For many organizations, culture emerges without intention. Yet every organization is designed perfectly to get the results it gets! So, it’s incredibly useful for leaders to pay attention to organizational culture. Every leader wants their organization to be as effective as possible; you pour your heart and soul into your business, your team, and your customers, and you want to put as much value as you can into the world, with as little waste as possible.
Organizations are complex, and sometimes you may not feel that you really understand the people in your organization as well as you want to. What about yourself? How do you create an organizational culture of positivity, accountability, or productivity? And what is organizational culture anyway?
The Problem with Poor Culture
Being unintentional with your culture leads to wasted time and resources. The turnover rate for organizations with poor cultures is 48%! Turnover costs organizations billions of dollars a year collectively, not to mention all the wasted time from the distraction of turnover. Employees who stay in an organization that’s not intentional are far less productive. They have conflicting priorities, no clear sense of direction, and no personal attachment to the mission. Most leaders acknowledge how important company culture is. The challenge is they just don’t know how to make the culture what they want it to be. Having a ping pong table or bringing bagels into the staff on Mondays doesn’t make company culture.
Leaders are thirsty to know how to create the company culture they want to have. How do you make your culture your competitive edge? According to research published in Personnel Psychology, top performers are 400% more productive than average performers. And these top performers value company culture. So how do you attract, develop, and retain top talent in your organization? You create the culture you want to get the results you want.
It Starts with the SELF
Creating company culture starts with you, or the Self, at its core. We often talk about company culture like it’s this living, breathing thing that evolves. And to a degree, it is. Organizations are complex systems, and culture is something that emerges from a variety of factors. But at its core, culture still always boils down to human behavior. That’s why our Inside Out model of creating company culture has the Self at its core. You must focus first on developing the individuals on the team to maximize the effectiveness of the team to make your company culture your competitive edge.
Everything in an organization comes back to human behavior. Humans create processes. Humans design equipment, humans build software. Humans run meetings. Humans collaborate, or they avoid each other. Humans inspire each other or tear each other down, humans communicate openly, or they withhold knowledge, information, and feedback. It all comes back to human behavior. So if you want to make your culture your competitive edge, you have to focus on human behavior.
The good news is, we have tools and frameworks, and we will give you the knowledge and the skills to simplify it and to understand human behavior. If you truly want to develop an individual, you have to do it from the inside out. What we see from people on the outside is their behavior. And if you’ve ever led anybody, you know that trying to change someone’s behavior is not as simple as telling them to change. Maybe that can work in the short run, but if you actually want to transform someone’s behavior, you have to go deeper. That’s because our behavior is actually driven by the feelings that we have about the people around us and those feelings actually come from how we feel about ourselves. Because at our core is our self-concept.
A Personal Example
I’ll give you an example of this. I was 25 years old, working for NASA at Kennedy Space Center with a group of emerging leaders, and my mission for the day was to help them understand the value and the importance of mentoring so they can find a mentor to work with. They were my peers, but most of them were older than me. Before even coming into this room, I found myself questioning: “Are they going to listen to me? Do they think I’m credible? Do they have any idea about my background? Do they trust me?” I could feel I was already pretty nervous.
I was sitting in this conference room in KARS Park, which is one of the offsite facilities near the Space Center and talking about mentoring and not getting any engagement. They were not interacting. They were not answering my questions. And just at the moment of deepest self-doubt, one of the women said, in a very snarky tone: “I don’t even understand why we need to have a mentor.” And I snapped back, “Why are you even in this program?” The second the words were out of my mouth, I wanted to just pull them back in. I tried to recover, but the damage was done. It was incredibly clear that I was defensive and not showing up at my best.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I actually sought out a mentor of my own. I was sitting there in the cafeteria, having a lunch meeting with him. And he said, “I want to be really open with you.” And I already felt my physiology responding; my heart started to beat a little faster, and I said, “Okay.” He said, “I told my boss that you asked me to mentor you.” His boss is a respected senior executive at the Space Center. And he continued: “I told her that I’m mentoring you, and she said: ‘Good, she needs it.”
I was completely shocked. I was confused and incredibly upset. I felt my heart pounding. I felt my face just twist in confusion. I had barely even worked with this woman, and I didn’t understand where this was coming from. I was completely flabbergasted. He said, “Any idea why she might say that?” At the moment, I didn’t. But we talked it through, and as it turned out, the senior executive was actually really tight with one of the women in the room that day at KARS Park. And as soon as I mentioned that piece. My mentor said,” Oh yeah, that’s it, that’s definitely where she got it from.” So here it was, years later, and that one moment where I didn’t feel like I was in control of my own behavior because I didn’t have enough self-awareness, self-acceptance, and self-accountability to show up the way I wanted to, I now had a negative reputation with a leader that I really respected.
This moment helped me see the power of self-awareness. It was huge for me to realize that it was my own thoughts that triggered that kind of behavior in the first place. It was me thinking that they didn’t trust me or that they wouldn’t find me credible that led me to feel so defensive. It wasn’t even her snarky tone. It was all me. And what I didn’t realize is that it was actually my own self-concept and the parts of me that I didn’t even know about. I was doubting my own ability to add value, and that showed up in my behavior. From that point on, it became incredibly clear to me: I want to continuously focus on self-awareness so that I can be self-accountable, and feel more in control of my own behavior.
Individual behavior, which is ultimately what truly comprises company culture, always comes back to how each individual feels about him or herself. What does this mean for you as a leader wanting to create a company culture? How do you have any effect on how the people on your team feel about themselves? How do you make company culture your competitive edge? This is what we do here at Gallaher Edge. We invite you to join our Leaders Journey email list so we can help you evolve your culture.
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