The Culture Conundrum
Anyone who has ever worked for any organization has heard how important “culture” is to the operating environment. Because the word is used so loosely, the significance of organizational culture is often misunderstood - the oxygen that feeds the soul of a company can be taken for granted and mishandled by its most senior leaders. Culture is professed on webpages and in handbooks as being the embodiment of mission, vision and values. But, too often, there is a disconnect between the written word and leadership behaviors - what an employee is told to believe and how to behave is not the same as what they experience.
When I have conducted employee opinion surveys and a department receives a negative result, the first reaction of the manager typically has been to exclaim, “I can never please my employees!” followed by comments like, “They don’t think they make enough money,” or “They’re never happy with their schedule!” When I do a roundtable with the employees, the feedback always includes words like “disrespected,” “not feeling valued” and “lack of communication.” Our employees are not stupid and nor are we…but we can be awfully dense sometimes. Employees expect us to keep the promises we make - especially those that are in writing. When we tell our people we believe in values such as integrity, respect, equality and honesty, they hold us accountable for living by them.
As leaders, we have many priorities competing for our attention. Too much of the time, we focus our efforts on what we convince ourselves are the urgent administrative tasks - preparing budgets, justifying revenues/expenses on financial statements, drafting work schedules, ordering supplies - rather than engaging with our employees. That disconnect causes us to be out of touch with the needs and wants of our people which deteriorates our relationship with them. The resulting tension leads us to further avoidance of interaction and an even greater focus on what we falsely tell ourselves is urgent. Thus the culture conundrum begins.
We expect our employees will demonstrate our organization’s values to our clients, customers or guests. How often do we look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we are demonstrating those same values to our employees? Are we listening and making good on our commitments to them? As leaders we have a singular critical purpose - to be of service to our employees. If we do that, everything else falls into place. Employees are supported. When employees are supported, they feel included. When employees feel included, they become engaged. When employees become engaged, they exhibit the organization’s values to our customers. When the organization’s values are exhibited to customers, everyone experiences “culture” in the way it is intended. Metrics fire on all cylinders - employee opinion survey scores, customer reviews and financial statements achieve their maximum potential.
The biggest challenge in the culture conundrum is that senior leaders expect immediate and significant positive results for little effort. Warren Buffett has a famous quote: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Creating a strong, positive culture takes a very long time. The metric rewards take even longer. However, a single action that goes against your organization’s values can set the trust in the culture back months or even years. Now, imagine what happens to that trust when those values are not front and center in the minds of your leaders in every decision they make that affects your people. Every interaction can not only erode trust, but can develop a negative culture that permeates the entire organization right down to the bottom line.
We are all human and nobody is perfect. We cannot expect everyone is going to be happy with every decision we make. However, if we are active in our determination to live by our organization’s values, if we own up to our mistakes and if we hold each other accountable for doing the same, we will succeed at solving the culture conundrum. We all will benefit from the win.
