Cultural change: scary and lonely

Cultural change is the stated objective of many law firm, yet remains elusive. We give ourselves the best chance of actually achieving it by first recognising how hard it is, writes Samuel J Woff

Cultural change is often the coveted holy grail of organisational or professional change. So often the conclusion is that all our woes will be immediately fixed by the panacea of lawyers ceasing their bad behaviour, en mass, and adopting different habits.

This is true and admirable enough. However, the often missed corollary, and the reason cultural change is so elusive, is that changing group behaviour requires persistence and courage, qualities which are far rarer than the ability to identify that change is warranted.

A walk on the beach ruined

An incident from own past taught me just how difficult changing behaviours (and hence culture) can be.

During one of the rolling pandemic lockdowns in Melbourne in 2021, my wife and I were taking a walk down at the beach. Strict restrictions were in place at the time prohibiting social gathering, and the news had been filled in recent days with back to back coverage (and associated outrage) at an illegal engagement party held in flagrant defiance of the rules.

It was in this environment that we came across a group of perhaps 20 teenage boys playing rugby on the beach. An unremarkable and even heart-warming event in normal times, a quintessential Australian summer activity, but these times were anything but ordinary. We walked past in some discomfort, painfully aware of the risky and illegal nature of this activity (exacerbated by the fact they were playing full contact).

What to do? We initially passed without comment, but my conscience wouldn’t rest and a few hundred metres down the beach I turned to my wife and said “I have to say something. Those boys are endangering themselves and others, and setting a bad example.” Was I scared? Sure was! I was just a member of the public, without any authority whatsoever to direct other’s behaviour. And teenage boys! I finally understood My Chemical Romance’s famous sentiment that “All teenagers scare the livin’ s#%t out of me”. But I steeled myself and decided I had to do what I thought was right. So I walked the furlong or so of sand back to the illegal junior rugby world cup and — stomach flip-flopping — indicated a time-out. I said: “I don’t want to be difficult, but you need to stop playing. We are in a lockdown, and as hard as it is, you have to follow the rules. We all do.”

I was legitimately concerned about coping some flak, and my expectation wasn’t disappointed. I was the subject of pushback. “You can’t tell us what to do. Go away. We’re kids, we don’t get COVID. Leave us alone”. Eventually I was compelled to pull out the big guns, and said “If you don’t stop, I will call the police” and I pulled out my phone to show I was serious. This caused a general panic and the players scattered, though not without a parting shot: “Paedophile”, I heard slung at me by a departing fly-half.

I stood there in a now abandoned patch of beach, feeling pretty grim. That stung. Had I done the right thing? I looked around, searchingly, at some of the other nearby adults on the beach for a look or smile to show that they supported me, and that I was in the right. This time the expectation was disappointed. Nothing. Blank stares from behind sunglasses, where a stare was even provided at all, leaving me with the uncomfortable feeling that perhaps I really had come across as a child sex predator.

Whose job?

That episode has had a lasting impact on me, and taught me several things about why cultural change is so difficult to achieve.

First, it showed me the burden of enforcing the norms of behaviour necessary for cultural change often falls on ordinary people, like me. Cultural change is a ground up, grass roots effort. It’s not just the leader’s job, it’s all of our jobs. The Premier, Minster of Health and police (despite my threat) were not at the beach. It was me. If behaviour was to change, I was the only one who could do it. A distant press conference wouldn’t do it.

Because the leader (and their enforcers) cannot be omnipresent the drive to change behaviour only gathers momentum when individual members of a community take responsibility and, overtly or covertly, police the behaviour of others to pull them into compliance. Culture may flow from the top, in the form of example setting, but cultural change must be driven by the members of the “proletariat”. It must be bottom up, not top down, and driven by the masses

Other examples of group enforcement readily come to mind. For instance, an organisation that has a stated “open door” culture will require the “troops” to latch onto any instance of a closed door and let the perpetrator know, with the appropriately calibrated amount of subtle disapprobation, that such behaviour is not done around here. It’s not a job for the CEO, who cannot possibly observe all deviant behaviours. It’s a job for everyone. Or a culture of “leaving at five” must not allow instances of late night work to pass uncommented on by co-workers. And a culture of “collaboration” is only developed and maintained when solo operators are bought back into compliance by the gentle, yet firm, peer pressure of the herd. When it’s just the CEO enforcing these dictates, is not culture, it’s discipline. It is only peer pressure that drives true cultural change (rather than temporarily coerced behaviour through fear of punishment). And peer pressure can only come from the masses, our peers.

Courage

There was also a second lesson for me from the beach walk ruined. And that was a realisation that it takes significant courage for a member of the “troops” to do what’s necessary to drive cultural change, because enforcing a cultural norm can come with significant personal risk.

Very few people like to be told what to do, even if (and sometimes especially if) they are in the wrong. The unfair abuse that parking inspectors get, or the slurs I endured on the beach, are the common responses to people being told “you have done the wrong thing”. Very rarely does a perpetrator say: “Wow. You’re right. I was doing the wrong thing. Thank you for helping me see the error in my ways. I will modify my behaviour forthwith.” No, instead people that enforce the rules, or the cultural norms the organisation is trying to build, are often met with anger and hostility.

This is hard enough to endure when it emanates from a stranger. The difficulty is only compounded of course when you need to tell a colleague, with whom ongoing cordial relations are important, or — heaven forbid — a boss, that they have done the wrong thing. A boss holds a significant degree of power over your career, especially in a hierarchical profession like law where your advancement is rarely determined on pure objective merit, but rather a proxy for objective merit, that being what your superiors think of you.

This means you potentially place your career in jeopardy by correcting your boss. You hurt their ego, and the resentment they feel can stymie your progression in subtle, undetectable ways. Hence the common lament of a victim of workplace impropriety: “I wanted to say something about my boss, but I feared the ramifications it could have on my career.” We have all heard that sentiment expressed before, and one feels for the person in that dilemma.

This we must recognise the difficulty involved in driving change. In order for the “troops” to stand up for the right thing to do, and provide the necessary enforcement mechanism which calls out bad behaviour and drives cultural change, a significant amount of personal risk must be accepted. I might be subjected to an angry response. At the very least, I might annoy a colleague, and at worst, I may scuttle my chance at advancement by off-siding my boss. In the moment, therefore, it can seem significantly easier to simply let the behaviour slide. This avoids conflict in the short term. But long term, allowing undesired behaviour to continue unabated through fear of backlash simply frustrates the stated, but ultimately quixotic, goal of changing a culture.

Persistence

The other significant challenge in driving culture change, even if the barrier of courage can be surmounted, is one of persistence.

It is not enough to enforce the rules once. Illegal beach rugby is not stamped out by Samuel Woff, private citizen, asking a single group to stop, on one day only. Instead, it is only in the consistent, firm pressure of ongoing enforcement that behaviours start to modify wholesale. When seatbelts were first made mandatory in Australia, there was a significant amount of non-compliance. However, with persistent and firm enforcement of the rules, eventually — over a course of years — the message collectively sunk in, and now it is almost automatic to put a seatbelt on when entering a car in Australia, and as unthinkable as leaving the house without pants not to. Without a seatbelt or pants, in both instances you feel naked.

But as anyone who has had to do something hard on a persistent basis will tell you: it’s very difficult. Often times, with great focus and commitment to doing the right thing, people can start doing something, or do it once. The reformed unhealthy person can usually manage to get to the gym once, and eat a salad with protein for dinner that night. But it is human nature to revert to the mean, and these acts of discipline regularly do not last. It’s old ground to point to the minutely small half-life of New Year’s Resolution, so I will not press the analogy further. But the point remains valid. It’s hard to persist with things that require determination. Being courageous seems to zap a large amount of our disciplinary energy, so it’s common not to last endure.

But of course, as with the latest diet and exercise plan, nothing happens when you only do it once. Your body is not transformed by doing one spin class, and culture change is not ushered in by someone saying “please leave your door open, it’s kind of how we do things here” once. And here in lies, to my observation, the nub of the challenge. We can, by sticking to our convictions and having courage, probably manage to call out bad behaviour on a single occasion. But when the consequence of doing so is anger, (sometimes) abuse and (perceivably) a stunted career, our appetite for doing so on a constant and ongoing basis likely quickly satiated.

I learned this painfully for myself. Did I speak up again the next time I saw defiance of the lockdown rules? No, I was done. Not only did I not enjoy putting myself in a position of conflict, the abuse stung. My willingness to endure it again was entirely undercut. So even if I saw breaches of the rules, I looked the other way, so as to have to avoid the unpleasantness of doing what I knew to be right.

Coincidentally, as I am writing this on the train, a group of disruptive young men, swearing and horse-playing, just alighted. While they were on board I flirted with the idea of asking them to tone it down. But I was outnumbered four to one, and decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. My persistence-endurance was entirely depleted.

Loneliness

So we may accept that correcting behaviour to drive cultural change is not easy. Nor is it a one-time activity. It is an on-gong, never ending process of gentle persuasion, or harder enforcement, one person at a time. It of course requires courage. And persistence. But further compounding the difficulty, and the final (but arguably most critical) barrier to achieving cultural change, is that it can be very lonely.

The loneliness and sense of isolations manifests itself in the following way. Most likely, despite the courage and persistence you demonstrate, no one will notice your individual efforts. Most likely no one will come over to you and say “good job”. As I found, blank sunglass hidden stares will be your only reward.

In the packed train just now, I wasn’t going to hold my breath that someone would come to my aid if required, or thank me for handling the situation.

Therefore, those taking on the burden of changing culture must be prepared for what is a solitary challenge. There will be times when you will be left standing on an empty patch of sand, abuse ringing in your ears, and be disappointed in the expectation of moral support from other adults as you look around for it.

No wonder true cultural change is so rare.

Yet it is only by the slow accumulation of all of your (and others) small, unnoticed but immensely important efforts in persuasion and enforcement, eventually a ‘culture’ emerges, which we sustain by the same ongoing effort. Is this easy? Absolutely not. Is this glamourous? No. Is it crucially important? Undoubtedly, yes. For unless we can overcome the feeling of futility and loneliness as we battle against the forces of entrenched bad behaviour, and courageously persist regardless, cultural change will simply be an aspirational goal beyond our reach.

Our challenge

We readily identify the solution to a given problem in the legal profession is to promote “cultural change”. Examples are legion:

• “Cultural … change is as vital as legislative reform to combat sexual harassment…”

• “To encourage cultural change it may be important for lawyers, judges, court officers and Juries Victoria staff to have access to disability awareness training.”

• Such unethical, now unlawful, behaviour will only continue within this closed system, unless a broader cultural change is made.

It may well be that these sentiments are correct, and cultural change is the panacea for these various maladies in the profession. It might even be obviously so.

But as David Maister says “What is obvious is not always easy”. As it is here with changing a culture. It requires a significantly large percentage of a given population to (1) have courage (2) persist and (3) often endure the challenge of altering behaviour one person, one incident at a time, without support. Occasionally we may manage to do one or two of these things, once. But as ambitious lawyers, and indeed human beings, it is very difficult to (for instance) place your career in jeopardy by persistently correcting your boss when their behaviour falls below and minimum standard, and without any recognition or support in the important role you have played.

I’m no paradigm of virtue here. I have been guilty of censoring myself despite unacceptable behaviour from my boss (and others) in the name of not rocking the boat.

There is therefore often a significant gap between what we know to be right, and we actually do, when it comes to driving cultural change. Our problem is not one of understanding, but implementation. And ultimately this means that we do not solve the problem of a poor culture by identifying that it needs to be changed (obvious), or giving a speech imploring us to change it (ineffective). The work is not done by identifying that cultural change is necessary. Instead, this is the point where the work starts.

Culture changes slowly, with hard word, and due to hundred and thousand of unsung courageous people individually and persistently accepting the personal risk involved in correcting another.

And unless we do more to encourage, promote, support and reward this behaviour, our rallying calls to “change the culture” will ultimately lead nowhere. We will simply have to repeat identical catch-cries year on year. For instance, it was said in 1998:

• The problem is not with technology- today's technology could be used to produce a much more efficient and accessible legal system The real issue is one of cultural change .. How do we convince the generation of current business and legal leaders that technology is here to stay, without threatening them?

And then, with chilling similarity, 18 years later:

• Cultural change is the greatest challenge law firms face in keeping up with new technology, named by just under half (49%) of the law firm leaders surveyed

Repeating the same conversation ad nausea for two decades later about the need to change culture is akin to Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill for entirety.

If we are to get real, and actually drive a change in culture, enough with the speeches and admonishments. We must actually recognise it’s hard, and do all we can to support those troops on the frontline of the culture war.

A simple “good job, playing rugby was wrong, and telling them would have been difficult” from a fellow beachgoer would have made all the difference for me.

Samuel J Woff is a commercial construction lawyer and construction litigation specialist, speaker and published author. He has broad experience across a range of construction litigation matters including domestic and international arbitrations, litigation in the Victorian Supreme Court and security of payment adjudications.

Copyright 2023 Samuel J Woff