What the f#@k is culture anyway?

Peter Drucker famously said culture eats strategy for breakfast, and if you’re anything like me it probably left you wondering – what every day? What if I’m fasting? What if I only have a double shot espresso for breakfast is that still considered breakfast??

Indeed, ponderous questions my friend. While culture is one of the most touted, discussed and tossed around concepts in leadership and management today, the exact definition of it and what to do about it still seems elusive.?

It’s such a bingo buzzword today that in leading business publications references to the term “culture”? have risen exponentially from 500,000 in 2019 to well over 2 million by 2021 (hooray sounds like I am in the right game).

People tell me in the leadership and team workshops I facilitate all the time that it’s the values, the vibe and how we do things around here. I don’t know about you that still seems kind of fuzzy wuzzy like the caterpillar.?

I’ve had one CEO pull me aside in the kitchen during a break and say to me “I hear that culture is your best competitive advantage but I’m still not sure of what it is and therefore how can it be my advantage?” Fair point I’d say and certainly he is not alone. How the heck are we expected to grow, develop and improve the very thing our competitive future may rely on if we can’t even name it or claim it.

Which leads me to where I began…What the f#@k is culture anyway?

What indeed.

A Deloitte culture survey found that while 94 per cent of execs and 88 per cent of employees knew culture was important to a businesses success, less than a third of them really understood their own culture.?

Last week I facilitated a team retreat for a large corporate services team, and they came up with all sorts of analogies from “it is the mortar between our bricks”, “it’s the glue that holds the place together” and “it’s our special sauce.” Interesting.

For something we bang on about so much you’d think we’d have developed something more sophisticated than that and yet here we are.?

I asked Chat GPT it’s thoughts: “Company culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, attitudes and behaviours that characterise and organisation. It encompasses the way employees interact with each other, stakeholders and customers.” Same same, blah blah.?

In a 1988 article penned by some brilliant fellows, far more scholarly than moi, they identified 54 different definitions of organisational culture. In the article authors Verbeke, Volering and Hessels looked at articles and books between 1960 and 1993 (long before open AI was in play and could have saved them a lot of time and energy), their research found that there no common definition, merely some common language themes that they could find including – members, shared, values,, organisation, behaviour, beliefs, patterns, norms and learned.?

While we can’t seem to define it we can at least articulate the benefits of doing culture well and cultivating it as your secret weapon including:

• Increased employee engagement
• Greater productivity
• More customer loyalty
• Less safety incidents
• Reduced absenteeism
• Greater employee wellbeing
• Higher profitability?
• Enhanced employee retention
• Increased innovation?
• Improved customer service?
• Greater competitive advantage
• More fun at work!

Here are a few uncommon definitions I created just for fun:

• The breath that gives life to the body corporate (say ahhhhh)
• The wind beneath our brands wings (hot air, don’t care)
• Culture is like ice cream – each one has a different flavour (rum and raisin anyone)
• The office aura (woo woo I know)
• If employees are the instruments, culture is the symphony they play (toot toot)?
• The cubicle circus (where everyday feels like a three ringed spectacle and everyone is clowning around).

So what say you out there in LinkedIn land? What’s your definition of culture and what the flip is it anyway, curious minds want to know below, add your quirky definitions to mine!