There’s a point where “culture” stops being what a company says on LinkedIn and becomes what people actually experience when they work there.
You can post all the polished messages you want about people-first leadership, growth, transparency, and culture—but saying those things doesn’t make them true. Culture is reflected in who gets listened to, who gets protected, who gets developed, who gets held accountable, and ultimately, who chooses to stay.
If leadership continues asking the same small circle of people whether everything is okay—and those people are the ones benefiting from the current system—of course the answer is going to be yes. But that is an incredibly narrow way to measure the health of an organization, especially one that desperately needs to right the ship.
At some point, leadership has to get uncomfortable enough to actually listen. Not just to the loudest voices, the favorites, the “yes” people, or the people sitting closest to power. Talk to the people who left. Talk to the people who stopped speaking up. Look at retention. Look at engagement. Look at production beyond the surface-level numbers. Look at what happened to the travelers and relationships that were handed off to people celebrated as “top performers.” Did those relationships grow? Did those travelers stay? Were those desks actually nurtured—or were they simply inherited?
And if the same people have been sitting in leadership seats for three years while the same problems continue to surface, it is fair to ask whether the problem is no longer the circumstances—it’s the people in the seats.
Leadership should not be a talking head. It should not be gossip, cliques, politics, favoritism, or protecting the people you personally like. Leadership means fighting for your people, advocating when it is uncomfortable, holding everyone to the same standard, and having the courage to admit when something isn’t working.
Stop fluffing certain desks while demanding everyone else prove themselves over and over again. Stop celebrating numbers without examining how they were achieved or what happens after the handoff. Stop confusing loyalty to a leadership circle with loyalty to the company.
Three years is enough time to make meaningful change.
At some point, continuing to do the same things, empowering the same people, protecting the same behaviors, and expecting a different outcome becomes exactly what we all know it is: insanity.
What makes this particularly sad is that this company once talked so passionately about being different. About putting people first. About creating something better than the corporate environments so many people had experienced elsewhere.
Somewhere along the way, it started becoming the very thing it said it would never become.
Profits matter. Performance matters. Growth matters. But people have to matter too.
And when good people continue walking out the door, leadership shouldn’t be asking how to improve the messaging around culture.
They should be asking what happened to it.
4 replies (most recent on top)
@a8 The bigger issue is that we keep putting people into middle-management roles because they’re well-liked by upper leadership—not because they’ve demonstrated that they can lead people, challenge broken systems, drive results, or actually move the company forward.
We don’t need more leaders who simply agree with the status quo. We need people willing to ask hard questions, identify what isn’t working, and have the courage to change it. Instead, we continue promoting the “safe” choices—the people who won’t push back, won’t challenge decisions, and won’t make anyone above them uncomfortable.
And then we wonder why nothing changes.
For all intents and purposes, our strategy seems to be: let’s just do what everyone else is doing. No real differentiating factor. No compelling reason for clinicians to choose us, for clients to work with us, or for talented employees to build their careers here. In a competitive industry, being exactly like everyone else—but paying people less—isn’t a strategy.
We’re asking employees to do more with less. We’re paying recruiters less. We’re paying nurses less. We’re trying to protect margins while simultaneously failing to create the kind of experience, service, innovation, or culture that would actually justify why someone should choose us over the dozens of other companies offering essentially the same thing. But weird why isn’t it working….
Meanwhile, we continue rewarding and financially protecting the same upper-level leaders who have been responsible for figuring this out and still haven’t.
At some point, accountability has to go up the organizational chart, not just down it.
This isn’t flipping rocket science. Hire and promote people who can lead. Reward people who produce results and let’s be honest results aren’t things handed to you when good people leave you were given the result, do better. Listen to the people closest to the work. Stop confusing loyalty to leadership with leadership ability. Stop treating disagreement as disloyalty. Give talented people enough room to challenge the status quo, innovate, and build something competitors aren’t already doing.
You cannot cut your way to greatness. You cannot underpay your way to loyalty. And you cannot keep promoting people based on who makes leadership comfortable and then expect them to somehow pull the company up by its bootstraps.
If the goal is real transformation, then eventually you have to be willing to put transformative people in positions of influence—even when they’re the ones asking the uncomfortable questions.
Culture?!? Never heard of her. At least not since the first round of lay offs like @ak said.
Anyone still around in most roles is likely only there because of WFH. I’ve asked myself many times, would I still put up with all this if I had to sit in traffic twice a day and sit in an office just to be “lead” by people who give zero effs about the people themselves and only the bottom line?…. Absolutely not.
I don't think Med Sol has had any kind of a "culture" since the day our former CEO announced that they were cutting 10% of the staffing nearly two years ago. I mean let's face it, we were flat out lied to about the shape of the company's finances for months while spending was approved like the money was infinite. They overhired and overspent. And with nearly two years of internal restructuring, sending jobs to an offshore office and being told to "get over" the three months of layoff that happened in onshore operations last year, the company still isn't where it needs to be. And you can't ask current employees to help shape a culture when there's so much distrust of the c-suite and never knowing if and when the next round of layoffs is going to happen.
To this day, I'm still shocked at the smart and talented people who were let go and at some of the people they let stay. Some, and not all. There are still some every talented people there, just not enough of them.
I've never quite understood the idea of "culture" at a company because regardless of whatever's said, the end goal is the same: to make money. To be profitable. I mean, it's not exactly a non-profit, is it. Maybe if it was, we'd actually have a culture to speak of.
If they really want honest feedback about how we feel things are, then they need to broaden the targets of their employee engagement surveys. As if, don't make it about just the person you report to. Do another one (or a couple) focusing on the other levels of management from the pleeb's point of view. Middle management and c-suite. It's insincere to say that you want comments on surveys if you never create the vehicle for those comments to be delivered. I don't think that's an oversight.
Both the Aureus and MedSol middle management holdovers have been complicit in ruining this once solid company. MedSol will continue to decline and it has become harder and harder to defend it to our clients and travelers.