Your Culture Is A Sanctuary.

?"People Believe It In Their Hearts After They See It With Their Eyes" Old Spanish Proverb

I wandered through an exhibition of Ancient Greek relics recently and discovered the Greeks penchant for building sanctuaries. Structures like the Acropolis and Delphi and Sunium. These sanctuaries were havens and safe places and creative hubs.

Strong cultures are sanctuaries for leaders and their people.

‘It is wilful blindness to lead an organisation without committing to building a strong culture for your people’

What is culture.

Culture is a powerful, multiplying essence in an organisation.

It’s the silent language or languages of your people.?

It’s your organisations DNA.

It’s what people do when the boss is not around.

It’s a type of auto pilot.

Culture is not only what people do without being told but how they do things.

Good culture is fairness.

Culture strangely does not appear on the balance sheet, and it is mostly not measured.?

We are also not taught as leaders how to build culture.

Culture is the only thing though that your competitors can’t copy.

It’s a superpower unrecognised.

It’s also the company attribute a leader is proudest of if they get it right, and it’s the most creative thing a leader does.

Culture first and foremost is CARE.

As a leader if you care for your staff, they will care for you.

If you care for your team, they will care for each other.

And if you care for your people, they will care for your customers.

‘Customers will never love a company until its employees love it first’ Simon Sinek

At the core of culture is collaboration, and if your profession is competitive like real estate or any commission driven business there is always an internal tension between co-operation and competition. This tension can pull the people-weave of your culture apart.?

Hiring is culture and culture is Hiring

People join leaders despite what we are told today about the power of brand.

Recruiting and keeping key people is still THE most important boss job.

Hiring is like adoption and leading is like parenting.

Build a business you would want your child to work in is a good rule of thumb for a leader.

In the US Marines the best marines are chosen as recruiters.

In a business the leader should be the best marine equivalent. Don’t delegate recruitment if you want to build a great culture.

Just as you cannot fatten a pig on market day you just can’t fix culture.

Rousing speeches and words on walls won’t change a culture and they might even bruise it.

To change the culture in a business, change the processes and systems within your organisation and get your people to work on these projects together.

This builds connections like synapses in the brain. These connections strengthen the culture in layers and trust grows while your teams work together. Trust is the glue that holds everything together. Trust takes time.

If you have team members who don’t get on, make them work together on a project and see what happens.

Poor culture blocks the pipes in the decision-making parts of your organisation.

Just like a plumber, you must go in and unblock things by asking specifically why and how decisions were made.

This unpicking is the way forward.

How do we measure culture?

Large organisations today measure culture by trolling through emails and other company internal communications examining how people talk to each other.

Some organisations survey and question their staff and use outside organisations to do assessments. For me, wandering around the floor of our organisations listening for laughter, looking for smiles, checking on sick days, watching productivity levels and seeing how many people are asking for pay rises are the most effective ways of assessing your culture. Great culture is never about money.

Soil Your Undies is a scheme created for farmers to assess the health of the soil on their farms.

It involves farmers putting old 100 % cotton underwear in the soil for a couple of months then digging them up. If the cotton is eaten away the soil is healthy.?

Culture is the soil (and the soul) of an organisation and planting good people in bad soil has the same effect in a business as it does on a farm.

Two simple questions that help assess the health of your culture are ‘How are you doing?’ and ‘What do you need to make your job (and your life) easier?’

Listening to your people with no agenda is just like planting the underwear in the soil.

How do you build a strong culture?

Its part alchemy and part science coupled with people artistry and a good dose of grunt known as emotional labour. The final ingredient is one I struggled with for years. It’s called patience.?

Coaching leaders to build strong cultures is about helping people understand that your people can hear when a leader’s heart is in their words or not, and over time a knowing grows within you about the health of your team’s culture.?

Positive cultures are very hard to build and mould if your team has too many takers.?

Takers are DRAINERS.?Givers on the other hand are the glue that holds cultures together. Givers are PUMPERS who pump up everyone’s tyres. Givers are earnest people who clamp the world together.

Volunteer organisations, footy clubs, writers’ festivals and emergency rescue groups only exist because of givers. Givers turn up on time and put the chairs away after meetings.

Sit down and make a list of all your team and put a T or a G against the names of your people and see what the ratios look like. Too many Ts means turbulence for a leader and the overuse of the ‘I‘ word on the shop floor rather than the ‘WE’ word.

Also ask this question about all your existing team. Knowing what I know now about all these people who would I NOT give a job to today?

Here’s another question for you.

Do you have a multiplier culture or a diminisher culture? Hint. Diminisher cultures have lots of staff turnover, boss blaming, unhappiness and lots of sick days.

Anxious people are invaluable in helping to build a strong culture because they want to work in a safe place and because they are sensitive to other people’s feelings and wants.

This is their gift from anxiety.

It does not always feel like a gift for them but as a leader I have watched so many anxious people over contribute to organisations I have led.

They just get culture because culture is care. You don’t need to explain it to them because they feel it.

A good culture also works like a filtration system within a team particularly for new staff.

Culture is caught not taught.

Strong culture is also a shock absorber for trauma.

Staff resignations and pandemics and GFCs are all easier to navigate in an organisation encased inside the deep protective layers of a good culture.

All cultures are unique, good or bad, but unless the leaders have good EQ, they will struggle to create a strong culture.

‘Nothing good happens quickly, only bad things happen quickly’

Culture is granular. Think Lego blocks.??

It’s a structure like friendship.

Tech is not your biggest challenge today.

A leader’s biggest challenge is, and always will be culture.

Because collaboration is the essence of culture and because women collaborate naturally, they seem to have a talent and a liking for creating and belonging to positive responsive safe cultures.?

They do not seem to need training in this space.

Cultures always need to be nurtured and protected.?

Recognising good work and effort and hanging out socially are all good ways to fertilize culture, but by far the most powerful way to strengthen culture is for a leader to help people with their lives outside work.?This is the hard stuff.

Culture isn’t just important, culture is everything. If you have doubts about the culture in your organisation, ask yourself this simple question as you drive to work. Are my guts churning or am I smiling as I walk through the front door?

"The way you see people is the way you treat people, and the way you treat them is what they become." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe