A dying company culture is a culture that is about to die and everyone can sense it, as the feel of the culture is bad — really bad. The sickness of the culture affects everyone and everything negatively, including customer satisfaction, employee fulfilment, management, productivity and leadership effectiveness. A dying culture can occur on a large scale, with attendant media attention and publicity. In more recent times than Enron, we have seen BP, Barclays bank, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the Bank of England all accused of operating in a below the line manner. However, a dying culture can also occur in small- to medium-sized businesses. All that is required is for things to be bad in the culture and no-one being accountable or taking responsibility for doing anything about it.

The difference between a culture that is dying and one that is at the next level up in our review of below the line cultures is that, by the time the culture has reached the stage that it is dying, it is almost impossible to turn things around. This does not mean it is impossible, just very, very difficult and probably unlikely. Dying cultures can be thought of as the Titanic after it had hit the iceberg but before it sank under the icy surface of the North Atlantic Ocean — filled with dread, panic, selfishness, desperation and the occasional final act of heroism. In the organisational cultures that I have personally witnessed at the level of dying, some of the common behaviours I witnessed included:

• Lies. With the pressure on to achieve more when it is clear everything is declining (company revenues, productivity, performance, customer and employee satisfaction), people feel pressured to revert to lying or selling half-truths to protect themselves or buy themselves and their team more time. Leaders lie to the board about how well things are going, and then do the same to the staff, keeping people uninformed and only telling people, as one CEO told me recently, ‘on a need-to-know basis’. The need-to-know basis he was referring to was to ensure no-one jumped ship prematurely before he could wring every last cent out of the business for shareholders before the ship went down. In true below the line style, he had also seen fit to organise his own life raft, in the shape of a similar role with a competing company.
• Cheating. This is about cheating the system, be it the tax system, the internal or external auditing system, cheating customers (for example through providing them with inferior stock or by fixing prices above their market value). It’s as if, in a dying company culture, it suddenly becomes acceptable for people to be dishonest or sneaky, or even act illegally. Stealing company and colleagues’ property may also occur.
• Sabotage. Of projects, company equipment and other people’s property. Vengeance seems to be a big focus in a dying culture. Once people have awoken to the fact that the company ship is going down and they are going down with it, people look for someone to blame and then go out looking for revenge.
• Ignoring others. That can include colleagues, bosses and, worst of all, customers. People in this culture will ignore phone calls, requests for meetings and emails. They will ignore people standing right in front of them, trying to talk with them. When people exhibit this behaviour, it sends a message to everyone around them that ‘I have switched off and I can’t be bothered anymore’. And when we are ignoring, we are susceptible to becoming ignorant, because ignorant doesn’t mean stupid, it means ignoring something or someone that could be helpful or useful.
• Insults. Insults tend to occur at this level of culture in all their various forms, and they will be directed at all sorts of people, inside and outside the organisation.
• Backstabbing and blaming. When things go bad a common trait in a dying culture is to make it somebody else’s fault. The amount of both covert hostile behaviour and out-and-out hostility targeted directly at fellow culture members increases dramatically. This seems to occur particularly in cross-divisional or hierarchical levels of the organisation. The silo mentality we discussed earlier seems to kick into overdrive.
• Cynicism. This trait emerges and is directed towards the company leaders by the staff and at the staff by the company leaders. Both will often become cynical regarding the company vision, mission, values and strategic objectives as their own collective behaviour means they are falling far below the standards required to deliver on key performance indicators. They start to at first doubt the validity of the vision, mission, values and objectives and then move onto openly despising them and treating them as a joke.
• Absenteeism and resignations. Both of these increase: who wants to work in a culture like this?
• Bullying. A very sad fact of a culture that is dying is that bullying seems to raise its ugly head. It is as if the pressure and stress involved in trying to stop the organisational ship from going down is interpreted by some as permission to bully others. Just as blaming increases significantly across a dying culture, bullying seems to flourish in all its ugly forms.

Summary of culture traits at this level

All of the following culture traits may appear in dying cultures:

• ignoring each other and customers
• insults
• cynicism
• talking negatively about leaders
• very high staff turnover
• very high customer churn
• inter-departmental rivalry or warfare
• resentment
• lying to each other and customers
• very high levels of absenteeism
• disrespectful language and behaviour
• breakdown in friendships
• cheating
• blaming others
• negativity
• lack of attention to detail and the delivery of quality
• lack of attention towards other people, including customers.

The more of these traits that a culture manifests within itself, the more likely it is in its last days, and of course the presence of these traits actually accelerates the culture’s demise. Things can be turned around, but this requires some drastic measures. We will look at how to achieve a culture turnaround in chapter 13, where I discuss cultural buoyancy devices. But for now simply learning to identify the symptoms of a culture that is dying is a useful level of awareness to develop and have on behalf of your own company culture. The trick to shifting your culture is to first see it as it is now. If you can see early enough that your culture is indeed dying, this offers the best hope of turning things around. The longer a company culture has to become habitually and unconsciously incompetent, the tougher it is to transition into an alternative and improved form of itself. Figure 6.1 shows us where the dead culture sits in the above and below the line culture framework.

Figure 6.1 dying culture’s position