Culture: The Secret Sauce
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.
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