Every organization will have a culture. Every leader will be part of a culture. The leader will either carry the culture or be carried by it.

The question of culture is not one of importance. The question of culture is how is it defined and then layered in the organization? 

Culture is huge buzzword in the second decade of the 21st Century. This is largely because so much of our society has changed dramatically very quickly and there have been drastic cultural changes where old norms have been discarded and technology & ideology are forcing new strategies. The need for culture is pressing and immediate. As leaders forge new paths into the new global, digital world, new strategies arise. New strategies often lead to necessary changes in culture (Krishnamoorthy, 2015). Strategy shifts have led to a renewed interest in organizations emphasizing the importance of culture because the need to transform culture to keep pace with external and internal pressures.  There is collective agreement to the importance of culture.

However, what is not as unified is an understanding of what composes culture and how to maintain it.

Culture: Learning & Leadership

Part of the problem in defining culture is things that are hard to measure are often hard to define. How can something as seemingly mysterious as culture be measured? The answer starts at the beginning. Culture always has a founder. Culture is the accumulation of the founder’s beliefs and values transferred into the habits, practices, and behaviors of the people and processes of the organization. Culture does not simply occur. Culture is learned. Therefore, whoever is doing the organizational instruction often holds one of the most essential roles in the entire organization. Examining culture is an examination of what the group has learned or is learning. Someone is always responsible for the learning. Organizational culture fades when learning is absent or marginalized. Leadership is critical because leadership is the key to learning (Schein & Schien, 2016). It is more important for leaders to define their cultural values and beliefs than to talk about the importance of culture. Make no mistake: culture is always the responsibility of the leadership, because where culture goes, the organization goes.

People are always responsible for creating culture. In any successful organization, there is or was always a founder who instituted ideas, principles, and practices that were embraced and adopted at an early stage among a key group of founding members. Those founding members then transferred those cultural elements to an early group of adopters or initial stakeholders. A founder creates a group who learns from the founder or learns together. This group learning is the foundation for organizational culture (Schein & Schein, 2016).

Values: Inspirational & Operational

To create culture in your organization, department, business or team, the leader must identify core values that are essential to both the character and the strategy of the organization. Core values create cultural form for the unique context of the individual organization (Tocquigny & Butcher, 2012). These core values must not only sound good, they must work good. They must embody the principles and tenets of belief of the leaders. Values don’t set organizational direction, they carry the organization in the direction set by the leader. It is ineffective to list core values that no one knows and no one practices. It is unproductive to pick values that are solely aspirational, yet fail to become operational.

Good core values must be a combination of inspiration and perspiration. These values must lift the culture to an ideal state, but also a practical, achievable state. Too many organizations list values they don’t practice and they don’t preach. I have sat with many key leaders of organizations who fail to know their core values or they fail to know how these values are layered into the organization’s processes and procedures. Cultural values must be present in both the people of the organization and the practices & procedures of the organization.

Former CEO of Proctor & Gamble Ed Harness said, “Though our greatest asset is our people, it is the consistency of principle and policy that gives us direction” (Tocquigny & Butcher, 2012). Organizations that are inconsistent with their principles create an unstable culture that impedes the harmony and synergy of the organization. If the followers in the organization are unaware, having to guess or misaligned with values and principles of the organization, the cultural state of the organization will make sustainable progress difficult. Leaders must work relentlessly to embody the values, articulate the principles, and hold others to behavioral accountability. A healthy organizational culture is an organizational multiplier. A leader must do more than talk about culture. A leader must have the character that the culture represents.

References:

Krishnamoorthy, R. (2015). GE’s culture challenge after welch and immelt. Harvard Business Review.

Schein, E. &  Schein, P. (2016). Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition. Wiley.

Tocquigny, R., & Butcher, A. (2012). When core values are strategic : how the basic values of Procter & Gamble transformed leadership at Fortune 500 companies (1st edition). FT Press