BENEFITS OF A HEALTHY ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

After this lesson, you should be able to:

1. Explain the key traits of a great culture

2. Differentiate between a Culture by Design and Culture by Default

3. Explain the elements of a Culture by Design

4. Describe the benefits of leading through learning

The task below will be automatically checked off once you complete taking the quiz.

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Culture is the vehicle to an organization’s transformation and its continual evolution. Culture is the constant that transcends change in strategy, environment and everything else. Designing a culture that spans all layers of an organization demands more than trends and rhetoric. Association cultures should be inspired by and modeled after the people and things we strive to be or achieve ourselves:

Smart – Funny – Creative – Expressive – Helpful – Beautiful – Hopeful – Ambitious

A good culture is not rigid or polarizing. It should clarify your organization’s view and purpose and expand its capabilities. It tells your story, by providing context and nuance to the organization’s identity. That story is how everyone involved relates their own culture and purpose in the world to the organization’s culture.

Culture must be understood to encompass your internal behaviors along with the way you operate and are seen in public. Members, and even people outside your membership demographic, need to align with the cultural ideology you put in place, or you will have a mismatch in setting priorities and finding a good operational rhythm.

RATHER THAN THE BELIEF THAT ALL CHANGE MUST COME FROM THE TOP-DOWN, GENUINE CULTURAL CHANGES ACTUALLY GROW IN ALL DIRECTIONS.

Key Traits of a Great Culture

Inspired by the world outside the organization
Mutually beneficial to both the organization and those it interacts with and serves
Everyone connected to the organization knows its Core Purpose
Internal staff and your external audience (i.e., current members and the public as a whole) understand the organization’s set of Core Values

With a strong culture is rooted in purpose and aligned through values, you can remove many of the micromanaging details often found in policies, and rely on the day-to-day ingenuity that resides in your team’s collective mind, but often remains locked up.

Extensive policies and procedures aim to standardize and reduce risk and ultimately stifle thinking and innovation.

The more apt an association is at giving meaning to its workplace, purpose, culture, and policies, the more creative, informed, empowered and satisfied its people will be.

Organizations require a more flexible framework to allow for better collaboration and support, while staff and leaders alike will take on a more diverse set of functions.

It takes intensive planning, patience and a genuinely bought-in leadership fully competent of and committed to the importance of culture before an organization can reap the benefits of a healthy culture — innovation, teamwork, brand/staff loyalty and streamlined operations among them.

It should serve and inspire people to do better work. By offering access to the organization’s lifeblood that fuels its work, a healthy culture is the center of gravity for everything your organization does, so long as you know how to talk about culture correctly and motivate your people to carry it out for the long term.

CULTURE BY DEFAULT VS. CULTURE BY DESIGN

Avoiding a faux culture, which is ultimately useless at best and harmful at worst, requires a Culture by Design. An intentional, thoughtful culture depends upon a thriving, autonomous, scalable and competitive environment rooted in purpose and guided by values. It’s also only as good as one’s ability to recruit supporters and contributors to it.

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Culture by Default

In most organizations, the culture is there by default, meaning a culture exists, but at its core, it was not created intentionally. In many other instances, there are embellishments made to a culture for the sake of appearing like a Culture by Design, but the core was not designed intentionally and is therefore rather hollow.

A Culture by Default is not the kind of place purpose-driven workers, clients or members want to be.

Culture by Design

A true Culture by Design, in contrast, is painstakingly crafted, communicated and continually reinforced at every layer of an organization. At its core, each pillar of the cultural foundation of the organization is thought-through and aligned to provide a stable and powerful base for success.

When we find applied innovation, which requires a strong Culture by Design, we see amazing results. We see how the final product changed an aesthetic or even an entire industry.

Simpler is better when sharing ideological concepts. The actual mission of the association might be deeply meaningful, but when expressed in a convoluted or clichéd way, it becomes that boring plaque on the wall of the boardroom rather than a living part of the organization’s culture. Such a misstep occurs when the organization forgets who it is somewhere along the way, and attempts to cover its lack of conviction with a kind of bandage — a generic and unconvincing purpose.

To deliver thoughts around culture and its benefits convincingly, leaders must find ways to simplify the concepts and make them relatable to everyone both inside and outside the organization.

When we present culture as a choice and as something that lives, breathes, grows — and thus capable of dying — the idea of culture sustaining lasting change sounds counter-intuitive to a lot of people. But when we talk about how it forms a legacy (creates a model that others can learn from, contribute to and be immensely motivated by) culture takes on the image of something capable of transcendence, something that will continue to add value and strength to both the organization and the people connected to it, or its mission, indefinitely.

Encouraging a Learning Culture

We know if we’re not trying to learn something new, we are failing the organizations we lead.

Establishing a learning program that the leader is actively and visibly a part of is the best way to set a tone that inspires a collegial type of culture in which everyone can find their best assets and help grow the organization.

Leaders and people in general, who don’t want to learn have a fixed mindset (fixed mindsets are terrible for growth) and cripple not only the leader’s power to invoke progress but also the entire organization’s opportunities for finding a better way. It comes down to cohesion, a pivotal component of all great cultures.

You might say a team that learns together, stays together.

When leaders foster an environment of learning, they enable their team to take an active part in the organization’s development. By allowing everyone to contribute new ideas, strategies, and tools, you provide more chances for a problem to get solved.

By listening and leading with questions instead of answers, leaders can spot new opportunities more readily. Leaders need to be examples of growth by constantly learning and sharing with their team what they have learned. It may not be possible to give a fair testing period to everyone’s ideas, but a leader who is receptive to the input of others creates an atmosphere that encourages people to contribute as much as they can to their work.

When you establish a learning culture, you’re giving everyone a chance to work at their maximum potential. You’re saying that while a person might work at a low level within the organization, they could be really strong in a particular topic and should be able to come forward and teach everyone else something new about it. The key here is generating the most diverse set of ideas.

Diversity of thought doesn’t come if you have the same people talking and making decisions all the time. You need a wide variety of people thinking and sharing — and have a culture to support it.

This extends beyond your staff. Associations have the amazing advantage of being able to mobilize volunteer workforces to support initiatives in committees and task forces.

For an association to have a thriving culture of learning, the approach described here has to extend beyond your physical office to include volunteers, members and even those outside your membership circle. You don’t get that in an environment unless the leader is emanating an open, receptive and learning-centric tone.

LEADING THROUGH GROWTH

When organizations grow, their focus often broadens. Your consumer base, client/member profile, staff, policies and the markets that impact them, all widen and change as a result of outstanding organizational growth.

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Beginner's Mindset

A beginner’s mindset is actually a very powerful tool for improving culture. Rather than assuming you’re the expert on a particular issue or problem, assume you’re a beginner, and it opens up the possibility of learning more. The more you think about something, the harder it is to learn more about that topic.

Adopting a beginner’s mindset makes you approachable as it does more efficient and trustworthy. It allows you to bring out the expertise that often lies quietly in other people.

Take Action

When the leader is actually doing the stuff they’re promoting and showing the team they’re always learning and listening, the game changes.

People want someone they know will be receptive to their needs and concerns, not dismiss them or punish them for speaking up.

They want a leader who …

is confident and driven, not cocky and lazy
they can learn from
believes in them and inspires them to push themselves further than they would on their own.
is capable of delivering them and the rest of their team to victory

Check Your Ego

Healthy Ego: A healthy ego is important for leaders at every level. They need the confidence to lead others and execute difficult tasks.

Unhealthy Ego: When egos get out of check and cultures celebrate a “hero worship” view of leaders, the fixed mindset sets in. Few people readily acknowledge they have a fixed mindset, but many leaders who have been successful, particularly when they’ve had few failures in their history, increasingly believe they have the answers and fail to listen and learn. Bringing humility back to the corner office, and to every level of an organization, is one of the most critical needs for today’s associations and commercial entities.

Techniques to Avoid “Hero Worship” Ego

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Listen and Ask Questions FIRST

Listen and ask questions before sharing your opinion. Often, a person taking the risk to present a new and contrary viewpoint or idea is shut down because one or more people in the room quickly shoots holes in it. That results in the best idea losing out to those of the most stubborn person in the room. The key here is truly listening before asking any clarifying questions.

Don’t spend time thinking about what you’re going to say in response to someone when they speak. Instead, use the time to hear what they have to say and formulate your questions. After you’ve had this exchange of questions and answers, it’s fine to share your views, but this extra oxygen being thrown into the process allows a fledgling idea to have a chance of taking hold in a constructive discussion.

Debate

The goal behind this tactic is to get everyone in the room to listen and consider the new idea fully. After the Q&A is complete, each person in the room is required to argue both for and against the new idea. By requiring everyone to debate both sides of the topic, they have to expend intellectual and emotional capacity to really think through the ideas. It’s amazing how often you’ll find people switching their views as you go through this exercise.

When people believe in their leaders and have the right guidance from them, they rally around them and work beyond the call of duty to push the organization forward in whatever way they can. That’s the mark of a strong culture, one that allows the leadership to focus on the horizon knowing they have a team behind them willing and able to take them wherever they want to go.

Activities to apply this lesson’s concepts

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Align Purposes

Communicate

When people in other professions talk about culture, it’s often less scary. It seems more natural, typically greeted with greater curiosity and willingness to talk about culture in fields such as academia and media. Anthropologists, sociologists, journalists, artists, filmmakers, musicians, historians — they all talk about culture, but few get to the root of it.

If an organization is not committed to understanding its bigger purpose and building a culture around it, then it will only create a superficial culture riddled with contradictions and confusion. Open lines of communication around the concept of culture, and listen to the feedback you receive from both inside and outside the organization to assess where your organization stands on the idea and how it can be improved.

There are many ways to strengthen communication and get people to generate new ideas, two that are helpful include:

Listen and ask questions before sharing your opinion. Great ideas and deep personal resolve don’t always coexist in the same person. If you want to encourage people to bring their ideas forward, make it a habit to ask at least three, unbiased clarifying questions when a new idea is presented. Some of the questions I’ve used include, “How would this impact our staff? How would it impact our customers? Does this align with our Core Purpose?”
Debate — not argue. After you have listened to a person or group’s idea and exchanged a few clarifying questions and answers, make everyone involved (regardless of which side of the idea they may be on) argue both for and against it. People often take sides too quickly in a meeting when a new idea presents itself. This mental exercise requires people to think about the pros and cons in a new way, and most often results in a deeper understanding of the idea itself and a change in opinion.

There are four key benefits to culture that should be communicated clearly and consistently:

Low cost: Attitude and environmental changes are free or very near to it.
Sustainable: Culture stimulates new growth while simultaneously helping to nurture the progress an organization has already made by making people (both inside and outside the organization) want to invest themselves in the organization and its work.
Return on Culture: A strong, well-articulated culture adds value to the organization in the eyes of its staff, members, and the general public.
Alignment: Culture is a useful tool in bringing members, potential members, staff, volunteers and the public together based on such key motivators like a sense of purpose, values, professional needs and interests and personal convictions.

Culture of Learning

Realized Goals

Culture by Design has three major parts; identify your organization’s:

Core Purpose — Core Purpose is the true reason why the organization exists. Profit’s not Core Purpose. Profit’s important, but it’s the fuel that drives an organization, not its underlying reason for being. Core Purpose must be real and meaningful. Every part of what you do as an organization should tie to Core Purpose.
Core Values — Core Values are the agreed-upon behaviors that a person or organization will hold themselves up to as they pursue their Core Purpose. Values guide our decision-making, and they should be immutable and non-negotiable.
An Envisioned Future — Set large goals that you strive toward over a long period of time (ten to thirty years). In their 1994 bestseller Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras define this type of long-term goal as a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal,” or BHAG. The purpose of such a goal is to set a stake in the ground defining where you’re going as an organization. It should be something you don’t know how to do, but rather are striving to learn about and achieve as a team. Once achieved, BHAGs should be reset as something new using the same criteria.

CHECK FOR UNDERSTANDING

See if you understand the concepts by completing the quiz. Click Benefits of a Healthy Organizational Culture Quiz to begin.

Benefits of a Healthy Organizational Culture Quiz

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