Is your team performing in line with your expectations?

A company’s culture is reflected in how decisions are made under pressure. In making a culture of prevention a priority. In what happens when a client raises a complaint. In how a mistake is corrected. In whether someone can say “I disagree” without paying an invisible price. In everyone’s financial responsibility to control expenses and reduce costs.

Whether you run a small company or lead a business unit within a larger organisation, sometimes—even when the strategy is clear—things simply do not flow. The problem is almost always cultural.

Culture is the air your team breathes. It cannot be seen, yet it shapes everything. If the air is heavy, people protect themselves, compete internally or remain silent. If the air is clean, communication is open, responsibilities are assumed, and problems are resolved before they escalate. It is also the soil in which results grow: if it is well cared for, performance is sustainable; if it is depleted, any difficulty will cause it to crack.

Within any organisation, different “logics” coexist: the logic of those who want to grow and innovate; the logic of those who monitor costs; the logic of those who safeguard quality and safety; the logic of those who prioritise customer service; and the logic of those who care for people. None of them is wrong. The risk arises when only one consistently dominates.

If numbers alone take the lead, relationships grow cold and long-term vision is lost. If growth alone dominates, teams come under strain. If service alone prevails, burnout appears. If control alone governs, initiative is suffocated. Leadership consists of recognising these tensions and managing them with sound judgement, not denying that they exist.

The Compass Method, the foundation of the Company Management Programme, which begins next 26 March, focuses on making cultural tensions visible, harmonising the interests of different stakeholder groups, and building more balanced and self-aware organisations. 

There is one element that is often overlooked, yet makes a decisive difference in any company: human care. It is not sentimentalism or a loss of professionalism. It is genuine respect, closeness, and a sincere interest in people. It is what allows us to correct without humiliating, to demand without dehumanising, and to collaborate without distrust. It is the invisible glue that sustains performance when pressure mounts.

That is precisely the purpose of the first module of the Compass Company Management Programme at Docensas: to help managers and executives understand, in practical terms, how organisational culture works and, above all, how to transform and enrich it day by day.