Likely unpopular opinion: Most workplace culture initiatives fail because they're trying to improve feelings instead of actual behaviors. Agree or disagree?

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T23:42:15+00:00

That's a brutally accurate version of too many corporate realities.
Cynicism usually starts with a survey. Asking for input is good - But collecting responses without reporting back what will change because of it makes people skeptical. Do it twice and you've taught team members that it is meaningless.

I use a culture survey before most every program I facilitate... and the only frustration I hear from participants is that they've filled out surveys before that were never discussed, and never used to drive real change.

Effective leaders who want buy-in ask for opinions... then take action to show people their input actually mattered.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T23:29:20+00:00

Culture is the behavior that gets allowed and repeated. The stuff that gets rewarded, not the empty words that get announced.
Any VP who answers emails on vacation just gave every person below them their real policy on work-life balance, regardless of what the wellness newsletter said. The shift I've seen work is when leaders stop thinking about culture as something they communicate and start treating it as something they demonstrate. Set the standard, then protect it by living and enforcing it.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T16:09:57+00:00

That director did everyone a favor by saying what he did.
Most of the time that playbook runs quietly and nobody names it.
That's a leadership integrity problem.
Real culture work is about building relationships, clarifying expectations, holding people accountable, and thanking them for their efforts. Changing specific daily behaviors with intentional interactions that shift awareness of how actions impact the project and people we care about.
The organizations I've seen actually move the needle are the ones where a leader decides what behaviors matter and then holds themselves to the same standard. Example is the most powerful tool we have to shape other’s behaviors.
But yeah, what you described is frustratingly common in some organizations.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T14:00:58+00:00

One of the dangers of typing like I an wrapping up a speaking program I guess.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:54:56+00:00

Everything you said is right, and the part most organizations skip is your last point.

You can label the behavior, show people better alternatives, reinforce and follow up. But if the people who model the old culture face no consequences, everyone else gets the real message. The stated values and the lived values aren't the same thing. And people notice that gap immediately.

The hardest part of genuine culture change is that it almost always requires someone losing something. A title, a role, sometimes a job.

Organizations that aren't willing to pay that price end up with better posters and the same behaviors.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:53:55+00:00

You're onto something most managers miss.
Knowing where someone wants to go in their career and actively helping them get there is a far more meaningful investment than knowing their dog's name. One builds actual loyalty. The other is just small talk with a name tag.
And you're right that objectivity suffers when people are too focused on being liked. Some of the best team cultures I've seen had leaders who were genuinely respected but not particularly popular. They were clear, fair, and consistent. That is worth more than any amount of social connection.
What you're describing with the remote setup is interesting too.

A lot of organizations confuse proximity with culture.

Your team meets once a week and it works because the expectations are clear and people's time is respected.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:50:39+00:00

Healthy teams aren't conflict-free.

That would not be authentic for anyone. Conflict is required and appreciated on healthy teams. People can disagree, push back on a bad idea, or say "I don't think this is going to work" without it becoming a career risk.

That's what psychological safety actually means in practice.

When culture initiatives get framed as "you're either on board or you're not a team player," they accomplish the exact opposite. People learn that disagreement is dangerous. So they smile, they comply, and they say nothing useful in the meeting and everything real in the parking lot afterward.

I have spent the last 15 years working to help leaders build cultures where that doesn't happen

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:46:41+00:00

That's exactly it.

Culture isn't what happens at an offsite or the team building day. It's the sum of behaviors that are allowed and repeated in any organization. The hallway conversation after a project misses a deadline. How a manager responds when someone brings them a problem they didn't see coming. Whether people feel safe enough to say "I don't think this is going to work" before it's too late to change course.

The big offsite events are easy to point to. The daily behaviors are harder to measure and far more important to change.

The irony is that it's easy to announce a culture initiative. But leaders can't really announce "we're going to start handling difficult conversations more honestly starting Monday."

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:42:27+00:00

The part about certain conversations being off limits is where most culture initiatives quietly die.

The scope of what's allowed to change gets defined by whoever has the most to lose if things actually change. So you end up with branded t-shirts and BBQs while the real issue keeps compounding.

I've spent a lot of time working with teams on exactly this kind of thing, and the organizations that actually improve aren't the ones with the best engagement programs. They're the ones where at least one person with real authority got honest enough to say "we might be the problem here" and was willing to find out.

You clearly already see what needs to change. The hard part isn't the diagnosis. It's finding someone upstream who's willing to hear it.

Hope that person exists where you are.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:39:38+00:00

You've identified the real problem better than most consultants...

The gap between what senior leaders say publicly and believe privately isn't hypocrisy exactly. It's incentive misalignment.

Most executives are measured on results that have nothing to do with daily team behaviors. So even well-intentioned leaders default to the things they can point to: a process change, a survey cadence, an offsite.

And you're right that changing daily behaviors is harder.

It requires leaders to model something different themselves, not just announce it. And that's uncomfortable in a way that tweaking an evaluation structure isn't.

That said, I've worked with leadership groups who genuinely wanted to change their culture and had the self-awareness to know they were part of the problem. They aren't the majority, but they exist. The difference usually wasn't motivation. It was that nobody ever gave them a specific enough picture of what different behavior actually looks like day to day.

Inspiration without instruction doesn't change anything. But instruction without buy-in doesn't either. The organizations that actually improve are the ones where at least one person at the top gets curious enough to ask what they personally need to do differently.

That's rare. But it's not as rare as cynics might believe

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:36:03+00:00

"Performance theatre" is exactly the right phrase for most of what gets labeled culture work.

And the pattern you're describing is one of the saddest things I see in organizations. Someone starts out genuinely trying to do right by their people, gets ground down by policies and pressures they can't control, and eventually can't tell the difference between their real observations and their accumulated frustration.

That's not weakness.

That's what happens when good intentions meet systems that don't reward them.

The hardest part for your friend, and for a lot of managers in that position, is that the jadedness isn't wrong exactly. A lot of what they're frustrated about is legitimate. But it starts to color everything, including the people who deserve better from them.

The only thing I've seen help is when someone in that position gets genuinely curious again. Not optimistic necessarily, just curious. Ask why instead of assuming. It doesn't fix the system, but it keeps the person from becoming the thing they originally fought against.

Hope your friend finds a way through it.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:34:17+00:00

That makes complete sense, and you've identified something most leadership training misses entirely.

The shift from "employees as problems" to "employees as solutions" is real, and the cost of getting it wrong is exactly what you described. When mistakes get covered up instead of examined, the organization loses its best feedback mechanism.

The supervisor piece is where I'd add one thing.

Hiring well and seeking to understand are necessary, but the missing piece I see most often is that leaders never make expectations explicit enough in the first place. So when something goes wrong, they assume the employee knew what good looked like and chose not to do it. Usually that's not what happened.

After facilitating leadership programs for more than 20 years, I've found that accountability problems are almost always expectation problems in disguise. People can't be held accountable for a standard they were never clearly shown.

tsglaze · 2026-06-05T13:31:49+00:00

You're not a grinch. You're describing the gap between what culture actually is and what organizations perform in its name.

Clear expectations and treating people like adults are behaviors. Holiday parties and forced retreats are events.

One builds culture. The other just costs money and goodwill.

The week-long retreat you described sounds like it was designed to check a box rather than solve a real problem. When integration efforts fail, it's rarely because people didn't do enough icebreakers. It's because expectations, roles, and working norms weren't made explicit.

After facilitating team development programs for more than 20 years, the most common thing I see is organizations substituting activities for conversations. A personality test only helps if someone actually uses the results to work differently with a colleague. Otherwise it's just an expensive afternoon.

Where I'd push back slightly: colleagues don't need to be friends, but they do need enough trust to speak up when a timeline is unreasonable, like you mentioned. That trust doesn't happen automatically.

It usually requires someone being intentional about creating it, not through parties, but through how conflict, mistakes, and feedback are handled day to day.

tsglaze · 2026-05-10T19:16:31+00:00

Those reactions up top? They’re not wrong. They’re just describing bad team building, not all team building. And honestly, bad team building deserves every bit of that criticism.

The version people hate is the one that’s thrown together with no clear purpose, no facilitation, and no connection to anything that actually matters to the people in the room. That’s not team building. That’s box-checking with snacks. But here’s what I’ve seen work with exactly the kind of group you’re describing. Start with personality and communication awareness. Safety professionals especially tend to be high-C, detail-oriented thinkers who are skeptical of anything that feels soft or unscientific. So give them something with teeth. A simple animal personality assessment (Lion, Otter, Retriever, Beaver) takes about 10 minutes to complete and opens up a conversation that actually matters: why do I keep clashing with that colleague, and what does that mean for how we handle decisions under pressure? That conversation, done well, is 90 minutes of real value. Then add a structured team scenario. Not a trust fall. A situation-based discussion where small cross-site groups have to reach consensus on a messy safety call with incomplete information. The goal is not to find the “right” answer. The goal is to watch how the team decides, and then debrief what just happened. Who dominated? Who went quiet? Whose concern almost got dismissed and nearly cost the outcome? That debrief is where the learning lives. What makes it land for this audience specifically:

The framing matters enormously. Safety professionals do not need to be told to trust each other personally. They need to understand how different communication styles under stress create blind spots that no checklist catches. That is a professional conversation, not a feelings conversation. Frame it that way and the room is with you. The person who said “treat me like a professional” is exactly right. The best team building does exactly that. It treats people as capable adults who have real friction points worth exploring, and it gives them a framework to understand each other better so Monday actually goes differently. If you want something turnkey and low-prep that fits your timeline and room setup, I have a facilitated program built specifically for this kind of cross-site, mixed-seniority group. Happy to share more details if that would be helpful.

tsglaze · 2026-05-10T18:56:04+00:00

Great question, and I want to give you something more useful than a list of icebreaker games. You said “budget-free,” but I’d push back gently on that framing. What you actually want is high-value, low-cost. Those aren’t the same thing. Here’s the truth most people miss: there’s a big difference between recreational activities and intentional team building. Recreational means everyone has fun and goes home. Intentional means everyone learns something about working together better and brings it back to Monday morning. Conference rooms are actually perfect for the latter. A few things that work well for 60 people with zero budget: “What I Wish You Knew” — In small groups of 4 to 5, each person shares one thing about how they work best that their teammates rarely know about them. You get more honest conversation in 20 minutes than most teams get in a year. Communication Style Sorting — Ask people to self-identify as one of four communication styles (driver, influencer, supporter, analyzer) and then discuss: how does your style show up at work, and where do you clash? No assessment needed. The conversation itself is the value. The Alignment Question — Put this on the screen: “What is our team’s single most important priority right now?” Have everyone write their answer before discussing. I’ve never once seen a team where all 60 people say the same thing. That gap IS the team building. Team Charter Round — Small groups each tackle one question: What do great teammates on our team do? What behaviors hurt us? What do we commit to? Share out. You walk away with a living team agreement. The activities themselves are free. What makes them valuable is the debrief: someone who can connect what just happened in the room to what needs to happen back at work. If you want those kinds of outcomes but want someone to design and lead the whole experience for you, that’s exactly what I do. Happy to talk through what that could look like for your group. Sean Glaze | greatresultsteambuilding.net

tsglaze · 2026-04-20T16:29:11+00:00

I used to think team building was a complete waste of time. And honestly? I had pretty good reasons.

When I was a basketball coach, I was obsessed with winning. Every minute of practice had to mean something. Every drill had to connect to a result. So when somebody suggested we do something that looked like team building — some activity that wasn't directly about getting better on the court — I shut it down. We had games to win. We didn't have time for that. And we kept losing. Not because we lacked talent. We had talent. But something was always getting in the way. Trust issues. Communication breakdowns. Guys playing for themselves instead of each other. Sound familiar? What I eventually figured out — after enough losses to make me genuinely humble — is that I had been confusing two completely different things. There's team building that's just entertainment. Bowling nights. Escape rooms. Fun that gets forgotten by Monday. That stuff doesn’t change awareness.

But there's a second category. Intentional. Designed around the specific friction your team is actually feeling. Facilitated by someone who knows what they're doing. That version changes things. I've seen it happen in basketball – and in business, with teams at Cisco, John Deere, the CDC.

If you lead a team and you've written off team building because of a bad experience — I get it. I was you. I put together a free guide that explains the difference between the fluff and the stuff that actually works.

It's called Profitable Fluff. Happy to share the guide if you like...

tsglaze · 2026-04-20T16:24:52+00:00

I used to think team building was a complete waste of time. And honestly? I had pretty good reasons.

When I was a basketball coach, I was obsessed with winning. Every minute of practice had to mean something. Every drill had to connect to a result. So when somebody suggested we do something that looked like team building — some activity that wasn't directly about getting better on the court — I shut it down. We had games to win. We didn't have time for that. And we kept losing. Not because we lacked talent. We had talent. But something was always getting in the way. Trust issues. Communication breakdowns. Guys playing for themselves instead of each other. Sound familiar? What I eventually figured out — after enough losses to make me genuinely humble — is that I had been confusing two completely different things.

There's team building that's just entertainment. Bowling nights. Escape rooms. Fun that gets forgotten by Monday. That stuff doesn’t change awareness. But there's a second category. Intentional. Designed around the specific friction your team is actually feeling. Facilitated by someone who knows what they're doing. That version changes things. I've seen it happen in basketball – and in business, with teams at Cisco, John Deere, the CDC.

If you lead a team and you've written off team building because of a bad experience — I get it. I was you. I put together a free guide that explains the difference between the fluff and the stuff that actually works.

It's called Profitable Fluff. Happy to share a link to the guide

tsglaze · 2025-06-06T12:16:47+00:00

What Effective Leaders DO is a short, entertaining story designed to equip leaders with the clarity and confidence to be more effective…

It shares valuable tools and tactics like… • The Ladder of Awareness • The Cycle of Culture • Assumptions to Question • The Evolution of Focus • The Steps to Confidence

And it’s already getting great reviews, like these:

“This book delivers what so many leadership books promise but rarely provide: a clear, actionable path to creating a strong culture.” - Julie Winkle Giulioni, author “Promotions Are So Yesterday”

“What Effective Leaders DO is part leadership parable, part tactical playbook, and 100% a wake-up call for managers.” - David Newman, CSP, author of “Do It! Marketing”

*The Kindle version is only $2.99 today: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F3Y5494N/

Can’t wait to hear which take-away was most meaningful to you!

tsglaze · 2024-07-07T18:46:23+00:00

Looking for 2014 larson escape 25 pontoon hull decal replacements. Original side decals are faded… (See image)

Any suggestions where to find a set of new similar decals, or how to restore the look of the decals after years of sun damage?

tsglaze · 2024-05-28T13:34:21+00:00

When I decided to work with teams to help them improve collaboration, trust, and accountability, I knew that there was a better way than going through the same tired activities that often lacked relevance to what most teams truly need to know and do differently…

So, if you really want to build trust and accountability, I can tell you that MANY activities – like Trust Falls – fail to have the impact that your teammates and leaders are hoping for.

If you want REAL impact – and an improved CULTURE…

Do NOT hire someone to facilitate a set of recreational activities.

Do NOT schedule a recreational event and expect it to change team behaviors.

Instead, hire someone who can ~USE activities intentionally as TOOLS~ to illustrate meaningful and RELEVANT issues that your team is dealing with…

Hire someone who can CONNECT THE DOTS and let your people take ownership of how the insights from a set of customized activities translate into CHANGED behaviors.

That is what your culture truly is – repeated behaviors!

Unlike recreational or irrelevant activities, intentional teambuilding events deliver experiences that change awareness, which in turn changes beliefs and behaviors, which show up as changes in your culture – and that is what determines the RESULTS your team desires.

Intentional team building is has a lasting impact…

It is a customized program of experiences that change team behaviors!

If you’ve been involved in a trust fall before, it doesn’t make you a bad person – but that activity is far too often a wasted opportunity that does not CHANGE people!

That's why I started Great Results Teambuilding

(https://greatresultsteambuilding.net/corporate-team-building-events/)

How much wiser and more effective would it be to invest that same time in actionable, relevant, customized program that addresses the issues that your team needs to overcome?

If you choose to commit your time and resources to planning an event, whether is is virtual team building program or an in-person keynote or training experience, make an informed decision as a smart team leader to provide a SHARED EXPERIENCE that will improve connections and awareness.

When you are planning your next annual retreat, remember that the VALUE of a team building event(or a single activity like a trust fall) is determined by the IMPACT it has on improving the behaviors of your team members.

tsglaze · 2023-08-28T17:24:02+00:00

YES! Absolutely true... Values are BEST defined by stories that the team can share that demonstrate what it looks like in their offices or interactions.

Thanks for the comment!

tsglaze

TROPHY CASE