Read any description of “Great Organizations” and you’ll find a laundry list of customs, rituals, perks and slogans touted as elements of their unique cultures.
Beware!
Customs, rituals, perks and slogans become intertwined with an organization’s culture and help clarify it. They become signs and expressions of cultural values. But they can’t stand alone to create culture. Picking them up from one organization and plunking them down into yours is not a great strategy for optimizing your culture. Too often, looking from the outside in, even smart leaders can miss that point and put the cart before the horse in their efforts to drive culture. Here’s a story to illustrate:
It’s Not About the Coffee
I haven’t always been a Leadership Consultant. For part of my career, I was a church leader. During my tenure, our church built a new, much larger facility. One Monday after the move to the larger space, I got an email from a fellow church leader that went a little something like this:
Some of us recently visited your church and we hope to provide a similar “experience" on Sunday mornings. One specific change we’re considering is providing several kinds of coffee. We loved all the choices in coffee you offered on Sunday morning, and we’d like your advice on how to incorporate that into our Sunday morning experience as a way to welcome people and make them want to come back. What do you think?
I think you’re putting the coffee cart before the culture horse. It’s not about the coffee.
In the church’s original space, 1970-style percolators (with one kind of coffee) sat on folding tables in a glorified hallway adjoined by a less glorified hallway spanning the entire length of the building to the kitchen. Both hallways and the space around the kitchen buzzed on Sunday mornings as members and guests stood elbow to elbow visiting and drinking coffee between services.
In our new space, we had a huge, open kitchen and adjoining Café that included tables and chairs and a fancy coffee maker. And three kinds of coffee. Members and guests filled that space and did what they had always done….better and more comfortably.
Not knowing our history, from the outside looking in, “coffee” – three kinds of it -- looked like something you could pick up and plunk down into another church to create “the experience.” But it wasn’t the coffee. It was the people. People were serving that coffee and those donut holes. People were making sure guests felt welcomed and included. They had done it before with one kind of coffee. They did it now with three. The coffee – even three different kinds of it -- couldn’t possibly create the experience. The people and their shared value for hospitality were the experience. The coffee was just the social lubricant.
Culture is defined by the people an organization selects, develops and retains.
If you want to optimize your culture, look at your people.
- What unifies both the veterans and the newest recruits?
- What values drive them?
- What makes people stay?
- What attracts new people?
Effective communication can work like a gentle breeze to coax your cultural embers into a wildfire. But don’t make the mistake of putting the communication cart ahead of the culture horse.
Culture is more than what you say. It’s who you are. We all know that saying something doesn’t make it true, and saying something you merely wish were true about your culture can confuse people, diminish trust, and actually erode culture instead of strengthening it. But finding what is true and naming it can be a powerful force making it more true. Here’s another story:
It’s Not About the T-Shirt
In that same church, service was a deeply embedded value. Members were serving people all over our city and around the world by tutoring, feeding people, providing medical and dental care, building houses and churches, and more. We started naming that cultural value using one consistent phrase in all of our website and print communications: Southwood Serves (Southwood is the name of the church).
My successor put Southwood Serves on a t-shirt a few years ago. But it wasn’t about the t-shirt. She and her team used the naming of that cultural value as a springboard for a new ritual -- getting the entire church involved in a single day of service. The name of that day? Southwood Serves.
This will be the 6th year that 500+ people in that church spend a Saturday morning coming together to serve their local community en masse. Naming that cultural value became a vehicle for cultivating and optimizing the culture. It made the people’s shared value for service more true. The t-shirt is the sign of a cultural value and the people who share it. Not the impetus for it. Don’t put the communication cart before the culture horse. It’s not about the t-shirt.
Takeaways:
- Culture arises organically from your people and their shared values.
- It’s great to look outside your organization for ideas and inspiration on how to optimize its culture.
- Ultimately, though, what you choose to incorporate has to fit your people, their shared values and your history as an organization.
- Saying something doesn’t make it true. But naming what’s true can make it more true.
- Don’t get confused between the cart (the signs and expressions of culture) and the horse (the people and the values that define culture).
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