The Culture Nerds - A Leadership Podcast
Want to constantly grow as a leader and shape a great culture in your workplace? This is the podcast for you.
Of course, if you’re a yoghurt fan who typed in ‘culture’ and ended up here …(sorry, nerdy workplace culture joke). If you’re a serious person who believes serious topics must be covered in a serious way, we may not be the petri dish for you either.
But, if you want lived executive experience and decades working with corporate clients, government agencies & NFPs, all topped off by the hilarious hosts (at least we think so!), welcome - we're glad you could join us!
We nerd out on leadership and workplace culture – which is why we’re good at them. We tackle the topics you need to develop as a leader and to transform the workplace culture you have into the workplace culture you want. And we have fun doing it.
Hard hitting topics. Easy listening.
The Culture Nerds - A Leadership Podcast
Are the monkeys running the zoo?
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Summary
Have you ever thrown your hands in the air, frustrated, and said, 'the monkeys are running the zoo!' If you haven't, I bet one of your co-leaders has.
What does that mean, though? And why does it happen? In this episode we talk about how leaders should respond when they feel the monkeys are running the zoo and discuss another type of 'zoo' that should be avoided at all costs!
Links and resources mentioned in the show
The Authentimeter (free culture survey with option for detailed analysis of results)
Plenty in 20: Holding People Accountable when you Can't Afford to Lose Them (free, on-demand webinar with actionable strategies and tips)
The Culture Nerds Newsletter, a free monthly summary of subscriber resouces
Organisational Culture Surveys for those who want to explore our services
What's next?
Talk to one of our culture and leadership experts - a free 30 minute consultation to problem solve any issue you are facing.
Detailed show description
The culture of your workplace doesn't just happens—it's shaped by leadership choices and team behaviours. In this episode, Simon Thiessen use the 'monkeys running the zoo' metaphor to discuss 'three zoos' that perfectly capture different workplace cultures and the leadership approaches that create them.
What happens when the monkeys are running the zoo? This environment emerges when leaders fail to set clear standards or hold people accountable. Mediocrity becomes normalised, high performers grow frustrated, and when leaders try to raise standards, resistance is fierce. Simon unpacks the affiliative or absent leadership styles that create these situations.
The second zoo represents workplaces ruled by fear, where people avoid taking risks, hide problems, and dread coming to work. These environments stem from directive, demanding, and critical leadership that breaks trust and stifles initiative. Simon shares real-world examples of this fear becoming embedded, requiring consistent positive experiences to rebuild confidence.
But there's a third option. The ideal workplace where people operate with freedom within clear, agreed-upon standards. Here, people understand their purpose, collaborate naturally, and hold each other accountable. Research consistently shows these environments produce happier employees, better customer experiences, and superior results across all metrics.
Creating this culture requires conscious leadership rather than defaulting to comfortable habits, clarity of vision about what excellence looks like, willingness to change (starting with leaders), and a tolerance for the uncomfortable. The journey isn't easy, but the rewards are transformative.
Workplace culture is shaped by leadership choice. We each have a best self and a worst self, and workplace environm
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Want some insight into your workplace culture? Take our free online Culture Survey here
Visit our website The Real Learning Experience
Thanks to our producer, Josh at Deadset Podcasting
Before we get into today's episode, we want to acknowledge the privilege of living and working on Aboriginal land and we pay our respects to the Elders, past, present and emerging. Welcome to another episode of the Culture Nerds a leadership podcast. My name is Simon Tyson and I'm flying solo today. I'm the only nerd on deck today. Now we call ourselves nerds because we're fascinated by workplace culture. We're fascinated by what makes your workplace tick.
Speaker 1:Why do people behave the way they do? Why do they do bad things? Why do they do bad things? Why do they do good things Critically? How can you improve it and get regular high performance and a great workplace vibe? That's what we aim to unpack in these podcasts and also in the other mainly free resources we create for our network. Every month, we have a theme for the resources we create, and March's monthly theme is workplace culture. There's a Plenty in 20 episode one of our very short as the name implies 20-minute webinars that are available on demand. This month, we focus on giving people feedback and holding them accountable when you can't afford to lose them. We have our Authentimeter, which is an online culture survey a free online culture survey that you can answer a set of questions and get a score around your current culture and get a bit of a breakdown around that. For those who need a bit more help, we've created a page on some of our paid workplace culture surveys that help you take a strategic and proactive approach to improving your culture. And, of course, there's this podcast, which brings me to the topic.
Speaker 1:Today I want to talk to you about something a client said to me recently. It prompted a thought for me. We're going to talk about three zoos, and this isn't a troll through my holiday snaps, it's about a metaphor that's often used. This particular client, a fairly new client, felt that things were completely out of control in her workplace and the words she used to describe it were that the monkeys are running the zoo, and that led to a discussion about what she would prefer instead of the current situation, and that led to a discussion about the three zoos, and I'm going to run you through that today. Now, I'm 100% aware here that we're talking about human beings, that we're not comparing people in our teams to monkeys. We're simply going to use and extend that metaphor to give us a bit of an insight into three possibilities.
Speaker 1:What could three different zoos look like in this context? So zoo number one is, in fact, the zoo that this lady was describing to me, a zoo where the monkeys are running the zoo. In that zoo, the monkeys are doing whatever they choose. They do what's easy, they do what's convenient, they do what doesn't challenge them, what is comfortable and known for them, and the monkeys are making those choices without reference to the overall goals of the zoo, without even understanding what the goals of their own team, their own enclosure, are like. There's no reference to the values of the zoo. There's no reference to the zoo's visitors. It's not about them. It's about the needs of the monkeys visitors. It's not about them. It's about the needs of the monkeys. When there's a problem, though, the monkeys go to the zookeeper and they say to the zookeeper we expect you to fix this, even those petty, trivial issues that the monkeys should be sorting out for themselves, and it's really easy for the zookeeper, or zookeepers in this, to decide that they need better monkeys. That's the solution. The problem we've got is the monkeys we've got. If we only had better monkeys, we would get better outcomes.
Speaker 1:Now, why is this happening? That's the critical question. Why do we have a zoo where the monkeys are running it, and running amok. Well, typically it's about leadership. It's about a failure from the zookeepers to do one of several things. One of them is a failure by the zookeepers to create clear standards, to define the standards that they want from the monkeys, to say this is what we expect of you every day, and to make those things reasonable and fair and clear and consistent and well communicated and transparent on all those things. Now, it's possible that the zookeepers have created those standards for the zoo, and so the monkeys know what the standards are, but when they fail to uphold them, there's no accountability. The zookeepers let it go. It's all too hard, it's all too uncomfortable, so we're not going to do anything about it. We're not going to say anything. Maybe if we just get better monkeys, or maybe magically, one day we'll come in and the monkeys will have improved, they will have decided they're going to live to these standards. And I'm going to tell you that's not happening. That does not happen without change from the zookeepers. It's a zoo characterised by really low accountability, either because standards aren't there, in which case the monkeys can't be accountable to them because they're not there, or where the standards are not upheld.
Speaker 1:It's typically associated with some leadership styles that are more affiliative. We've got zookeepers who want to be the best friends with all the monkeys, with all the animals, and they spend more time investing in those relationships, in keeping things smooth and calm on the surface. Beneath the surface there's all this tension, there's all these issues. It could also be characterized by zookeepers who have an absent leadership style, who potentially didn't even really want to be a zookeeper, but they were happy being a monkey and they recognised that the only way for them to make career progression, for them to get on to do things that were more challenging, was to maybe move into a zookeeper role, not really thinking through or underestimating how much that involved responsibility for now managing the monkeys, for now leading the monkeys. So they tend to focus on task and in terms of the monkey's performance and need, they're absent. It can also be a very hands-off.
Speaker 1:I don't like to interfere, I don't want to be a micromanager type of zookeeper mentality and what they end up doing they hide behind a veil of, oh, we're delegating and empowering, which is not true. Essentially, they're abdicating and they're stepping back and saying the monkeys will figure this stuff out. They're all adult monkeys. They'll figure this stuff out In this zoo. When the zookeepers do start to say you know what? We can't go on like this. This is not working.
Speaker 1:The monkeys are outraged. They're appalled because they have, over a period of time, normalized mediocrity. So when the zookeepers raise the issue, they feel they're being asked to do something incredibly unreasonable, even though the zookeepers might simply be saying I want you to work to reasonable standards and I want you to behave well amongst each other. They may be the only two things the zookeeper is asking, but the monkeys, because they've normalized mediocrity, will see that as asking them to go over and above. Now, stepping out of the metaphor for a moment, I have had this experience as an executive leader where a service that dealt with other humans, where other humans' well-being was in play. The team at this service were outraged when we asked them to work to contemporary standards and standards that would meet today's test, and when we asked them to stop treating each other terribly. And the reason they were outraged is because the way they'd been doing things had become so normalized for so long by a highly affiliative leader that what we were asking, even though it wasn't really a stretch, felt like an intrusion. If we go back into that metaphor now, because I think it's a really important metaphor for us to understand how these things happen.
Speaker 1:At the end of the day, in the zoo, where the monkeys are running the zoo, the monkeys go home and, despite the fact they're running the place and despite the fact that they're doing what's convenient for them, they go home and complain about the zoo. They deride it for being out of control. They have no respect for it and, to be honest, that's probably fair, because it is a zoo where there are no set standards, where there's no accountability to those standards. Why should I behave appropriately when the monkey beside me has no respect for delivering good outcomes, no respect for the visitors to the zoo, no respect for the standards, no respect for the zookeepers, etc. And it becomes the norm.
Speaker 1:So the way to change this if you're a zookeeper, in a zoo like this, you need to accept it's going to be painful to change it. There's a hump you need to go through and that hump is defining reasonable standards, defining values that you'll all work according to, and then you've got to stick to them, even when it's inconvenient. As a zookeeper, you need to embody those standards and behaviours. You can't say I expect them from everyone else and then not do them. You've also got to have some really uncomfortable and difficult conversations, even with the monkey that's been there for a long time, or the monkey that's very awkward to deal with, or the monkey you don't feel like you can afford to lose, because as soon as the standards apply unequally, then they mean nothing. One of the problems you're going to have is that sometimes people will be unhappy about being held accountable, even when it's a reasonable thing to do, even when the accountability is reasonable. Remember, slipping out of the metaphor again, that if you're a manager here, someone being unhappy is not evidence that you're doing the wrong thing. It might be evidence that you're making them uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:There's a rule of thirds that sort of vary roughly and it may be. The proportions may be different in your zoo. The rule of thirds is that one third of monkeys are going to be ecstatic because they've been waiting for someone to do something about this. They've been sick and tired of not being able to work at the level they'd like to, of not being treated in the workplace the way they feel they should be, of not coming to the zoo and being happy. Another third the other extreme will be outraged and resistant and they will be your noisy third, and sometimes it will feel like that's 90% of people, but that's simply because of the amount of noise they're making. And the middle third are sitting waiting to see which way things are going here and if it becomes inevitable that standards are going to raise, they hitch their wagon with that third. If it seems that things are going to stay as they are, they hitch their wagon with the other third. And all they're trying to do is come to work, fly below the radar, just get on with stuff without too much discomfort, without too much controversy. They don't want to get caught up in all this stuff.
Speaker 1:So my conversation with this lady then turned to okay, I get it, you've got a zoo where the monkeys are running the zoo, but what would you prefer? What is it you want? And we started talking about another zoo which in my view is equally undesirable, and that's a zoo where the monkeys are in fear of the zookeepers. This is a zoo where the monkeys they cower in their cage, hoping no one notices them. They hope that someone else is going to make more mistakes or do something else wrong, because that's where the attention goes from the zookeepers, who tend to be like tyrants and they can just get on with doing the bare minimum that they have to do.
Speaker 1:They don't show any initiative, because you know what Initiatives are risk-taking behavior. And when a monkey shows initiative, the zookeeper comes in and overrules them or criticizes them or corrects them. The zookeeper, in this case, very quickly starts to believe that if you want things done properly, you've got to do them yourself, because you know what. Very few of the monkeys are up to the standard. The monkeys are either unified by their fear of the zookeepers which sometimes happens and you see a reasonably tight team behind the zookeepers or below the zookeepers is probably more correct in this case or it becomes very dog-eat-dog. So the zookeeper's behaviour starts to create a climate in which people are just looking out for themselves and just surviving, which means of course we don't see the monkeys doing any of that, collaborating, etc.
Speaker 1:The visitors to the zoo. They get an apathetic performance because you know what the monkeys just want to do, what they have to do, without being noticed, and they want to go home. When there's a problem, normally in this zoo the monkeys just shut up about it because you know what? I'm not sticking my head above the parapet, I'm not raising it, and the zookeeper starts to think there's no problems. I never hear about any problems. Everything's good, everything's fine. You know what? If there was a problem, the monkeys would come and tell me about it. So why is this happening?
Speaker 1:It's typically associated with zookeepers who've got other leadership styles. These tend to be more directive I'm here to give you instructions, you're here to follow them. Demanding styles, where nothing's ever quite good enough. Critical styles, where the zookeepers catch the monkeys doing things wrong all the time. Where the zookeepers have a pace setting style, where it's just keep up, hang on and keep up and the monkeys, when they can't do that, pull back. Because you know what, if I'm somewhere in the middle, I'm more likely to be noticed. If I go over here and, under the radar, just do what I have to do and get out of here, maybe no one will see In this type of zoo.
Speaker 1:What we actually often see is some monkeys become deputy, unofficial deputy zookeepers. They start to behave in the same directive, critical, demanding way, and this is not a problem with having high standards, it's a way. It's a problem with the way they're communicated and with the standards being arbitrary and based upon either the zookeepers or the deputy zookeepers preferences rather than reasonable and agreed standards. And the zookeepers look at these deputy monkeys and they say they're deputy zookeepers and say why can't all the monkeys be like that? And once again the temptation can be we've just got some good monkeys and we've got some bad monkeys. And again, do we just need some better monkeys? So how do we change this? Again, there's a hump. It's a different type of hump. You've already got standards there. You might need to revisit them and make sure they're reasonable and fair and clear and not arbitrary. But there's a lot of burnt bridges in this zoo.
Speaker 1:The monkeys don't trust the zookeepers at all. They have an ingrained fear of the zookeepers and don't think just because the monkeys aren't cowering doesn't mean they don't have a fear. They have that fear reaction of what's going to happen. If I have an idea, if I make a suggestion, if I give feedback, if I use initiative, slipping out of the metaphor for a moment, I've dealt with organizations where it took years for this to be turned around. I don't think it has to. But the monkeys have to have a very clear, very consistent experience of things being better than they were. They can have 10 experiences of, oh, things are changing around here and one experience of, oh, it's just like the old days and you'll go all the way backwards. So it's got to be a clear, consistent experience.
Speaker 1:I dealt with one organisation, a national organisation, with a manager who managed around half the country with about 50 branches, and the branch managers were not allowed to make any decisions. I'm talking stupid stuff like buying stationery. So these were people who were turning over millions of dollars and with responsibility for 10, 20, sometimes up to 50 and 60 team members, were not allowed to make decisions about buying stationery. It all went through the senior manager who was a directive demanding critical pay setting zookeeper, and when a new manager came in and saw that, they were bewildered. When a new zookeeper arrived, they were bewildered and said that's a decision you don't need to talk to me about. And it took them a while to understand what the history was.
Speaker 1:It took months for that manager to demonstrate a pattern of behaviour where the team were comfortable making decisions For a while. There it was. I can make the decision I know you're telling me I can, but am I going to be criticized for it down the track? So this new manager had to make it very clear I'm empowering you to make this decision and I might give you feedback and coach you. If I would have done it differently, I'm not going to criticize you. There'll be no negative consequence for you. I'm here as your coach. I'm here to help you make better decisions, but the only way we can do that is by you making the decisions in the first place and then unpacking them together. At the end of the day, in this zoo, the monkeys go home and they spend the evening feeling sick about coming back the next day. They absolutely live for knockoff time and weekends.
Speaker 1:I had another experience as a senior executive, with a senior person in my team ran one of the key functional areas and she had come from a major retailer major Australian retailer, I'm not going to mention them and her experience there was so bad she was very much in fear of the consequences of initiative. It took me 18 months probably to have her 100% comfortable coming to me with recommendations instead of coming to me asking me to make decisions that were hers to make. I had to hold myself to an incredibly high standard to give her a consistent, safe experience of doing those things, because the learning was so embedded. So, turning this round again, you're going to have to overcome those issues with burned bridges and lost trust. We're going to have to have really clear, consistent and fair standards and then empower people to work towards them. We're going to have to accept that that involves some risk, that that involves the prospect of people making mistakes, and we're going to have to be okay with that. We're going to have to allow them to make mistakes and be there to support them, to learn from them, not criticizeise them for making those mistakes. We have to hold ourselves to really high standards as senior leaders and we have to challenge the leadership approaches of leaders around us and the leaders who report to us. We've got to hold them accountable to more constructive and I'm just going to say it less lazy styles. Being more constructive and I'm just going to say it less lazy styles being directive, demanding, pace, setting, critical all the time is lazy leadership. It takes a lot more effort to be constructive in our leadership styles but ultimately and it doesn't it's not that big a learning curve ultimately people perform better and more independently when we do so.
Speaker 1:Let's go back into the metaphor and look at the third zoo, and this is with this new client. This is where we landed. This is the zoo she wanted. What I said to her is it necessarily bad when the monkeys run the zoo? And she said well, no, if they're empowered and they're doing good work and so on, I don't have a problem with that. But the problem is my monkeys just do whatever they want. And my comment to her was that's potentially because you're a zookeeper who uses some of those styles we used before. What if the monkeys did run the zoo, but they ran it according to agreed standards? What if we gave the monkeys a whole bunch of freedom in the way they conduct things at the zoo, but we also defined boundaries that that could happen with? So here are the parameters Within that I'm good for you to make choices and decisions. What if the zookeeper saw their role as creating a zoo environment where monkeys were empowered to do their best work but were also held accountable to those standards?
Speaker 1:In that sort of zoo, the monkeys put on a show. They love the visitors, they love performing for the visitors, not because they have to, but because they thrive on it, because they've got a sense of purpose, because it feels like they're accomplishing something. They're doing something worthwhile. They try new things. They take a few risks and they either celebrate their successes or they learn from the outcomes when things don't go as well as they could. When one monkey struggles, the others chip in to help because they know that's the way to run a zoo. That's good for everyone. What really matters to them is the visitor experience. They know that's why they exist. They know that's why we're there. They know that's ultimately why the zookeeper's there as well. We're all in this together to create a visitor experience.
Speaker 1:When a monkey doesn't perform to the expected standard, the other monkeys have a chat, they sit down, they talk about hey, this is the zoo I want to work in. I'm not sure that the way we did that aligned with those standards. Very often the zookeeper's not even aware that there was a problem, not because the monkeys hide problems, but because they solve problems without having to escalate everything to the zookeeper. The zookeepers recognised that most, not all, not all. I'm not that idealistic, but they recognised most and almost all monkeys can be exceptional if they're exposed to the right environment. The zookeepers recognised that most, not all. I'm not that idealistic. They recognised that most, not all. I'm not that idealistic. They recognize that most, in fact, almost all monkeys can be exceptional if they're exposed to the right environment and they focus on creating an environment in which monkeys bring their best. They bring their best self to the zoo.
Speaker 1:Why is this happening? Leadership, and you'll notice that it always comes down to leadership. We have to eliminate leadership as the issue before we start looking elsewhere. We have to look at the zookeeper. We have to look at the rules of the zoo, the standards of the zoo, before we start criticizing the monkeys. And, similarly, when things go well, it also comes back to leadership, in this case, the leadership from the zookeeper. There's high standards. There's high and clear standards. We're here for excellence, not mediocrity, but they're fair, they're consistent, they're clear the standards around both performance and behavior. The zookeeper is accountable to the same principles and standards as the monkeys. So it's not about one rule for you, one rule for me. We're all in this together. The zookeeper's got a lot of coaching in the way they run the zoo, in the way they deal with the monkeys. They constantly debrief what goes well so we can learn from it and celebrate it and repeat it, and what doesn't go well so we can move on from it, so we can do better, but not to criticize people and not to impose negative consequences.
Speaker 1:In this third type of zoo, the reason the monkeys are so good at running the zoo day by day according to agreed standards is because they understand the why. What we need in in any zoo is a form of control. Directive, controlling, micromanaging, leadership is a form of control, but it's one that doesn't empower people. Helping the monkeys understand the why is another form of control, but in that one we trust that the monkeys will make good choices because they understand why we're doing it, not just what I have to do. It's a whole lot more empowering. It's a whole lot more energizing is the word I'm really looking for. I know why I do what I do and I know the difference it makes and why it's important. It's not just a task list of things that's expected of me.
Speaker 1:So I want to finish by emphasizing a really critical point. This isn't just an analogy, a metaphor. There's an overwhelming body of research that shows and I'm going to continue with the metaphor for just a little bit longer that in the third type of zoo, the monkeys are happier, they're more fulfilled, they work harder, they collaborate better and they stay longer. The visitors are more satisfied and they come back more often and they stay longer. The visitors are more satisfied and they come back more often and they spend more and the results are better. So whatever metric we happen to measure them on, in our zoo the results are better, whether that's profitability, visitor numbers, safety compliance outcomes, whatever you like to measure them on, those metrics are improved in the third type of zoo and, as you will have seen, each of those zoos has a very different type of culture.
Speaker 1:Now the resources we've created this month can help you create that third zoo. If you want help with that, then the culture surveys page that I mentioned up front and that will be in the show notes can help you with that. Would love to have a chat, happy to offer you a free consultation for 30 minutes and where possible I'll make myself available to do that personally with you. And if I can give you some tips on creating that third type of zoo and understanding your specific circumstances, I will do that. But for now I'm going to give you four closing tips.
Speaker 1:The first is it takes conscious leadership. You can't just default to habits. You can't lead the way you've always led because it's comfortable to lead that way. You've got to really think about the leadership styles I've outlined and ask yourself are we doing the leadership styles associated with the third type of zoo? The second is clarity of vision. You've got to know what great looks like so you can constantly align what we're going to deliver for our visitors and the standards we're going to hold ourselves to in terms of the way we treat each other. If you've got that clarity of vision and can communicate it and critically hold everyone accountable to it, then you'll start to move towards that zoo.
Speaker 1:The third is a willingness to change, and you've got to change from zookeeper now. So there are learnings for everyone in making this transition and those learnings are much more powerful if it's obvious that the more senior the zookeeper is, the more willing they are to embrace the personal change they need to make, not just the changes that need to make globally across the zoo, but the zookeeper, the senior zookeepers cascading down, are prepared to make in themselves. We all want change. We don't necessarily want to change and the zookeepers have to model their willingness to do that. And the fourth tip is you need to develop a tolerance for awkward and uncomfortable. There will be a hump. There will be a hump you've got to get over to get to that better place on the other side, and that hump involves having conversations you don't necessarily want to have, making changes in style and habit and behavior and process that you don't necessarily want to make, not because they're bad, but because you're comfortable with the old ones. It might be losing a few people, a few monkeys, who don't want to adapt and start working in the new zoo. It might be losing a zookeeper or two who doesn't want to adapt the way they do things to create the third zoo. So you need that tolerance to sit with uncomfortable and not shy away from it. Don't see uncomfortable as wrong. See it as necessary as part of the growth process.
Speaker 1:I want to finish by again emphasising not for one second do we see the people in teams, in workplaces, as monkeys? It's simply a useful metaphor and, I think, a really powerful metaphor when we extend it beyond the original metaphor and think about the three options. Simply a metaphor for what we're doing to create a climate in which people can bring their best selves to work, because we've each got a best self and we've each got a worst self. Some workplaces specialise in bringing the worst out of people and others specialise in bringing the best out of people. So which one are you? Likely somewhere in between. As always, if we can do anything to support you, we'd love to have a conversation. If that leads to a further relationship with your organisation, fabulous. If not, if we can make a positive impact by having a quick chat, then we love doing that. See you in the next episode, or talk to you in the next episode and in the meantime, be authentic. Come and see the real thing. Come and see the real thing. Come and see. Come and see the real thing.