You Are the System
Building the kind of trust that gets your best people's real thinking, not just their compliance
By David Norman, CMC®
Published for Business Owners | highcountrypg.net
Business owners love a good system. A clear org chart. A defined process. A dashboard that tracks the right numbers. None of that is wrong. Systems matter, and a business without them struggles to scale.
But here is a finding from organizational research that should reorder how any owner thinks about where real change comes from. Gallup's 2023 research on management found that a direct manager's behavior accounts for 70 percent of the variance in an employee's engagement. Not the mission statement. Not the software. Not even the compensation plan. The person that employee reports to, and how that person behaves, day in and day out.
If you are the owner of your business, that person is often you.
What This Actually Means
Picture two employees doing similar work, with the same pay and the same access to your systems. One has a direct supervisor who asks good questions, invests in that employee's growth, communicates honestly and consistently, and treats accountability as something shared rather than imposed. The other has a supervisor who communicates only when something goes wrong, manages by exception, and is largely unavailable outside of crises.
The first employee is significantly more likely to be engaged, according to the research, regardless of what systems the business has in place. This is both humbling and encouraging. Humbling, because it means installing a new operating system or a new set of processes will not fix a culture problem on its own. Encouraging, because leadership behavior is learnable. You do not need to wait for a new hire or a reorganization. You can start changing this Monday.
Why Culture-First Beats Systems-First
There is research that speaks directly to this order of operations. McKinsey and PROSCI, two organizations that study organizational change, found in research published in 2021 and 2022 that change efforts grounded in culture and genuine engagement succeed roughly 79 percent of the time. Change efforts that lead with systems and structure, without addressing the human environment first, succeed at closer to 26 percent.
That gap is not small. It says something specific to business owners who are eager to install a new operating system, whether that is EOS, Scaling Up, or something else entirely. The system is a tool. Whether that tool produces results depends on the trust, communication, and engagement of the people using it. Build the culture first, and the system has something to work with. Install the system first and hope the culture follows, and you are far more likely to end up with a business that looks organized on paper and still struggles underneath.
What This Looks Like in Practice
You do not need a leadership development program to start. You need a few honest, consistent habits.
Ask more questions than you give answers. Leaders who ask genuine questions build ownership. Leaders who only give answers build dependence.
Communicate proactively, not just in a crisis. If the only time you talk to your team is when something is wrong, you are teaching them to dread hearing from you.
Invest visibly in people's growth. This does not require a big budget. It requires attention and follow-through.
Hold yourself accountable to the same standard you expect from others. Nothing builds or breaks trust faster than a double standard.
The Choice in Front of You
The research is consistent across industries and business sizes. The behavior of the person leading a team, more than any other single factor, determines whether that team is genuinely engaged. As the owner, that gives you more direct control over your business's culture than almost anything else you manage.
You cannot fully delegate this. You cannot systematize it away. The good news is that you do not need to. You already have the most important lever in your hands. The only question is whether you are ready to use it.
Sources: Gallup, State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders, 2023. McKinsey and Company, Losing from Day One, 2021. PROSCI, Best Practices in Change Management, 11th edition, 2022. McKinsey Organizational Health Index, updated 2023.
David Norman works with business leaders who are ready to build organizations capable of performing not just when conditions cooperate but especially when they do not. His books Supercharge: A New Playbook for Leadership and Accountability Shift: Tips, Traps, and Techniques are available now. Subscribe to his newsletter at Substack.com, currently free for early subscribers.
