Cult vs Culture: Are you building a culture at your business or are you just building a cult?
“Culture is the character and personality of your organization. It's what makes your organisation unique and is the sum of its values, traditions, beliefs, interactions, behaviours, and attitudes.” – HR Insights Blog
Cult – NOUN
1. A system of religious veneration and devotion directed towards a particular figure or object.
1.1 A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or as imposing excessive control over members.
Everyone has an opinion on what company culture means and why it’s important to them, their team and their business.
We all know that workplace culture is fundamental in shaping how things get done, how people interact and engage with others and what is and isn’t appropriate and/or acceptable behaviour at work.
Building a positive workplace culture provides beneficial employee and work outcomes and creates a pleasant working environment. It’s also super important in attracting and retaining skilled staff to your business, gaining advocacy from your team so that they become the best promoters of your business or organisation.
But what many leaders in creative industries (maybe in others too but I’m focusing on my industry) fail to understand and connect with is that building a culture is not about building unquestioning devotion and slave like loyalty from your team to your business or worse still an individual leader within your business - you can’t force anyone to drink the Kool-Aid! They have to take that step by themselves (if and when they want to), and great businesses with great culture get this.
Great culture is about learning from the past, aligning your team with your core values, finding people who both compliment and challenge your thinking, open communication, having fun, working as a team and not being afraid to take risks because you know your team has your back.
A good culture encourages individuality, knowing that it can lead to great things. A good culture will also foster a communal atmosphere, but it starts to get a little culty when you’re either in or you’re out, and when there’s hostility towards those who don’t fit the mould. Don’t assume that a team has to be a clique in order to be the best…
A business usually goes from culture to cult either when the culture is taken way too far or those in the leadership team engender a system whereby they are seen as the all-knowing, all empowered individuals within an organisation and that the general rules of the culture don’t specifically apply to them. You also find in businesses that have more cult than culture they tend to attack people in their business rather than issues in their business.
I don't know about you but I certainly don’t profess to know everything in life… In fact, I very much enjoy the fact that there are things out there that I know very little about that I’m hopefully going to learn more about during my lifetime… As such I don’t demand or expect my team to run every decision by me or expect me to know the answer to every single question they ask me or to even go so far as require them to get me to seek out the answer for them if I don’t know it… I’m quite happy with them finding the answer from whomever can give them the answer first… Whoever that might be in the organisation – from a team member in the same department to the COO, CEO, an editor, animator, a consultant, intern or the cleaner just to name a few…
But as I have discovered through my own experiences and talking with many of you on LinkedIn… This is not the case in a lot of creative businesses.
I recall a company I once worked with where the CEO would insist on convening roadblock meetings with all the production staff every week – which in theory sounds great (the CEO getting everyone to get together to solve the company’s big problems) … But unfortunately, these aptly described meetings ended up becoming the biggest roadblock in producers lives as they ended up solving very few of their problems and were by and large used as sessions for the CEO to tell all his employees how they were doing everything wrong and how he (and perhaps a select few in his leadership team) had the answer to everything…
These sessions were designed to build culture… They were designed to build a sense of a team being able to answer their own questions and pool their talents to solve a problem but actually due to the way they were run all they did was erode the very culture they were trying to build.
Practices like the one above can seriously endanger the health of a creative businesses culture and if you are noticing instances like this creeping into your work place then you need to look at creating some safeguards to prevent your business becoming more cult than culture.
Some sure signs your workplace is more cult than culture include:
- All-knowing leadership
- No room for differences
- A new and better way
- Works prove beliefs
Some safeguards your business can reasonably take to quickly and effectively manage the situation are as follows:
1. Start taking responsibility
If you’ve already diagnosed the problem, start taking responsibility for it rather than avoiding the issues at hand. The worst thing you can do... Is to do nothing. Start addressing the issues straight away. Furthermore companies that specifically attack individuals in their business rather than the issues themselves risk further cult-like behaviour.
This can be a tough step. Particularly for smaller creative businesses without the infrastructure or guidance of an HR department, but owning the behaviour is the first step to dealing with it.
2. Make your team apart of your culture challenge discussion
There is nothing worse than organisations that feel doing outside of the box thinking with their leadership team is going to help them in a cult vs culture crisis. Stepping outside with the leadership team (who are often already inured in the cult of the business) to discuss your culture problem is just taking you further and further away from how to solve it…
Start by involving your team. If you want them to own the culture let them help you rebuild it.
3. Create Dialogue Opportunities
This flows off pretty seamlessly as an activation point of step two… Start developing opportunities and forums for leaders and team members to engage in honest, two-way dialogue in a safe environment.
This will force the business to think about problems from different points of view.
4. Challenge your culture
If your culture is good it can stand to be challenged.
A good way to do this is at the next hiring opportunity look for candidates who are on the fringe of your culture fit. People with different ideas and experiences who will naturally challenge the current culture and enable your company to grow and mature.
By encouraging the acceptance of these new employees and their new ideas you will find this will open up others to new ideas and perspectives which can in time change your cultures trajectory.
5. Make innovation a key part of your everyday business model
Creative businesses can only grow and thrive through the introduction of new ideas and by taking appropriate and considered creative and business risks.
By making innovation a part of your whole business from top down and down all the way up, encouraging all your employees to take time to move thinking and find new ways of doing things you are actually opening your business up to being more adroit to new thinking and building a culture that is positive and vibrant.
In closing if you want to build a great culture at your creative business:
Don’t
? Be a tyrant
? Isolate any outsiders
Do
? Attack issues rather than people
? Attempt to always be open to new ideas and experiences.
By doing this you will steer your business out of the reductive cult like territory and instead into a thriving, close-knit culture where everyone wants to work with you to get great results.
As always if this or any of my other articles was of interest to you and you’d like some advice or just to chat further… Send me a connection request or drop me a direct message.
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