One thing that I think leaders don’t consider often enough is their organizational culture.
When I established Diamond6, we thought about that in advance. That’s one of the reasons why I selected “awareness” as one of the values I wanted us to stress. I wanted it out there to remind me and my team that periodically we had to reflect on ourselves, the team, and the culture of the organization, which in essence is the inextricably linked to our mission, our vision, and our values— who we are, where we’re going, and what we’re all about.
Why is culture important?
Well culture of course, is the values and beliefs that underpin everything that an organization does and its identity. It further is all part of the implicit assumptions held by the members of that organization:
How we perceive things
How we react to problems
How we conduct ourselves
As leaders, why do we care?
As someone once said about organizational culture, it eats strategy for lunch every single day. If you don’t consider that, the best laid plans can go awry because they’ll violate organizational culture and norms. But in essence, we have to examine ourselves and be self-aware to ensure the particular values that we espouse as an organization are congruent with the actual values that we’re conducting ourselves about. Those two things need to stay the same.
A very famous organizational theorist by the name of Edgar Schein once said the most important things leaders do are:
Create culture
Key for somebody creating a new organization. There’s a lot of entrepreneurialism in America. It’s very busy time those young leaders were trying to get an organization off and running whether it’s for-profit or not-for-profit. When solving day-to-day problems, sometimes they need to stop, sit down, and reflect. “What are our mission, vision, and values? What is our culture and are we living up to it?” And do that periodically as they’re rapidly trying to create something.
Manage culture
This often times has to be a reflection of— has our environment changed? A key example of course is when organizations merge, and in fact, most mergers fail. And they fail, why? Because they have not been able to manage and bring these two culture together as these organizations are trying to conduct a merger.
Destroy culture, if necessary
When is that appropriate? Well, it’s very important for us to be very conscious about this and as a leader, understand a couple things. In the military, when I was an officer, we used to say: “An officer is always on parade.” The leader of an organization is the same. How he or she actually conducts themselves in the workplace will establish a lot of assumptions and the reality of the enacted culture of the organization. As a leader for example, if you allow people to tell off-color jokes, use bad language, treat each other inappropriately, put up inappropriate posters in the workplace— if you allow that to occur, it’ll quickly be assumed that that’s what we’re all about and it’s okay within our values and our culture. So very quickly you need to make sure that doesn’t occur and we stay true to our values.
Secondarily, if we have someone, even if they’re very, very critical member of the team perhaps, who egregiously violates the values of the organization we have to make a critical call. It maybe necessary, quite frankly to that person departs the organization. Because if not, if we retain them, then we’re sending a very clear message to the rest of the team that our values that we espouse, really don’t mean a great deal because we’re not willing to live up to them. You’ll find over time it’s better to the overall health of the organization and you will quickly find someone that can fill that space even though it might have seemed to be critical at that moment.
We want to hear from you! What ways can you (or have you) improved your culture?
If you’re looking for more videos and articles about developing your leadership skills, check out our YouTube channels for more videos and our blog for more articles.