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Culture
Culture is one of the most misunderstood concepts and practices in all of businessdom. I mean, if you ask twenty executives what is corporate culture, what is organizational culture, you will get twenty different answers. And that is where the problem begins is that we don’t understand what it means, but it’s actually very simple. Culture is the collection of behaviors that are modeled by executives, that are rewarded, and are encouraged. That’s what culture is. It’s how work is done. Is it done with urgency? Is it done with collaboration? Is it done with competitiveness? It takes a lot of time to get culture right. People try to wing it all the time. That’s a recipe for disaster. You cannot wing culture. Culture is something that you have to build deliberately and with intention, with the theory of the way you want your culture to be. If you wing culture, it’s a little like winging a family. Oh, I hope this works. I hope these relationships work. I mean, I think families work better when people are very intentional saying this is how we treat each other. This is how we operate as a family, and the same is true for organizational culture.
The Values Activation Construct
I actually have a construct for how a culture can be put in place, defined, and then activated within an organization. I happen to call it the Values Activation Construct, and it involves, five very distinct steps. So the first step is alignment, aligning the actual behaviors, values that you believe are going to get you to your goal the fastest and the most effectively. Here are our mission and goals. What are the behaviors that are going to get us there? It’s not random. It’s, like, not a free for all. Say the value is urgency. We operate quickly. We have a fire underneath our feet. The competition is coming for us. Everything we do is urgent. Now that’s not a value at every company. There are companies that have a value of deliberation and consideration, and there are different contexts that drive those different values. It’s not a blanket value. You know, urgency is only good in some situations. Deliberation is good in others depending on your strategy and your goals.
After that, there are four more steps, but here’s the thing about them. They’re not done consecutively. They’re all done at the same time, and combined, it’s a dynamic system that activates culture. So those are walk, talk, celebrate, and enforce. Let’s just take them one at a time. You talk about the values. You talk about what they mean. You talk about what they would look like. You talk about it when you’re doing them. You talk about it when you see somebody doing them. So it’s talk. It’s communication. You actually speak about the values so that everyone in the organization or on your team, if asked at three in the morning, what are our values? What is our culture? that they could actually answer that question.
The next piece of this is walk. This is the demonstration of the values by the leadership, by the managers or the top leaders. Everybody is showing what it looks like to actually live these values. The worst thing in the world for a leader or a manager is to be talking about the values and then not walking them, and that’s what people talk about behind their leaders’ back. If you think they’re not talking about you behind your back for that, you’re wrong.
The next piece of this is celebrate, which is to call out and make a big deal about the people who are living the values, demonstrating them. “Look. There’s Sally. She’s demonstrating our value of urgency by returning emails immediately and responding to our customers’ complaints within fifteen minutes.” It’s really best, if you possibly can, to celebrate with cash. Show somebody in their bonus. Show somebody with a raise. That’s how people feel it. That’s the most effective way to celebrate people. Celebrate in all the other ways that you can, but make sure it’s a big deal so that other people want that kind of love being shown to them.
And the last piece is the hardest piece, and that’s enforce, and that is actually saying something when people do not demonstrate the values. Sometimes people are so inadequate in demonstrating the values that enforcing means saying there’s probably a better place for you to work. But other times, it’s a matter of having a conversation with somebody saying, look. We’ve got these values in that meeting. We have a value of collaboration. And in that meeting, you were not collaborative. I need to talk to you about that, and we’d really like you to take the lead in the next meeting in demonstrating what collaboration looks like.
So those are the steps. Align, walk, talk, celebrate, and enforce. And if you’re doing them all at the same time in a dynamic system, you are activating your values every day. And that’s how you deliberately and intentionally keep a culture alive and make sure that it is the fabric of how you do work.