Organizational culture forms in the gap between what leaders say matters and what they actually enforce. Standards get set by the lowest behavior anyone tolerates, not by written policies. The speaker calls this drift: a gradual slide away from intended standards that happens everywhere and requires active correction.
Remember, contradiction is our culture. There's no two ways around it. When, when we say one thing and we contradict that, or we say this is important to us and we don't follow up on it, we don't make sure that it's actually getting done, the fact that we're not doing it is what creates our culture. So we talk about standards. We want high standards, don't we? But what actually creates our standards? What, what we tolerate. So we can write it down and say our standards are way up here, but if we continue to tolerate people doing this, what's our real culture at that point? What's our real standard at that point? The higher one or the lower one? The lowest common denominator, unfortunately. So that causes a lot of confusion within organization. Selective enforcement of standards is dangerous. Selective enforcement of standards— we all do it. So it's not to say, hey, don't ever do it. I know that's not going to happen because I do it. The point is, is recognizing it and then figuring out a way to recover back to it because we're all going to drift, which is that term that I continue to use. It's not failure, it's drift.
