The Case for Manager-Driven Company Culture

Most companies say culture is a priority. Far fewer can say who actually owns it. In this episode of CultureClub X, powered by CultureMonkey, host Diana Blass sits down with Michele Lau-Torres, Division Manager of Talent Development for Austin Water Utility at the City of Austin, to make the case that company culture lives or dies with managers.

Michele brings a rare vantage point to that argument. She is a performance and organizational development professional with over 20 years of expertise in talent management, organizational improvement, and employee development. She designed onboarding and new hire programs for Austin 311, led culture and talent strategies in divisions including the Austin Police Department and Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, and consults for organizations such as the US Air Force Federal Executive Board and the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission.

That background grounds the conversation in some of the hardest places to build culture: hierarchical, rank based, 24/7 essential services where you cannot simply send everyone home. Across the hour, one theme keeps returning. Managers set the subculture of their teams, and those subcultures, far more than any values poster, decide whether people feel trusted, valued, and heard.

How can managers make employees feel more valued and build trust

Michele's starting point is deliberately small. Every manager has a group of people reporting up through them, so the real question is what the culture and subculture look like inside that one team. Trust is not built by announcing an initiative; it is built by the manager letting go of their own ego and accepting that the job is not about them, it is about their people.

Her practical formula is simple: give employees the freedom and space to do the work they do best, because that is when you get their best thinking and their best work product. Being valued, she says, starts with having a voice on a team rather than being dictated to. And crucially, you have to give trust to build trust. Show employees you trust their decisions and expertise, be consistent, and put listening first.

Does hierarchy make trust harder to build

Diana pushes on whether team oriented, rule bound sectors make this harder, and Michele does not pretend otherwise. Government is hierarchical by nature, wrapped in regulations around hiring and performance management, and it carries the extra weight of public trust. Police departments add rank and a paramilitary structure, where inviting creative ideas from the rank and file does not come naturally.

Her workaround runs through decision making. Leaders can decide autonomously, but the moment a decision needs the team to execute it, excluding them shrinks the likelihood of their support. If you need buy-in from the people doing the work, include them in the decision, listen to their pros and cons, and give them room to push back. Even the most hierarchical chains of command she has worked in see the value of that trust, because it raises psychological safety and lets teams take risks.

Why managers are first responders to employee mental health

Few managers see themselves as first responders to their employees' mental health, and Michele calls that a terrible shame. Her advice is to pay attention to the signals: absenteeism, opting out, unusual behavior, forgetfulness. She tells the story of a colleague who was always engaged and then quietly started missing meetings. She simply asked, are you okay, I see you. It turned out his father had dementia and was dying, and he had been burning the candle at both ends.

That small act of inquiry opened the door to real support, and it illustrates her wider point about what care does to performance.

Running somebody into the ground, she adds, is not the way to produce a positive culture. Encourage self care, reprioritize the work, and let family come first.

Are managers overburdened, or are they overburdening themselves

Asked whether managers are overburdened with expectations beyond their scope, Michele offers a contrarian answer: she is not sure they are. Too many managers choose to keep being individual contributors when their job is to manage, which makes them micromanagers. Managing means staffing, controls, support, and resources; it does not mean doing your team's job or owning the outcome of their work.

The skill of doing work through people is getting lost, she argues, with decisions drifting upward and no autonomy pushed down to frontline workers. That absolutely produces burnout, but much of it is self inflicted through a lack of delegation skill. She also points at executives: a colleague who moved from government to the private sector found an unspoken culture of coming to work sick, where espoused values about caring for employees collapsed the moment deadlines hit. When leaders force managers to run people that way, the managers burn out too.

Two way trust is built in small interactions, not big projects

On two way trust, Michele's rule is blunt: if you say you are going to do something, do it, whether you are the manager or the employee. Trust does not come from the big project that went your way. Every day can be death by a thousand paper cuts, or you can be trusted by a thousand small interactions that went well.

She borrows a line from a colleague: when you want to show up, think about how you are making the other person feel. Being honest, clear, and even blunt develops trust, as does admitting your mistakes and what you do not know. And she warns against in groups and out groups, because it only takes one person who feels unfairly treated or unheard to derail a team. Psychological safety, in her definition, is knowing you are in a safe space to hold a different opinion, speak your truth, and still be appreciated.

What happens when a team microculture meets a strong company culture

Do manager driven microcultures guide the larger company culture, or the other way around? It depends on scope, Michele says. Her talent teams touch the whole organization, so they have to walk their talk: a team teaching conflict facilitation must be able to facilitate its own conflict. She has seen a healthy microculture catch fire and lift an entire organization, and she has also seen the opposite, where the wider culture is too strong and the team retreats into defense mode.

When that angst appears, the answer is influence, and it starts with leadership accountability. Everybody talks about accountability until it knocks on their own door. Culture, she says, is like a garden: either it grows overgrown and weedy by default, or you cultivate it into something purposeful.

If an organization espouses integrity but covers up bad behavior, its value is not integrity, and the gap between stated and lived values is exactly where toxic cultures and legal problems begin.

Should blue collar and white collar employees get different engagement strategies

Michele resists the premise that culture initiatives should differ for white and blue collar workforces. Having worked in critical infrastructure for 15 years, across public safety, transportation, and utilities, she reframes the question as one of equity. It is easy to engage an office worker with an email and a survey. It is much harder to reach the technician testing water samples on a night shift, who may not have equitable access to technology or the same fluency with it.

Her strategy starts with the hardest person to reach: the employee grooming horses in a stable from five thirty in the morning with no computer and no cell phone. Design engagement for that person and everyone else follows. In practice that means in person forums, sticky notes, and awareness of literacy limits, and above all closing the feedback loop: telling people what will happen with their input, when they will see it, and what their own role in the solutions will be. There is no point in asking if you are not going to do something with the ask.

Technology is the rice, managers are the rice cooker

On technology's role, Michele is enthusiastic but precise. Platforms like CultureMonkey, with nudges and crowdsourced coaching insights, have a strong place in the market, and data absolutely drives informed decisions and strategy. But rice does not boil itself. The technology is the rice; managers and executives are the rice cooker, the ones who actually have to make something happen. Her own struggle has been mixed workforces where a technology only approach meant hearing from just 25 percent of the organization, all office workers.

Culture keeps evolving, with hybrid work, Gen Z's demands, internal mobility, and DEI reshaping expectations, so listening cannot be a one time exercise. This is where continuous employee listening earns its place: not as a substitute for management, but as the input that tells managers where to act before people walk out the door with knowledge and money behind them.

That, in the end, is Michele's case for a manager driven culture. Tools can surface the truth, but only managers who listen, act, and keep their word can turn it into a workplace people choose to stay in.