Make Culture Actionable at Work
“The means are the ends: we need to find ways to engage our whole selves in processes that incorporate the same values and aspirations we are trying to create.”
— Mahatma Gandhi
Today the conversation around organizational culture is heightened, and being pushed to the people function within organizations, like HR. And without owners and champions at the C-Suite along with measurable metrics, most organizations won’t consider culture initiatives strategic or seriously.
Let’s face it, most consider culture too soft and amorphous to define and measure. So while most leaders know the culture is important we’re still not sure what to do about it. The conversation around culture needs to shift. We need to simplify how we define culture and turn our attention toward the quality of how decisions are made. Do the decisions we make on a daily basis embody our values? How aligned are our decisions with what we stand for?
Culture is decision making shorthand. If we had to learn each day how decisions were made we’d be much too slow. This shorthand is learned by observing how decisions around us are made. It’s NOT learned from a culture manual or during our onboarding training. It’s learned and reinforced in real-time by watching how decisions get made in the day-to-day operations of the company.
What if we thought of culture as a function of the following questions:
- How do we make decisions? Who’s promoted and why? Who gets rewarded and why? How are we incentivized? Which strategies are acceptable, which are not?
- Do the decisions we make reinforce our values? Is it aligned with what we say?
- Are those decisions helping us realize a shared future? Does this decision reinforce my point of view or does it reflect our point of view?
As Gandhi suggests in his quote above, are we aligned with who we want to become? And do our decisions reflect those desires?
Culture starts with caring about the emotional well-being and energy of people.
Contact shawn@bekokoro.com to learn more.
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