Before you commission the next culture programme observe your Monday morning meeting

I have sat in many meetings over the past few years, sometimes as a participant, but also sometimes just observing how the team really works. I have come to think that you can learn more about an organisations culture from the first ten minutes of a Monday meeting, than from almost any staff survey. It's the small interactions that I find so informative.Who arrived late, and who mentions it – or not. Who speaks first and who speaks most. Who sits quietly. What happens when a new director offers a new idea that doesn't quite fit, and how that languages gets translated, mediated and returned by a senior colleague. Are people really discussing ideas, or going through the motions? Are they on their phones booking holidays, or using the time to send emails? Perhaps even more telling is what is said in the corridor afterwards – And how different that is in the room. None of this is in the restructure or new strategy plan. Yet, I would suggest, it is where culture sits.The structural reflexCouncils are under significant and possibly unprecedented pressure. The instinct to reach for a new structure, transformational programme, or operating model, as a solution to their problems is more than understandable. With the current wave of reorganisation and creation of unitary authorities, that instinct is, if anything, even stronger. New organisations, after all, need new structures, and someone must draw them. I am not dismissing structure. Incentives, reporting lines and governance help shape what people do, and no amount of facilitation will help if an officer speaking directly on Tuesday sees their career stall by Thursday. You cannot, after all, talk your way out of a structural problem.But the reverse is also true; and more often forgotten. I have seen organisations redraw the chart, rewrite the values/ missions/ vision in an away day, and only find the same patterns reappearing within months. The same performative meetings as decisions get made elsewhere, the same silences and the same people speaking. When this happens it is usually because the patterns live in the everyday habits of intact teams. Surprisingly, not many people look there.The sociologist Anthony Giddens described structure and agency as mutually constitutive: structure shapes what people do, but they only exist because people keep enacting them. The governance process nobody challenges persists because nobody challenges it. For people to see the agency they have to make changes, they have to be given the structural space to choose difference.Structure and relationships are, in this sense, two sides of the same coin. Any culture change effort that works only on one side is likely to disappoint.Culture is a set of habits If culture is a pattern of shared assumptions, as Edgar Schein would suggest, then that pattern is not found in a strategy document. It is found in how a team makes decisions when time is short, how it handles disagreement, and how it responds when someone steps out of line.This matters because it changes where you put your effort. Team effectiveness can be improved when the team work not just on the daily operations, but on how they do their work together – rather than how they get along. Culture, in other words, is closer to a set of habits than a set of beliefs. Importantly, habits change through repetition, in context, on real work.In my own work I have senior teams move from large 25 people meetings full of laptop screens and slides into their hundreds, towards a small group of 6-8 decision making people with a single page of insight to discuss. Real dialogue and real work.What a leader might do in the next 90 daysIf you follow my line that culture lives in the team meeting, then that is the right place to start with change. The good news is, it doesn't require a budget line.Watch your own meeting as an outsider would. Look for the pattern rather than the agenda. Who speaks, who does not, who has their laptop open the entire time. What topics come up again and again. What is decided in the room and what is pushed outside or to another meeting. It is helpful to ask someone else to observe these meetings and describe what they see without judgement.Name the pattern. Share what you have noticed and ask them if it matches what they are intending. Ask what it is allowing or not allowing to happen. Together, name the pattern – it makes spotting it again more useful in the future.Take one meeting – build a new habit. Rather than relaunching everything and trying to change the culture at the top, take one meeting and a few habits and change them deliberately. A fixed slot for reflection or learning, rotating chairs to shift patterns, and a closing question that genuinely invites dissent rather than shutting it down (this last one needs a dedicated time slot.)Change the questions you ask. The language you use in meetings can become habitual. If the questions help close something down rather than open a discussion, maybe we need different questions. ‘Who will do this and by when? – lands differently to ‘Someone should look at this'.Make your behaviour intentional and visible. Culture change asks most of the people at the top. If the leadership team is willing to be observed, and change how it works together, others tend to notice and reflect on their own.Starting somewhereThere is a loop here between structure and agency – you cannot sustainably change the conversations without eventually changing the structures. But structures do not redesign themselves; someone has to name what the structure is actually doing before anyone with power to change it will believe there is anything to change. Start by naming it.For councils going through reorganisation, this is perhaps the moment of greatest opportunity. New leadership teams are forming, their habits are not yet fixed. The first few months of how a new top team meets sets the tone for how they will work together in the coming months and years. So before you commission the next culture programme or values workshop – observe your Monday morning meeting. The culture you are trying to change is very likely already in the room.Dave Yates is an organisational development consultant and team coach who works with leadership teams in local government, rail and the NHS. He is director of Dialogic.uk.

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LEADERSHIP

Before you commission the next culture programme observe your Monday morning meeting

By Dave Yates | 12 November 2026

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