No, you can’t upskill your culture. But you can upskill your leaders

Earlier in my life, I worked for a global company. I passed my manager in the hallway, and wanted to ask her a question. She was stressed and answered before I had even completed the question. I tried again. She did it again. On the third attempt, I looked at her and said, “Can you please be quiet until I have finished my question?”

She stopped. I finished. She answered and then rushed away.

Five minutes later, I did the exact same thing to one of my own people.

That moment has stayed with me for decades. It wasn’t the most dramatic experience of my life, but it was one that made me embarrassed. I’d like to think that I’ve learned something since then. But it’s easy to slip back into habits that I wanted to leave behind.

Most leadership communication failures are unconscious. And you can’t train unconscious habits away through values workshops, culture decks, or offsite strategy days.

This is the problem with how organizations try to fix culture. The thing is, you can’t upskill culture. It is too abstract. Culture accumulates from thousands of conversations within an organization, and shapes how people behave, day after day, in meetings and corridors and one-on-ones.

Communication shapes behavior, but behavior drives results.

This is the sequence. Every instruction, presentation, piece of feedback, and every stressed or friendly hallway exchange moves people toward a desired behavior or away from it.

If you want to understand the true state of an organization—its culture, its energy, and its direction, you need to listen to the everyday conversations. Strategy documents tell you what leadership intends. Conversations tell you what is actually happening. And every conversation will either build or break engagement. This is important because engagement is the bridge between communication and behavior. When people feel genuinely engaged, they do things because they want to, not because they have to. That’s the big difference. They show more creativity, collaboration, and higher commitment. But when they feel disconnected, they comply at best, which we now call Quiet Quitting.

Global employee engagement fell from 23% to 20% in 2024. This is the second decline in twelve years, and it matched the drop that we saw during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Manager engagement dropped from 30% to 22% over the same period.

Here is another disturbing fact: The people most responsible for driving team engagement are themselves disengaging. The ripple effect is predictable. Gallup’s data shows that you can attribute 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager.

The largest lever for organizational performance is the person leading the team, and specifically, how that person communicates. Highly engaged teams show a 23% increase in productivity and a 51% reduction in turnover compared to disengaged ones.

The three communication superpowers

After 20 years of working with leaders across industries and continents, I have identified three capabilities that set apart leaders who build high-performing cultures from those who erode them. I call them the ‘Three Communication Superpowers.’

The first is empathy. This is genuine presence, real connection, the ability to make the person in front of you feel that they matter. The team member I interrupted with a stressed response needed a leader who was actually listening.

The second is clarity. You need to communicate so that people understand what the company expects from them, and remember what matters. As Martin Gutmann and I argued in a previous piece for Fast Company, transparency and clarity are distinct muscles. Clarity is about direction, and direction is what people need to perform. People can’t act on what they don’t remember, so the content needs to stick.

The third is energy. This is your passion that manifests in how you look and how you sound, like your non-verbal communication. It’s the oldest form of communication, and people read body language and tone before they process words. A leader who delivers important messages in a flat, distracted way signals that the message itself is low priority. Energy is about letting genuine commitment show.

The good thing is that these three superpowers are trainable. These are all examples of skills, which you can develop. When leaders take the time to develop them, engagement rises, behavior shifts, and results follow.

Culture changes because leaders start having different conversations—with more presence, more direction, and more genuine care for the people they lead. That’s where it starts, and that’s where you can change it.