Building an Inspired Culture
CULTURE AND STRATEGY
According to “The Internet,” Peter Ferdinand Drucker (1909–2005) purportedly said these words:
“Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast” - Attributed to Peter Drucker
I cannot find any evidence of it in his writing, but this quote sparks a fantastic question all leaders have to struggle with in constructing their businesses. “What is culture, and how does it relate to the strategy of the organization?”
Like most important words in the English language, it is difficult for a group of people to operate on it purposefully without a shared definition. For our discussion, I will use this definition for culture in a modern organization:
The context that binds people together, which results in action toward a common goal.
Culture is the context that a group of people shares. It can be positive or negative, optimistic or pessimistic, risk-averse or risk-taking, traditional or cutting-edge. Culture exists in every family, in every neighborhood, in every nation, in every company, and within every department within every company. It is hard to describe what culture is, so leaders often avoid discussing it and allow it to happen by default. I have observed many leadership teams who work to craft powerful missions, visions, and values, hopefully serving as the foundation of an influential and positive culture. Still, these words can only be the foundation.
LANGUAGE
Healthy and robust cultures emerge from motivated teams who start with a strong foundation in language. But, they must be nurtured to thrive. Language might be the single most powerful tool organizations have to bind people together toward a common goal. An organization’s culture manifests and can only thrive through the language that gets used and repeated. The more purposeful a leader is at curating the language used by its teams, the stronger the culture will get. If you try to force-fit language when it is not working, however, it might backfire. Leadership teams have to start somewhere; thus, they craft the language they believe will inspire their teams and paint it on the walls. However, it is foolish to think that the language that a leadership team creates, no matter how good it is or how well-intentioned the leaders are, will stay static forever. It is even more foolish to believe that any small group of people can come down off the mountain top with their values etched into a stone and lead the organization's people to magically live into those values without external, low-quality motivation like fear.
The way language manifests in an organization should start with a purposefully created lexicon by a well-intended leadership team. Still, as the organization grows, the culture must be allowed to evolve and change. It will do so without leadership permission, and it will evolve chaotically if no-one is nurturing it. It will also diffuse the more an organization grows, the more people it has in its ranks, and the broader the organization is distributed. There is no way around this. Growth invariably leads to a diffusion of culture.
Whatever is written down by the leadership team only serves as a foundation. The culture must change and evolve to thrive. The values and mantras painted on the walls but not used are still valuable because they influence conversations. But it is more practical to understand, through observation, which values are being lived and espoused in your organization. An organization’s culture exists in the spoken and lived context, not in the desired culture that we wrote down. When you hear the language showing up in repeated mantras, in the stories that are used and told, in art and symbols that are repeated, and in the conversations that occur in the hallways when the leadership is not around, you know that you the culture is being powerfully curated.
Leaders cannot create culture, they can only nurture it.
NATURE VS. NURTURE
A firm is not born with a great culture, and a firm’s culture does not emanate solely from its founders. David Packard discussed a leadership method that he termed “Management by Walking Around,” in detail in his book about the building of HP. It is fundamental for leaders to maintain a real pulse on what is happening in their businesses by talking to real customers and real front line workers regularly. There is no other way for leadership to understand how the culture operates, identify what is working, and find things that are not working. They have to be authentically listening and observing at the ground level with some reasonable cadence.
Leaders also need to be committed to walking the walk. The leaders themselves must live the values that they want to see espoused by the organization. The words must be used in proper context by the leaders if the people in the organization are to follow and use the words in the same way. Otherwise, these values have no power. When a leader professes personal integrity but behaves badly behind closed doors, it is only a matter of time before the culture is undermined. Those stories of incongruity with the values will become the stories told, and they will influence the culture in ways that will be difficult to suppress.
COMPONENTS OF CULTURE
A culture manifests as a collection of language elements and artifacts that live in its context. It starts and grows out of a shared lexicon and moves through the stated beliefs and values that are authentically espoused, the mantras that are purposefully used, and the stories and lore told repeatedly. These language tools lead to conversations that ultimately spark the action that makes a culture powerful. This diagram demonstrates how culture works.
Culture is heard in the language that is spoken and felt in the actions that it inspires. You have a positive culture when there is openness, optimism, and energy around the language. You can hear and read the language in action. You have evidence of a positive culture when the team is highly motivated toward positive action. It starts with the words that we make important and the words that we ignore, and it only matters when it results in positive action toward the goals that we set.
Words. We choose the words that we make important. When we are powerful with those words, we take the time to understand the words, define them in a meaningful way with our teams, and work toward more powerful shared usage. Later in this book, I will demonstrate how to do this with the words “Trust, Loyalty, and Advocacy.” As I discussed earlier, this is the only tool that our collective history's great leaders had in common. It is their words that live on and continue to inspire change today. In some cases, they are still motivating action thousands of years later.
Values. Many leaders were taught the importance of distinguishing values to align around. I have often seen them expressed as a set of between four and twelve words that sometimes get defined and used but are usually articulated more for the sake of posterity. Sometimes these words are spoken and acted upon consistently, but more often, they are not used in the daily language and only occasionally acted upon. It is the values that are consistently being lived and emulated by the people in the firm that are valuable and need to be operated upon.
Mantras. These sometimes manifest purposefully in mission or vision statements, but those are rarely remembered and used. In their most powerful form, they use the words that we make important and express our values clearly. The mantras that get used and repeated in your business begin to form the conversational context for a powerful culture.
Lore. The stories and lore that are told and retold in your business's hallways are of core importance to the sustainability of your culture. Every culture has heroes and villains, and they play out in the lore that that gets expressed by our people. The most powerful of these stories show the heroes that are succeeding in the context of our business and the villains that are defeated as a result of our good work. Cultures live and die by the stories told when new people join the team and new customers show up for our services. The lore that is told has a powerful impact on the way people feel about the business and the culture that persists.
Art. What would a culture be without its art? By art, I mean all of the various forms of art that come from any culture. In business, it manifests as our brand, our logo, and the symbols and iconography that we create for our day to day work. It also lives in the artifacts that we produce for the world like our website, the documents that we print, or the videos that describe what we do. It also lives in the performance art that shows up in our rituals and ceremonies, the secret handshakes, and how we celebrate our successes together, the way we greet visitors when they walk through our doors and the music that we play in our phone tree. A business is a work of art that is never complete and always evolving. It is expressed through its art.
CONVERSATIONS
None of the above matters unless it impacts the conversations that occur, in the hallways, when the leaders are not around. It is in the conversations that culture lives every day. In the dialogs, discussions, arguments, celebrations, and meetings, the culture of a business is authentically expressed. Unfortunately, leaders have very little control over these daily conversations unless they are in the room.
This diagram represents a pattern that I see in high functioning cultures. Both the quality and the quantity of the conversations that occur lead to direct positive action toward the group's shared goals. This concept leads to clarity around David Packard’s theory about walking around and making certain that we have a pulse on the actual conversations that are occurring throughout the organization. The better a leadership team becomes at scaling the quality of the conversations and listening to the language that works, the better the result. When we actually improve the quality and quantity of the conversations around the subject, we will see the needle move on the behaviors associated with it.
If we want people to care about a subject, they need to be talking about it and talking about how to change it together. Forcing people to sit through indoctrination classes may move the needle on their knowledge and understanding, but it will not create a sustainable, resilient culture for the organization. Resilience and adaptability come from the exhausting work of improving the conversations occurring every day throughout the organization.
TELL
If there are silos within your organization where great things are occurring, and the culture is thriving through high-quality conversations, study these groups deeply. I have seen, countless times, where leaders see that a group is successful by doing something a little different and label it a silo.
Even though it is working well, they swoop in and demand change because they are not following a process or don’t like how a particular member of the group operates. In most cases, they feel as though they are losing control or that their leadership is threatened somehow. This is a rookie leadership mistake. These are the parts of your organization that might hold the keys to the future through their innovative capabilities, and they need to be carefully curated.
The imperative with high functioning silos is to learn from them and inspire them by telling their stories and training their peer organizations around what they have learned. Give them a stage upon which to tell their stories.
CRAFT
The bottom of the chart represents where I see many organizational cultures. In the lower-left quadrant, with low-quality conversations happening without much consistency, an ad-hoc culture exists. Teams are willy-nilly with their language, words are used inconsistently, few stories exist, and there are few, if any, heroes. People figure out how to share context on the fly and in the moment, and there is very little repetition of useful context. It is difficult to scale a positive culture like this.
In the lower right-hand quadrant, there may be consistent and high quantity use of low-quality context. In this situation, a culture of chaos may exist. With poorly defined language, stories that don’t match the corporate mantras, and lots of “fake news” floating around, the culture will not contribute to high-quality action resulting from the conversations.
If the organization’s culture lies somewhere in the bottom two quadrants, start over. It is not a “chicken or an egg” problem. The culture has to start with the leadership purposefully crafting what they want the culture to look like and deploying it smartly by finding the important words, crafting some mantras, deploying them by example, and searching out and telling the stories around what works, including heroes who save the day for the organization. And, telling the stories around what doesn’t work, those where the villains in the ecosystem are defeated wherever they might lie.
ACTION
When you have a strong context that feeds your culture, it is easier to scale your teams' alignment. When you have a strong history of success expressed through stories and ways of being, it is easier to be confident. When all of these things are working well, it is easier to get your team committed to the actions needed to achieve a common set of goals.
AMPLIFICATION AND SUPPRESSION
The best cultures adapt and evolve organically; thus, the most powerful mantras and stories will emanate from within, through inspired people doing inspired work. The leadership must amplify them. When they are not working or having a negative impact, you have to work with your teams to modify and suppress them. The faster you do that, the better. However, when the contextual elements of culture result in positive action, a leader’s job becomes to repeat them, encourage their use, celebrate them, and amplify them as powerfully as you can.
The best cultures adapt and evolve organically; thus, the most powerful mantras and stories will emanate from within, through inspired people doing inspired work. The leadership must amplify them. When they are not working or have a negative impact, you must work with your teams to modify and suppress them. The faster you do that, the better. When the contextual elements of culture result in positive action, a leader’s job becomes to repeat them, encourage their use, celebrate them, and amplify them as powerfully as you can.
To address the quote from Peter Drucker from earlier, culture does not eat strategy for breakfast. Culture is an integral part of building a motivated team to achieve a meaningful vision. It is an essential part of a powerful strategy. A strategy that includes understanding how culture, through language, relates to motivation and results in shared action toward a positive result is destined for success. The organization’s culture is the context in which the strategy is pursued. They are deeply interrelated concepts, and we need a healthy, thriving culture to claim that we have a good strategy.
If you like this, please clap and share it. If you use it, let me know so that we can learn together.
References:
I could not find an authoritative source for this great quote, but I do believe that it came from Peter Drucker based on his work. | https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/05/23/culture-eats/
“The HP Way: How Bill Hewlett and I Built Our Company” (2006) By David Packard
