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Two more podcast appearances dropped this past week (links below), and it’s no surprise where so much of the conversations went: culture.
Why do so many conversations about public sector projects slide so easily toward culture?
Because project culture in government shapes everything from momentum to morale — and no structure can fix what the culture undermines.
If we want to figure out how to deliver big outcomes, it’s almost impossible to do without understanding the people around you.
Culture Isn’t the Only Problem
There is an undeniable link between the structures we build – like oversight, reporting, funding, etc. – and the people that operate within those structures.
The structures are meant to encourage certain behaviors, and people generally follow them. I’m sure we could all point to an instance where there was someone going “rogue,” but in my experience, most people perform the roles within those structures as intended.
But here’s the big reason why culture keeps surfacing as an issue:
What if everyone is doing what the structures intend, but the intentions themselves are flawed?
What if creating more oversight and more checks and balances does little to stop the big problems, and fans the flames of the smaller problems that no one notices?
How Project Culture in Government Shapes Delivery Outcomes
Ensuring that a project has lots of checkpoints is important – but sometimes people can subconsciously substitute those checkpoints for accountability.
The more people are involved in a decision takes away from the accountability any single person might have, and so even the key players can become one of the “herd.”
Once this interaction plays out a few times – in the current project or in previous experience – it begins to influence how leaders manage. These behaviors are signs of how project culture in government quietly reshapes leadership expectations:
- They defer to committees
- They wait to be told to act, rather than initiate it
- They fail to act with urgency, because they expect to be slowed down
No one ever gives up their authority deliberately, but it can be given implicitly through the pull of an unproductive culture. That authority doesn’t vanish, it just gets absorbed by process.
That’s why project leaders have to create their own culture.
As I discuss on both podcasts, organizations as big as a federal public service have cultures that are impervious to the actions of one person.
But the project? That has its own culture, and one that can be absolutely be steered toward ambition, productivity, and driven results.
The first step is acknowledging the broader culture.
The next step is building your own. The most effective project leaders in government don’t just react to culture — they deliberately shape it.
Because without that shift, even bold projects end up bending to the same old habits.
This Week’s Spotlight
As mentioned, two podcast appearances were released this past week, and both were a blast to record.
- In Growth Hacking Culture (Spotify and Apple), we really dove into risk-averse culture, and how public project leaders have to build their own culture in order to deliver big outcomes.
- In the Mastering Risk Management podcast (Spotify and Apple), we talked a lot about embracing risk to feed ambition by using it to develop plans to land those massive outcomes.
Want more insight into how project culture in government shapes risk, leadership, and delivery?
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