Five Questions
Five culture questions for housing leadership teams
The Competence and Conduct Standard places culture and behaviour change at the centre of what providers must evidence from October 2026. But unlike the qualification requirements, there is no prescribed curriculum or course list. Each organisation must define, embed, and evidence its own approach.
These five questions are designed for housing leadership teams to work through together - not as a compliance exercise, but as an honest assessment of where your organisation stands on the culture side of the standard. Each question connects to a specific requirement and surfaces the gap between what policy documents say and what staff and residents experience day to day.
They take about 15 minutes each. The disagreements they surface are usually more valuable than the agreements.
- 1
Can your front-line teams describe the behaviours expected of them - in their own words?
Not what's written in the code of conduct. Not the values poster on the wall. Can the people answering the phones and knocking on doors tell you, in plain language, what "good" looks like in how they treat residents?
If the answer relies on a document nobody has read since induction, the standard will surface that gap. The Regulator will be looking for evidence that behaviours are understood and embedded - not just documented.
The test is simple: ask five front-line colleagues what conduct is expected of them. If you get five different answers, the code isn't embedded. If you get the same answer in the same corporate language, it might be memorised rather than lived.
- 2
Are your managers equipped to lead culture - or just manage performance?
Across the housing sector, a common challenge: managers who are technically excellent, promoted for their knowledge of housing operations, but who've had very little support in leading the human side of their teams.
The Competence and Conduct Standard places managers in a critical position. They're the ones expected to embed behaviours, model conduct, address poor practice, and create environments where people feel comfortable raising concerns. That's leadership work, not process work.
Where things tend to get stuck is at this middle management level. Front-line teams want to do the right thing. Senior leaders set the direction. But the translation layer in between is where culture is either built or lost.
If your managers were promoted for technical competence and haven't been given the tools for culture leadership, the standard will expose that.
- 3
Have residents genuinely shaped your code of conduct - or been consulted after the fact?
The standard explicitly requires that residents have "meaningful opportunities to influence and scrutinise" the policy and the code of conduct. That's a higher bar than consultation.
Consultation asks: what do you think of this thing we've already designed?
Influence asks: what matters to you, and how should that shape what we build?Residents aren't housing experts, and they're not expected to be. But they hold something no internal assessment can replicate: direct evidence of whether conduct is working, because they experience it every day.
The organisations getting this right tend to involve residents early, not late. Co-designing what good conduct looks like, rather than inviting feedback on a finished document.
- 4
Does your learning and development connect to culture outcomes - or just knowledge transfer?
Most L&D programmes in housing are designed to transfer knowledge and skills. That's necessary, but it's not what the standard is asking for on the culture side. The standard asks for evidence that development translates into outcomes - into better conduct, better resident experience, better service.
The gap tends to appear when you ask a simple question: can you show that your training programme changed how people behave, not just what they know?
Attendance records don't evidence culture change. Certificates don't evidence embedded behaviours. What does evidence it is the resident who notices they're being spoken to differently. The complaint that was handled with curiosity rather than defensiveness. The safety concern that was escalated because someone felt the environment was safe enough to raise it.
If your L&D measures inputs (who attended what) but not outcomes (what changed as a result), the assurance conversation with the Regulator will be harder than it needs to be.
- 5
When someone isn’t meeting behavioural expectations, what happens - honestly?
Every organisation has a performance management process. The question is whether it extends to conduct and culture, or only to operational delivery.
In many housing organisations, technical underperformance gets addressed quickly. Behavioural underperformance - the manager who delivers results but treats people poorly, the team leader who technically follows process but misses the human moment - tends to persist. Sometimes for years.
The standard makes conduct a regulatory expectation, not just a cultural preference. That changes the conversation. But only if organisations are willing to have it.
The honest version of this question: are there people in your organisation right now whose conduct wouldn't meet the standard you'd want to evidence to the Regulator? And if so, what's preventing that from being addressed?
Explored the questions? See where your organisation stands across six culture dimensions of the standard.