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What is Your Leadership Priority?
How do we move culture from an idealistic organizational philosophy to a daily reality that you and your team can consistently identify as your secret sauce? Culture is just like any other leadership discipline, you have to create it intentionally. Just imagine if your company is regulated by the government. If you didn’t put any time into organizational compliance it would not take long before your operation would be shut down and your license suspended. Likewise, if you do not put intentional effort into creating and fostering culture it will suffer. No one will come and audit you for unhealthy culture, but you will experience the consequences daily if you neglect it. Therefore, you need to assess what assumptions and espoused values need to be aligned. When you see clearly what needs to be done you can start to address each cultural value in phases. Remember, that culture and values are not programs or services, however they are the ingredient that permeates every area of the organization. You are the master chef who is constantly taking a small taste of the sauce and adding just enough of this or that to create the secret sauce that makes your organization irresistible. There is are all kinds of thoughts about organizational values and how to identify and codify them. I suggest you start with what you have written down. As a leadership team, choose one value that presently has the greatest alignment with your teams daily behaviors and priorities. Be very honest with each other in assessing the reality of how the value shows up. Usually, you will find that there are many interpretations of the value and you as a leadership team need to bring clarity of what it is and is not. It is helpful to list it in both positive and negative terms. If you value “team work” does this mean that you don’t value “lone rangers”? Have the debate! It is worth it. If you walk out with leaders all passing on different definitions of a value you are going to create chaos and create a split personality within your culture. Once you have clarity about what the value is, then you need to assess what are the indicators that the value has permeated the organization. This is why it is best to start with a value you are confident is close to reality. You will have a positive and fairly easy conversation to get you started. A lot of stories, examples, and metrics should be easy to add to the conversation. This will contrast when you start discussing an aspirational value. When you are clear about what the value is and how you can identify the value in daily behavior and priorities, you can assess the alignment with the cultural assumptions. If there are contradictory behaviors to the espoused values you can start leading to make your espoused values a reality in your cultural assumptions. As you can see, aligning your cultural assumptions with your espoused values will take some time and much work. If you want to create a strong culture from which to grow your organization and put an end to the internal chaos, then I encourage you to click on “ schedule an introduction ”. We can can discuss fully your organizational and leadership needs and choose an approach that works for you so you can grow your business by growing your leadership.
Recognize you already have a culture. Be honest and identify what behaviors and values in your culture you want to protect and which do you want to eradicate. Edgar Schein, organizational culture guru, divides culture into three parts and illustrates it using a triangle. The tip of the triangle is “Artifacts”, the middle is “Espoused Values”, and the base of the triangle is “Underlying Assumptions”. Your artifacts are often physical representations of your culture. Outside of Nike’s board room is a large bronze buttocks that employees slap as they walk by to communicate, “nice job”. What are your artifacts that new employees are introduced to as being significant to your culture? What artifacts need to be introduced to reinforce the culture you are creating. Espoused values are simple. These are written down. The reality is that most organization’s espoused values do not represent the reality of their culture. Often they are a list of aspirational values that sound just like all the other businesses that employees have worked for. Therefore, they garner little respect and have little influence in how people think and act at work. The challenge is to make these values real and concrete. This is the responsibility of every leader and requires strategic intentionality. What are your leaders intentionally doing to make your espoused values a reality and what behaviors are at odds with your values? Underlying Assumptions, are the foundation of the culture triangle because it actually influences all the others. The assumptions are identified by engrained behaviors or by offenses. That which is important to the culture gets attention and becomes habitual. Underlying assumptions is the organizational reality! If mediocrity is an assumption you will see it in the performance of your team. If going over and above to care for a client is an assumption you will see it daily in the decisions and priorities of your team. Conflict will arise when these assumptions are challenged, this being felt as an offense to “how we do things here”. It never needs to be written down in order for it to be reality in the organization’s culture. Therefore, create the culture you want and then protect it at all costs! Culture will have more influence in your recruitment, employee retention, productivity, and overall team morale. When you have an aligned team united around a cause and values it brings greater meaning and motivation than money. When your top talent is contacted by a competitor with a sweet financial offer they will make the decision based on their alignment with the team culture. If there is nothing special about your culture, then money will attract. I have heard countless times on my teams that they chose to stay simply because they believed in our culture and loved their team. The personal cost was too high to leave. If you want to move towards creating a culture that transforms your team and its future all you need to do is click on “schedule an introduction”. I will contact you and we can start discussing your unique culture and goals so you can grow your business by growing your leadership.