Your call is very important to us

The other day I was in need of speaking to my bank. So, I picked up the phone and called them. And then spent 50 minutes on hold listening to a remarkably tinny snippet of pop music, and every ninety seconds or so, a recorded voice assuring me my call was very important to them.

At first, I trusted the voice. I was important to them – by minute ten I was quite certain of the opposite, and by minute forty I was convinced they actually hated me. My call, it turns out, was not important to them at all. I know this not because of anything they've said – they've said all the right things, every ninety seconds – but because of what they've done, which is leave me, sat in the kitchen with several cups of tea, for the better part of an hour listening to tinny pop music on speakerphone.

That small, frustrating gap has a rather lovely name. The word is congruence, and it's a word I never tire of saying – it's a rather pleasing thing to say. Its Latin root gives us a definition worth looking at: the suitableness, or appropriateness, of one thing to another. One thing matching another. In this case, the appropriateness of what we say to what we actually do. When the two agree, there's congruence. When they don't, there's a recorded voice telling me how much it values me whilst a churn through an entire packet of Jaffa Cakes.

Let's be real about this, it's everywhere, once you start noticing it. "We value honesty," says the company who are, as I write this, working its way through a fraud case. "Customer service is our priority," says the hold music. But it lives just as much in the smaller things, and the things much closer to us too.

It's the friend who says they'll call and never does. It's the parent who says "be kind" and then hurls abuse at the referee from the sideline, whilst wearing the respect coat. It's the person who talks a magnificent game about the novel they're writing, the business they're starting, the person they're becoming, and somehow never quite writes, starts, or becomes. It's the luxury hotel, at luxury prices with cheap coffee sachets and staff who'd prefer it if you just packed your bags and go away. We are all, in some part of our lives, that warm recorded message played over a tinny pop song – we are human, it's kind of inevitable.

Because here's the thing worth playing with a little: people watch what we do far more closely than they listen to what we say. This isn't cynicism. It's simply how trust works. Trust is built out of consistency between words and actions, congruent with each other, observed over time. When the two come apart, nobody focusses on the words, they focus on the actions. The actions, what we do, is the more reliable signal and everyone knows it. Say one thing and do another, and the people around you might give you a couple of breaks – she's having a bad day – but over time, when our words and actions don't match, they conclude that the words were never the truth. The actions were.

John Wooden put this very neatly in a single distinction. We cannot control our reputation, he said, but we can control our character. Reputation is what other people decide about us from the outside, based on what they see, over time. Character is what we actually do – when nobody's watching, and, remarkably important too, when everyone is. Chase the reputation and you'll spend your life managing an image, a social media account, a personal brand and content calendar. Look after your character, and the reputation often takes care of itself, because it's really just a lagging report of your behaviours and actions anyway. Consistency builds trust. Congruence between what you say and what you do builds credibility. There is no shortcut I've discovered that skips the doing, at least not in the long term.

The beauty of focusing on the congruence between actions and words, is that it compounds. Isn't that something to get excited about? Small consistent actions accumulate, overtime, into a solid character, and a reputation for reliability. Once people believe that what you say tends to match what you do, everything gets easier, more fun and more human. They take you at your word. People know where they, and you, stand. The friction lowers and the rewards increase in every future conversation, because nobody's preparing, scrambling and trying to make sense of the gap between your promises, and your actions. You've earned a truly marvellous and valuable thing that one person can extend to another: the benefit of the doubt.

The inverse, tellingly, compounds too, and often far faster. Get caught, even once or twice, saying one thing and doing another, and people learn to ignore your words and watch what you do. Every subsequent sentence you utter now arrives pre-discounted, and covered in question marks about the authenticity. It's a pretty tough place to be. You can be entirely sincere in what you say and it won't matter, because they've stopped accepting claims from you – they only accept evidence now. It's no doubt an exhausting place to live, and it is almost entirely self-inflicted. And I think hypocrisy is noticed faster than nearly anything else we do: it doesn't just cost you the moment you're caught, it retroactively removes the trustworthiness of everything you'd said before. I recall some leaders standing in front of the team, in a really hard period of growth, saying how much they valued everyone, wanted a positive culture and wanted everyone to flourish. What we wanted them to say was the truth; they, and all of the newly appointed execs, were only really here for the exit.

This is why culture – whether of a company, a family, a band, or a friendship – is never what's written on the wall or printed in the values document, or included in the welcome email. Culture is what people actually experience, day after day: the group habit of what everyone actually does. It's the aggregate of individual behaviours, repeated often enough to become expected, expected often enough to become normal, normal enough, in the end, to become invisible. You cannot write a culture into being. You can only behave it into being. This means it forms whether you're paying attention or not, out of the behaviours you model, reward, and tolerate.

So the behaviour has to be visible. The example has to be lived – not described, not aspired to, not printed on a t-shirt. You don't need a title or a stage or anyone's permission for this, which is the ridiculously overlooked and hopeful part: influence of this kind doesn't come from a position, only from what you do; what you repeatedly do, when no one is watching and when everyone is.

I finally did get through to someone on the phone, and, to my amazement, they offered an apology, said they couldn't deal with my issue, and transferred me to another queue. At least this one had better music between the soothing voice saying I was valuable to them. Nobody on earth believes that recorded message though, they believe the hold music, the wait, the actual actions. The only question worth asking about anything you're building – a reputation, a friendship, a piece of work, a life – is whether your words and your hold music are congruent with each other.

I've since switched banks. Twice. For the record.