Changing the Culture

In the 2000 film, "Remember the Titans", there is a scene between the two stars of the football team, Julius Campbell (Wood Harris) and Gerry Bertier (Ryan Hurst) where the linebackers are in a heated exchange about attitude and effort. Team captain, Bertier, accuses Campbell of being selfish and not thinking about his fellow teammates - he accuses Campbell of having a bad attitude. Campbell responds, "Well, attitude reflects leadership, captain."

An organization's attitude is essentially the culture of the organization. We hear far too often about changing the culture and honestly, I bet few even know what that means.

A Google search provides the following definitions “culture”.?

Dictionary: the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular nation, people, or other social group.

Company culture: the sum of formal and informal systems, behaviors, and values, which create an experience for employees. At its core, company culture is how things get done.

Work Culture: the attitudes and behaviors of employees within an organization. Many things influence the culture, ranging from the work, policies, leadership, goals, values, and mission.?

So, when somebody says, “we need to improve the culture around here”– what the hell are they actually talking about? And how can we be sure that the ‘cultural’ improvement is an improvement or better yet, make sure it is not just an improvement for one group over another??

I offer the following mix of the above definitions.?

Rob’s Definition: Driven by the leadership, mission, and history of an organization – the culture is the formal and informal systems/processes, behaviors, values, and attitudes that create an experience within the workplace that drive how people get things done, are treated, and generally how they feel about where they work.?

Let’s work backwards through my definition to see if we can find what would need to be changed to “improve” the culture.

First, the reason for the change would be to improve how people feel about where they work. Agree?

You can certainly change how people are treated and how they get things done, but that is too vague unless there are very specific maltreatments. And then that isn’t necessarily culture change as much as it would be outright violations that need correcting.

Changing the behaviors, values and attitudes is definitely an objective – but you can’t change those things in and of themselves, you have to change something else that will in turn cause those to change.

We change systems/processes all the time for efficiencies and other reasons, so they alone won’t drive cultural swings.

Lastly, very few of us have the control to change the mission of our organization and none of us have the ability to change the history.?

Hmm, so what are we left with…?

Leadership.

If the employees are clamoring for cultural change, then the leaders need to look at themselves and ask the question – what are we doing? What behaviors, values, and attitudes are we modeling? How are we treating our people? Is the “bottom line” above our people? If it is, then it ain’t the bottom, the people are…

And If leaders are touting culture change – look in the mirror. Stop looking at the employees and ask yourself those same questions I just asked above. What are you doing that is driving the culture? I know there are many levels of an organization and therefore many levels of leadership – but you control what you control, which is yourself. Make sure the culture of your organization is what it needs to be. Your influence and example will spread upward and outward.

Remember, it takes a long time to build a culture, shaping or changing it won’t happen overnight… but it starts with you. ?You are a reflection of the culture.?

Yes, you, captain.