The biggest gap in organizational culture today is the chasm between the ideals and values on the wall and the actual lived reality of hourly work life.
This gap used to not matter at the height of the Industrial Revolution, but as the papering over of the gap has become less and less effective over time, the presence of the gap has become more and more evident.
Unfortunately, many organizational leaders are deciding to expand that gap through behaviors and conflict choices that reflect a nostalgia for a command and control past, rather than seeking to cross the chasm with a bridge to the future.
Either an employee is on one side of the chasm—or the gap—or they are on another.
Unfortunately, the inherent conflicts based in organizational identity fester and grow (they go fungal, rather than viral) in the darkness of that chasm.
Crossing the chasm of conflict between the ideals on the wall, and the daily workplace reality, is the hardest confrontation for leaders, founders, managers, and supervisors to engage in.
But the journey across that chasm is the only journey that matters.
