Your policies are not the problem, your culture is

**Malcolm Kambanzera **

Organisations keep trying to regulate problems they refuse to confront

There is a particular kind of email that usually arrives after something goes wrong in an organisation: “Management has noted with concern…”

What follows is normally a reminder of an existing policy, a new procedure, another approval requirement or, if the incident was serious enough, a committee tasked with reviewing the policy.

And the interesting part? Everyone receiving the email usually knows exactly who caused the problem. Yet instead of dealing with that person, we regulate everybody.

An employee repeatedly arrives late. Send an attendance circular to the entire organisation. Someone abuses a company vehicle. Introduce a stricter vehicle policy. A manager consistently fails to submit reports. Create another reporting template.

It makes me wonder whether some organisations actually have a policy problem at all.Perhaps they have a courage problem.

The policy is easier than the conversation

Policies are comfortable because they are impersonal. A manager does not have to sit across from an underperforming employee and say, “Your performance is not good enough.”

Instead, HR can circulate the performance management policy.

A senior executive does not have to confront another executive who continuously bypasses procurement procedures. The organisation can simply “strengthen procurement controls.”

Nobody has to have a difficult conversation. And that is where the problem begins.

Policies are supposed to establish standards. They cannot enforce those standards by themselves. You can have an excellent disciplinary policy, but it means very little if managers are unwilling to discipline employees.

You can have an impressive performance management system, but if every employee receives a favourable rating because supervisors avoid uncomfortable conversations, the system becomes theatre. The document exists. The behaviour remains.

When we regulate everyone because of someone

There is also something fundamentally inefficient about responding to individual misconduct with organisation-wide regulation.

Imagine 100 employees complying perfectly well with an existing procedure.

Five repeatedly disregard it. Instead of managing the five, another control is imposed on all 105.

Now everyone must complete an additional form, obtain another signature or submit another report. The organisation calls this improved control.

The 100 employees who were already doing the right thing experience it as bureaucracy. Do this repeatedly and something strange happens: the organisation becomes more controlled but less effective.

Every new rule may make perfect sense when viewed individually. Collectively, however, those rules can create an environment where people spend increasing amounts of time proving that they followed processes rather than producing results.

Sometimes the system is the problem

But we should also be careful not to assume that every organisational problem is caused by difficult employees. Sometimes people are responding exactly as the system teaches them to.

Management complains that employees do not take initiative, but every mistake is punished.

Executives complain that decisions take too long, but routine matters require five approvals.The Board complains that management is not decisive, but repeatedly overturns delegated management decisions.

Leadership complains that departments operate in silos, but performance incentives reward individual departmental results rather than collaboration.

Then another policy is introduced to encourage initiative, faster decision-making or teamwork. The contradiction is obvious.

You cannot regulate people into behaving in ways your organisational culture punishes.

What happens around here?

Culture is sometimes discussed as though it is something abstract: values printed on walls, employee engagement exercises and motivational speeches.

I think culture is much simpler. Culture is what employees learn happens around here. What happens when somebody makes a mistake? What happens when a high performer challenges a bad decision?

What happens when a senior executive breaks a rule? What happens when someone takes responsibility for failure? What happens when an employee raises an uncomfortable issue?

The answers to those questions tell you far more about an organisation’s culture than its values statement ever will.

If policies say one thing but leadership behaviour consistently says another, employees eventually learn which one matters. Usually, it is not the policy.

Governance cannot be reduced to documents

This matters for Boards too. A Board may proudly approve governance frameworks, codes of conduct, delegations and policies.

Those are important. But approving documents is the easy part of governance. The harder question is whether the Board and management are willing to enforce the standards they approve, including when doing so is inconvenient.

Governance fails when rules apply strictly downward but become negotiable upward.Nothing destroys organisational culture faster than employees watching leadership demand compliance with standards that powerful people are permitted to ignore.At that point, the problem is no longer policy. It is credibility.

Before writing another policy

Policies matter. Procedures matter. Controls matter. Organisations cannot function without them. But they cannot substitute for leadership.So before developing another policy, perhaps Boards and management should ask a more uncomfortable question:

Is there genuinely a gap in our rules, or are we avoiding a conversation we already know we need to have?

Sometimes the solution is not another committee, circular, procedure or reporting template.Sometimes somebody needs to confront poor performance.

Sometimes authority needs to be delegated properly. Sometimes an unnecessary process needs to be removed. Sometimes leadership itself needs to change its behaviour.

And sometimes the organisation does not need another policy. It needs someone willing to manage.

Author: Malcolm Kambanzera is a Senior Consultant at Straton Oak Legal Consultants, he holds a Bachelor of Laws (Honours), and is a scholar of Management Strategy.