What fuels your fire?

I love the quote from Peter Drucker, "Culture eats strategy for breakfast". Among other things, it reminds me that even our best ideas require fertile soil in which to grow. To put it another way, if strategies are the fires we ignite then culture is the oxygen that feeds them.

In the design and construction industry our traditional hard bid methodology has created a powerful culture that can make the implementation of new strategies and collaborative delivery models extremely difficult. Our best attempts are often swamped because we fail to recognize that we must play a different game. To achieve the success we are striving for, we must be able to identify and rework the culture of our teams, our organizations and our industry.

Lisa Washington, the CEO of the Design Build Institute of America, characterized the heart of our most effective teams as being built on integrated behaviors that spring from, “…an environment of trust characterized by integrity and honest communication; mutual respect for and appreciation of diverse perspectives and ideas; a commitment to innovation and creativity to drive quality; value and sustainability; and professionalism, fairness and the highest level of ethical behavior.” (DBIA IQ, issue 4, 2014)

The oxygen provided by a culture like this fuels the collaboration, the creativity, the “project first” thinking and all the other critical behaviors that drive effective teams. If you compared your team side by side, does this describe your culture? What fuels your fire?