Understanding your staff culture
- Feedback
- Leadership expectations
- Decision-making
- Meetings
- Conflict
- Trust
- Professional relationships
This is not a guide to other people's cultures. It is a way of looking at your own school — its habits, its defaults, its unspoken expectations — and noticing where those assumptions may be shaping how you read the families, students and staff in front of you. Work through it alone, or with your leadership team.
Understand the cultural complexity of your school.
Explore the eight dimensions, framed for schools.
Identify where your school's assumptions sit.
Work through realistic school scenarios.
Find where friction may be created, not found.
Practical moves for communication, trust and feedback.
Move from single fixes to whole-school practice.
Cultural frameworks help us generate questions. They should never be used to predict an individual's behaviour. People are shaped by culture, and also by personality, family, generation, language, money, professional experience, migration history, schooling and countless other things.
The purpose of cultural mapping is not to decide what someone is like. It is to help you notice when your own assumptions are influencing how you interpret them. Throughout this toolkit you will read “some people may” and “one possible explanation is” — never “people from X culture”.
Start with what you actually know — and be honest about what you don't. Tick what your leadership team could describe today, without looking anything up.
0 of 10 described
Now the harder question: what might these demographics mean for how people experience our school?
Demographic data tells you who is in your community. It tells you nothing about how your school feels to them. The rest of this toolkit is about the second question.
The unit of analysis here is not a country. It is your school. For each dimension, move the marker to where your school actually sits — not where you'd like it to sit — then read what you may encounter at the other end of the scale.
Our school sits towards explicit.
Our school sits towards direct.
Our school sits towards egalitarian.
Our school sits towards consultative.
Our school sits towards competence-based.
Our school sits towards open debate.
Our school sits towards scheduled.
Our school sits towards curiosity and agency.
Notice the shift: the question is no longer “what are these families like?” but “where might our school's assumptions differ from those of some families?” That question is more useful — and considerably safer.
Every one of these has an obvious reading. Open each to see what else could be happening.
They're disengaged.
Perhaps the most useful hour a leadership team can spend. Read each statement and ask the same question of all of them.
Are these universal expectations — or culturally specific ones?
A five-step process to use after any interaction that didn't go the way you expected. It takes about four minutes and it is the signature practice of this work.
Don't immediately interpret the behaviour.
What actually happened? Describe it without the story attached.
What assumptions am I making, and where did they come from?
Could expectations around communication, trust, authority, disagreement or time be at play?
What could I do differently to create a better interaction?
Run the same eight dimensions across the three groups you work with most — then turn the lens back on the school itself.
Every enrolment interview, newsletter, information evening, reporting cycle and discipline conversation encodes a set of cultural expectations. Naming them is the move from individual interventions to whole-school practice.
Run this with your leadership team