Key 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.
Can your resident-facing teams describe the behaviours expected of them - in their own words?
Can the people answering the phones and knocking on doors tell you, in plain language, what "good" looks like in how they treat residents? Not from memory of a document - from how they understand their role.
The Regulator will be looking for evidence that behaviours are understood and embedded - not just documented. The distinction matters: a code of conduct that lives in practice looks different from one that lives in a policy folder.
A useful test: ask five resident-facing colleagues what conduct is expected of them. Consistency is a good sign. But the most telling indicator is whether the answers sound like real working life or like a policy document being recited. The standard is looking for evidence that behaviours are genuinely understood, not just formally communicated.
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. Resident-facing 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 yet been given the tools for culture leadership, the standard creates a useful reason to address that.
Have residents shaped your code of conduct - or been consulted on it 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 can look like asking residents to respond to something already drafted. Influence looks like involving them in shaping it from the start. The standard is explicit about expecting the latter.
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.
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 and completion data are valuable for tracking participation, but the standard asks for something further - evidence that development is changing how people work and how residents experience services. That's a higher bar than most L&D reporting is currently set up to meet.
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.
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 the conversation happens openly.
A harder question underneath this one: 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 would need to change to address that?
Explored the questions? See where your organisation stands across six culture dimensions of the standard.
Key Questions for Leadership Teams
PPTXFive culture conversations for housing leaders preparing for the Competence and Conduct Standard.
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