Your Culture is an Operation

Is your culture your organization's engine or its brakes?

Here is an easy way to tell:

Ask yourself, "Is my workplace culture a constantly resurfacing project we have to deal with every three to six months or is it an operation?"

Projects are unique, temporary endeavors designed to produce an innovative outcome with a specific beginning and end.

Operations are an organization's ongoing and repetitive activities, such as accounting or programs.

Projects and operations are inextricably linked by randomness and change.

We live in an increasingly dynamic and complex world in which the efficiency of operations in workplaces are more difficult to maintain.

When operations break down, as they so often do, what must be fixed to return them to a reliable state, or what must be reimagined in order to create an entirely new result, becomes a project.

The ultimate goal of any project is to produce a valuable and reliable product and/or process that serves to return our lives, our work roles, or our institutions back to reliable operations.

Operations and projects are the fundamental building blocks of human consciousness.

They seek to apply some form of order to chaos with problem-solving serving as the bridge.

It just so happens that steadily productive operations can devolve into projects in an instant.

This occurs whenever a previously dependable operation no longer reliably produces the desired result.

If your organization, department, region, or team is struggling with culture, if employee engagement and motivation is low, if behaviors like gatekeeping, bullying, or microaggressions are on the rise, it is typically because your culture has fallen from a reliable operation and into the messier realm of a project.

If you are a leader or a manager of people in such an organization, guess what?

You are now in charge of your organization, department, or team's Culture-Building Project.

The goal of your Culture-Building Project is to redevelop your culture into an operation.

The stakes for completing this project are as high as they come.

The greatest risks to your Culture-Building Project are time, talent, and attention.

• Time: The longer you wait to embark on your Culture-Building Project, the more complex a journey your team will have toward creating a cohesive and unifying culture.
• Talent: The less prepared you are to lead your Culture-Building Project with competency and care, the less your team will trust you to manage them.
• Attention: The less intentional you are about the purpose and the outcomes of your Culture-Building Project, the more likely it will be that your efforts will create additional confusion as opposed to cohesion.

How do we know this? Because culture clarifies the people and outcomes we can rely on.

Reliable means operational. You can't improvise your way to cultural success.

Seth Godin defines culture as "People like us doing things like this."

People like us (on the same team) do things like this (behave this way to achieve this outcome.)

We Stay for Reliable Cultures

If you examine the reasons why people leave their workplaces, you can see that a lack of meaning, uninspired leadership, unsustainable workloads, and unreliable relationships with colleagues play massive roles in pushing people out of our institutions.

These are symptoms of confused cultures.

When we look at why projects fail, executive research by the Project Management Institute reveals that the top five causes:

1. Change in the organization's priorities (39% of respondents)
2. Change in project objectives (37%)
3. Inaccurate requirements gathering (35%)
4. Inadequate vision (29%)
5. Poor communication (29%)

An organization's vision, priorities, objectives, and communication are all circumscribed by the organization's leadership and, therefore, its cultural roots.

Our cultural roots help us answer, "What should people like us be doing right now?"

The Culture-Building Project

What if we forgot about everything else and focused on resolving these five project problems and these four relational problems in our organization?

How would we be behaving differently?

Better yet:

• How would you and your team behave if you were only using tools and strategies that could turn priorities, objectives, vision, and communication from constraints into accelerators?
• How would you and your team behave if your cultural values, beliefs, and principles were clearly tied to your organizational priorities, your vision for the future, and the objectives you have for the next 90, 180, and 365 days?
• What would a clear and reliable culture suffused with trust do for your communication and the stakeholders you serve?

What would happen is that your culture would become the engine for your organization instead of its brakes.

How Do We Operationalize Culture?

Start by addressing the main risks to your Culture-Building Project. If you can mitigate these three risks and turn them from liabilities to working assets, you have a chance to great an operational culture.

1. Dedicate the Time: Dedicate a team and the time necessary to create a continuous improvement effort for our culture, so that you are never surprised by the inevitable cycles of change that occur within culture.
2. Develop the Talent: Ensure that you and your senior leaders and key managers are trained in continuous improvement project management methods, emotional intelligence, conflict resolution, and intercultural competency.
3. Be Intentional: Be intentional about the processes you choose to link your organizational values to principles, your principles to policies, your policies to performance management, and your performance management to training curriculum. These linkages are what will sustain and reproduce reliable behaviors within your organization for the long-term.
4. See #1 and start now.

If you found this framework helpful, it would mean the world to me to have you subscribe for my future updates, react to the content, leave a comment with your feedback, or share this with a friend who might find it useful for their team.

More to come from The Clarity Culture.

#projectmanagement #culture #culturematters #nonprofit #nonprofits