For leaders and managers
Culture Is What Management Tolerates
A Workplace Culture Book for Leaders and Managers on Accountability, Standards and the Behaviour You Walk Past
The room where the real rules get made, usually by saying nothing.
Hazel Crowe
About the book
In her first week on the company side, Hazel Crowe and the operations director both walked past a fire door propped open with a pallet.
The team leader standing next to it was on his phone. The director nodded to him and walked on. Two hours after they'd set off, back in his office, he told her the site's biggest problem was standards. Everybody on that bay had watched them both walk past.
Culture Is What Management Tolerates is a workplace culture book for leaders and managers about the gap between the standard you state and the one you enforce. It shows how good organisations drift, through the high performer nobody will touch and the reward that teaches the wrong thing, and what a manager can do about the gap.
Every one of its 20 chapters has a tool, shown filled in for an example team, and ends on one thing to do this week.
How it fits the set
Five Ways of Looking at a Person is the difficult conversation itself. This book is the organisation that decides whether the conversation ever happens. Nobody's Fool and Articulate take the rooms where you are being sold to and where you have to speak up.
It is one of four books in Across the Table, and each one reads on its own.
Who it's for
- Founders and owners
- Directors and heads of department
- New managers, the newly promoted, and anyone who has just inherited a team
- Anyone whose same problem keeps coming back, or whose team is about to merge or grow
What's inside
- 20 chapters in 4 parts: Discovering the Real Culture, How Good Organisations Drift, Building a Culture That Works and Repairing Cultural Drift
- One tool in every chapter, filled in for an example team, including the Culture Reality Check, the Tolerance Gap Scorecard and the Decision Rights Map
- The Four-Week Norm Reset and the 90-Day Culture Repair, for a team that has drifted
- A 40-statement culture diagnostic across 8 areas, from standards to psychological safety
- 8 manager conversation scripts, a 90-minute team workshop and 20 blank templates
- 9 diagrams, and Notes and Sources by chapter
“I didn't design anybody's culture. I sat in the rooms where it came due, and I can tell you what had been tolerated on the way.”
Questions readers ask
- What do I do about a high performer who behaves badly?
- Chapter 8, The Brilliant Jerk Exception, weighs what one person delivers against what the team pays for it. Appendix B has a script for the conversation.
- How do I fix a toxic culture in my team?
- Start with the behaviour you walk past. The Four-Week Norm Reset walks one team through changing one norm; the 90-Day Culture Repair is for a whole team that has drifted.
- Does it cover psychological safety?
- Yes. Chapter 20 names each study and how far it has held up, and Chapter 6 shows why people keep quiet. The Response Scale in Chapter 12 keeps standards proportionate: clarify, support, coach, correct, warn, remove.
- Is this legal or HR advice?
- No. Where a step turns formal, the book names the shape of the process and tells you to take advice from HR or a qualified adviser.
- Does it apply outside Great Britain?
- Its process notes name the Acas Code for Great Britain and send readers elsewhere to local advice.
Free to print
The 20 tools from this book
The pages as they appear in the book, blank, with a PDF for each. Part of The Hazel Crowe Toolkit.
- The Culture Reality Check
- The Shadow Rulebook Audit
- The Tolerance Gap Scorecard
- The Culture Debt Register
- The High Performer Tax Audit
- The Raise-It-Early Sheet
- The Contribution Versus Visibility Matrix
- The Total Contribution Assessment
- The Incentive Integrity Audit
- The Decision and Commitment Log
- The Team Standards Charter
- The Response Scale
- The Performance Conversation Planner
- The Recognition Design Checklist
- The Decision Rights Map
- The Culture Operating Rhythm
- The Four-Week Reset Worksheet
- The 90-Day Culture Repair Plan
- The Culture Integration Checklist
- The Leadership Self-Assessment
Where it comes from
Culture Is What Management Tolerates is written from the rooms where culture came due: the appeals, the hearings and the drawers of leavers' forms, and what had been tolerated on the way there.
Every person and conversation in it is a composite, built so that nobody can be recognised. About Hazel Crowe
