Does your culture support your purpose and strategy?
Do you have a “strong” culture that is clear to everyone in the organization?
Peter Drucker is famously attributed as saying:
Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast.
A poor and/or weak culture can undermine your grandest of plans.
And culture is a direct result of leadership. This may be your wake-up call.
How do you build a strong culture?
Create Your Own. There is no one size fits all culture for every organization. It needs to support your purpose and strategy.
Involve Other Leaders. Call together a diverse group of people from your organization from different levels in the hierarchy whom you think exhibit the kind of leadership behaviors that exemplifies the culture you want.
Set Your Values. Ask the group to create a list of the most important values that you want everyone to follow.
Identify Key Behaviors. Based on the values, identify key behaviors that you want everyone to emulate. Share the values and behaviors broadly.
Be a Role Model. You and the others who set the values and behaviors need to role model them. People will watch what you do much more than listen to what you say.
Reinforce Regularly. You will need to remind people of these regularly and hold people accountable who do not follow the values and behaviors.
A strong, supportive culture takes time to develop – but can pay huge dividends for even longer. If you don’t like the culture in your organization, there is only one way to change it – it takes leadership. It is time to get to work!
