Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Job Underneath the Job
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Job Underneath the Job. Here we go. I want to start with a question I ask leaders regularly. What's the most important thing you do in your role? Most people answer with a task. Set strategy. Hit the number, manage the team. Those aren't wrong, exactly, but they're not the answer either. Edgar Schein, who spent most of his career studying how organizations actually function, put it this way. The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. Not one of the important things, the only thing of real importance. That's a strong claim. Let's sit with it for a moment. Here's a leadership moment that shows what Shine meant. Picture a team that hits every deadline. Numbers look great. Leadership is thrilled. Underneath, people are quietly burning out, afraid to flag problems, and watching one high performer get away with treating colleagues badly because he closes deals. Nobody wrote that rule down. Nobody voted on it. It just formed. Meeting by meeting, decision by decision, because no one with authority chose to manage it. That's culture. It's not the values on the wall, it's what people learn is actually true about how the place works. Here's the common misread. Most leaders think culture is a program. A kickoff event, a mission statement, maybe a values workshop once a year. Something you launch and then check off the list. Under that view, culture is a project with an end date. The reframe is that culture is not a project, it's a byproduct. It's produced continuously by what you reward, what you ignore. And what you tolerate when it's inconvenient to address. You don't manage culture with a slogan. You manage it with the 200 small decisions you make between now and Friday. And this is where it connects to something a lot of leaders are navigating right now, which is leading in a world with more tools than ever. AI can help you spot a pattern. It can flag that attrition is ticking up on one team, or that feedback scores dropped after a re-org. That's useful. But it cannot tell you what to do about it. And it definitely cannot decide what your team learns is acceptable behavior. That judgment call is still entirely yours. If anything, the more automated the routine work becomes, the more culture becomes the thing that actually differentiates one leader and one organization from another. So here's a carry-forward reflection: think about your team as it actually operates today, not as you would describe it in a value statement. What's the unwritten rule that's currently shaping behavior? Who gets away with something because they're useful? What gets rewarded that maybe shouldn't be? You don't have to fix all of it this week, but naming it is the first act of managing it instead of just inheriting it. Let me leave let me leave you with the core of it. Culture is not a side project layered on top of leadership. It's the actual output of leadership. Every decision about what to reward, what to ignore, and what to confront is a brick in that structure. Shine wasn't exaggerating when he called it the only thing of real importance. He was pointing at the job underneath the job, the one that's easy to skip and impossible to delegate.