviour under stress: what they reward, what they punish, what they walk past. A poster cannot do this. A policy cannot do this. Only a person can.

The doubt

This is where the self-doubt arrives, and I want to be honest about it. When you decide, as I did, that the response to witnessing this twice — and many more times than twice — is to leave employment and try to build something of your own, you face a quiet but persistent question: what makes you think you can do better? You watched people far more experienced than you accept these conditions as normal. You watched HR departments triple in size while the canteen got smaller. You watched policies written by lawyers replace conversations once held by managers. And then you tell yourself that a one-person consultancy, operating out of Warsaw, mostly through cold emails and door-to-door visits, is going to change anything. There are mornings when that sounds courageous, and mornings when it sounds delusional. Often it is the same morning.

From one side, what I observed should make the work easier: the problem is real, widespread, and increasingly expensive for the businesses that ignore it. From another side, it is sobering. The disciplinary letter for the employee who showed up when no one else did. How rarely the person who carries the shift is the person the organisation thanks. I had hoped it was a localised failure of a particular sector. It is not. The market does not always punish dysfunction quickly; sometimes it rewards it for years before the bill arrives. That is the sad part. Not dramatic — sad, in the specific sense that the pattern is older than I am and still here.

It is not personal

The cost of the gap is not only individual suffering, although there is plenty of that. The cost is societal. A workplace is where most adults spend the majority of their conscious hours. If those hours are governed by hypocrisy — by values printed but not practised — that hypocrisy becomes the default grammar through which people experience institutions: their employer, their bank, their government. Cynicism is contagious, and it scales. When a chef on a 4 a.m. shift is disciplined for failing alone what three people could not have done together, the lesson is not really about production targets. The lesson is that what is said and what is done have nothing to do with each other. People take that lesson home. They vote with it. They raise children with it.

The only response

So why do it anyway? Because the alternative — staying inside and accepting the grammar — is, by my own standards, a worse failure than trying and being wrong. Marcus Aurelius (ca. 180/2002) wrote that the impediment to action advances action; what stands in the way becomes the way. I do not romanticise this. There are weeks when the inbox is silent, the doors do not open, and the self-doubt is the loudest voice in the room. But the doubt is data, not verdict. It tells me I am taking the work seriously. It does not tell me to stop. Epictetus (ca. 125/2008) put it more bluntly: first say to yourself what you would be; then do what you have to do.

The famous organisational culture is not famous because it is rare in posters. It is famous because it is rare in practice. Edmondson's psychological safety and Brown et al.'s ethical leadership are not luxuries that well-resourced firms install when convenient. They are the minimum conditions under which human beings can do good work over time without being quietly broken. Any organisation, and any individual leading within one, that treats them as optional is making a decision. The Stoics would say the decision is theirs. The research would say it compounds, for better or worse, into the culture they deserve.

I started my consultancy because I no longer wanted to be a witness. I am not certain I will succeed in the way I hope. I am certain that the attempt is the only honest response to what I saw. The show, in the end, does not have to go on the way it has been going because for the past twenty years it has been going that way. Someone has to refuse the script. It might as well be us.

References

Aurelius, M. (2002). Meditations (G. Hays, Trans.). Modern Library. (Original work published ca. 180 CE)

Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K., & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2005.03.002

Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Epictetus. (2008). Discourses and selected writings (R. Dobbin, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work composed ca. 125 CE)

Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

Seneca, L. A. (2004). Letters from a Stoic (R. Campbell, Trans.). Penguin Classics. (Original work composed ca. 65 CE)

Treviño, L. K., Brown, M., & Hartman, L. P. (2003). A qualitative investigation of perceived executive ethical leadership: Perceptions from inside and outside the executive suite. Human Relations, 56(1), 5–37. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726703056001448

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