You're Creating a Culture, Not a Cult

January 27, 2025

Welcome to Navigating the Fustercluck. A Jargon Monoxide-free weekly newsletter. It's also a New & Noteworthy podcast available on Spotify and most major platforms. This week we delve into the difference between creating a culture versus a cult. Something that too many leaders don't seem to understand.

Don’t Confuse Atmosphere for Culture

Taco Tuesdays, birthday cakes, and company happy hours are all great, but they aren't at the core of your culture. A positive atmosphere can be fun, but it's your values and beliefs that make up your culture.

Do you reward merit or office politics? Are you a top-down command-and-control outfit, or a collaborative grassroots organization? Do you "celebrate" diversity, or actually live it? Do you promote maternity/paternity leave or pressure people to come back to the office before the ink on their little one's footprints even has a chance to dry?

These are the kinds of questions you need to ask yourself to determine whether you have a feel-good climate or a clear, actionable culture.

3 Simple Rules to Grow a Great Team:

1)???Support Your Performers

2)???Deal with the Rest

3)???If You’re Not Dealing with the Rest, You’re Not Supporting Your Performers???????

Seems simple. Yet, many executives allow underachievers, personal pets and those who’ve failed to future-proof themselves drag down their all-stars by taking their focus off the work and placing it squarely on distracting underachievers and politics.

Sure, you can go ahead and tell your performers to mind their own business, but in the end, itis their business. Their hours & energy covering for others, their trust that’s been eroded, and their pride to play for a winner that’s been allowed to turn into festering frustration and embarrassment.

What do you think? Have you seen this anywhere you’ve worked?

You’re Creating a Culture, Not a Cult

The Measure of a Leader is Not in the Number of Followers, but in the Number of Leaders They are Able to Create.

– Steve Drotter, The Leadership Pipeline

Followers are important. But followers at work are not like followers online.

Your business is not a fan club. It’s up to you to help them become leaders.

To carry on the mission and fulfill the vision. Over time, you’ll be most proud of those who have exceeded your accomplishments to do wonderful things for their people and businesses. Create more followers, create more leaders.

None of Us is as Smart as All of Us

The lone wolf may still have its moments, but these days, you have to learn to work together. Collaborate. Co-create. Crowdsource. And whether you’re standing alone or standing together with those who share your particular point of view, knowing how to get people together and ask the right questions is often half the battle in getting to the right answers. Not necessarily your answers. So, when others confront you with proof that doesn’t support your point of view, the real question is: Are you willing to change your mind?

It’s Not a Principle Until It Costs You Money. – Bill Bernbach, On the Mount Rushmore of Advertising if Advertising Had a Mount Rushmore

Values and principles. How proudly we hail ours until push comes to shove and we actually have to prove that we actually mean them. Live them. For better or worse. I once worked at an agency that caught an employee defrauding a client. Did they reimburse them? No, didn’t even tell them, because it would cost a lot of money, and they were afraid of the client’s reaction. While it wasn’t my place to alert them, I share in the shame. Not surprisingly, that agency no longer exists.

Good Leadership Requires You to Surround Yourself with People of Diverse Perspectives Who Can Disagree with You Without Fear of Retaliation. – Doris Kearns Goodwin, Historian, Author of…. A Team of Rivals

Effective leadership requires bringing diverse perspectives together. But those perspectives won’t be heard if they are stifled and people fear that they’re being boxed out and pushed aside. Lincoln allowed his cabinet to express themselves, even when their viewpoints displeased him. It’s how he got to the decisions that won the Civil War.

The Culture of Any Organization is Shaped by the Worst Behavior the Leader is Willing to Tolerate. - Gruenter and Whitaker

Boundaries. Setting them is one of the most important duties with which leaders are charged. They set both the ceiling and the floor.

For some reason, many leaders are apparently satisfied burrowing into the dirt by making exceptions. By playing favorites. Putting up with the unacceptable and mediocre. ?Allowing their unqualified pets to bring down the morale of the entire team. If you’re going to make exceptions, make sure they’re for the exceptional.

Find Your Tribe and Unite It

Who you choose to work with shapes much of your culture.

A while ago, there was an agency up north that was trying to create a new business plan. What they realized was that they tended to do well with brands that they liked and used themselves.

?As a group, the agency tended to be outdoorsy. They liked nature. Exploring.

And action. Once they realized this, they focused on brands that they understood firsthand.

They became the outdoor lifestyle agency. They also became the agency of Harley Davidson. Coleman camping. And a slew of other brands that collectively made them experts in this area. It got to the point that if you were an outdoors-oriented brand looking for an agency, you automatically called them. Afterall, whether or not they had met yet, they were in their tribe and could be trusted to bring the insights and passion that only insiders within the outdoors-lifestyle tribe could detect. P.S., If you’re a larger agency, split your accounts into separate tribes. But make sure they fit your culture!

The Difficulty Lies Not So Much in Developing New Ideas as in Escaping from Old Ones. – John Maynard Keynes, Legendary Economist????

Have you ever waited anxiously for your leadership team to introduce the "new way" forward, only to hear what sounds quite familiar to what you're already doing? No surprise, we love the familiar. It's comforting. It's understandable. It works. Or at least, it used to work. And it’s hard to move on from. Yet we must. It’s all about sticking to the fundamentals but redefining your vision for today. That's how your culture experiences healthy growth.

Everybody Has a Strength to Share. - Bill Sore, Share Our Strength

Are you a bookworm? Volunteer to help kids learn how to read.

Have a nice voice? Sing to the elderly. Athletic? Train Special Olympians.

Are you a foodie? Make food for the homeless. Think about your talents.

There’s something you do well that will make life better for someone else.

And it's up to the culture to make room for you to do it.

Don’t Let the Office Historian Make You a Prisoner of the Past

We tried something like that before and it didn’t work.

I had that idea 5 years ago but the CEO killed it.

I think someone else did that before.

Legal has never approved something like that.

There's a reason we've always done it this way.

This is what the Office Historian sounds like.

Old and tired.?

Now experience can be quite an asset, but sometimes fear,?burnout or a need to remain relevant makes people look?backwards more than forward.

Truth is, times change.?

You can’t dip your toe in the same river twice.?

Live in the present, and ask your team to focus on the best solution for today?rather than yesterday’s failings.

This is what the Office Historian sounds like.

Don't let them own your entire past, present or future. Or culture.

Old and tired.

Now experience can be quite an asset, but sometimes fear, burnout or a need to remain relevant makes people look backwards more than forward.

Truth is, times change.

You can’t dip your toe in the same river twice.

Ask your team to focus on the best solution for today rather than yesterday’s failings.

Ethics Is the Difference Between What You Have a Right to Do and What Is Right to Do.? - Potter Stewart, Supreme Court Justice

We all have rights. Your right to swing your fists ends at my nose. Ethics help create such boundaries. Determine how we act. And put in play our values and principles. Ethics help define such concepts as good & evil. Right & wrong.

Justice & crime.

Values, principles and ethics are often confused for one another.

We’ll leave that for the philosophers and academics to sort out.

It really doesn’t matter much. Not if you see them as a combination of the beliefs that guide your life. How you carry yourself. How you see things. How you act.

Run Like Hell from the Self-Proclaimed ‘Keeper of the Culture’

No one person owns your company's culture. And while leadership has a role in forming it, culture is not a department or committee to be assigned to any one individual. In fact, anyone referring to himself as The Keeper of the Culture, well, you can almost guarantee that this person knows all the right things to say, and that’s about it. In such hands, culture becomes weaponized. Clash with the keeper, and you're against the culture, pegged as a misfit, while the Keeper has come to believe that he is in fact the physical embodiment of the culture itself.

Want more? Listen to the Navigating the Fustercluck podcast and look to our daily posts on LinkedIn. Here's to healthy cultures. Here's to the future! - Wegs