How long does it take before people stop bracing for something that isn’t coming anymore?
Diana runs a department of about 35 people, inside a human services nonprofit of roughly 65 staff total. She’s about as different from the two leaders before her as you could ask for: informal, direct, genuinely open. In her first week, she started a bi-weekly listening tour, open sessions meant to help her learn the organization and its culture. They also gave people a chance to get to know her as well.
The same handful of people came every time. They spent most of each session testing the edges — how much can I actually say here — rather than just saying it.
That hesitancy didn’t start with Diana. It came with the culture she inherited. That culture spent years under a leadership style everyone described the same way: hierarchical, top-down, and formal. In Gustavo Razzetti’s framework, that’s what’s known as a Fearful Culture. It’s a culture where following the rules and staying safe with your boss matters more than speaking honestly. Diana is none of those things. Yet the habits built into the culture by its former leaders hadn’t caught up to the fact that there was a new leader in the chair.
Diana knows clearly what she doesn’t want to repeat. What she wants to build instead is still taking shape, and that takes more work than simply not being like the leaders before her.
Why This Isn’t a Trust Problem
It would be easy for Diana to read her team’s hesitancy to share their true thoughts as a signal that she just needs to build their trust or prove to them that she’s different. That’s the wrong read. The hesitancy predates her. It has nothing to do with whether she’s earned anyone’s trust yet.
Here’s how to tell whether hesitancy in your own team belongs to you or to whoever came before you.
Ask a few of the longer-tenured people directly, one-on-one rather than in a group: has it always been like this, or is this new?
Most people will tell you the truth if you ask plainly and privately. If the answer is some version of “this has always been the way it is,” the hesitancy isn’t a verdict on your leadership. It’s a habit left over from someone else’s.
Once you know that, here are some actions you can take.
- Find specific situations that used to go badly under the old leadership: certain kinds of questions in a meeting, raising a mistake, disagreeing openly.
- Watch for the next time one of those exact situations comes up with you.
- Respond the way you actually want to be known for responding, every time, especially when it would be easier not to.
People won’t take your word that things are different now. They’ll watch to see if the moments that used to burn them go differently under you. They’ll need to see it more than once, probably many times, before they will come to believe it.
The Real Work of Inheriting a Culture
That’s the first real work of inheriting a culture. Not just noticing what’s broken. The real work is determining which parts of what you’re seeing are actually about you, and which parts are still running on instructions and habits someone else left behind.
Want an honest read on which version of your culture is actually true? Or if you’re in that early stage of figuring out what you want to build instead of what you inherited, I can help you think it through.
Linda Howard is the founder of Howard Consulting, LLC. She helps purpose-driven organizations strengthen culture, leadership alignment, and collaboration, especially during periods of growth, strain, or change.
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