Being Deliberate in Building Culture
How much time and energy do we devote to strategic plans and initiatives, metrics, goals, and project planning? Look around your office. Do you have posters announcing goals, email signature blocks attesting to the newest initiative, and strategic plans with your organization’s acronym emblazoned across the cover?
But have you ever forgotten to address culture during a key strategic shift? Ever experienced a culture pushing back on a strategy or a change-management initiative? We recall hearing a long-term devoted public servant speaking to her team in the hallway after a new political leader’s election and inspiring “call to action” speech. She said, “Be respectful, and know that we can wait out any of this leader’s strategies…we’ve done it before and we can do it again.” That’s culture pushing back. People cross their arms with the intent of waiting things out—and the “meeting after the meeting” undermines all of your well-intended efforts.
A great culture must be leader-led, designed intentionally, and have an established framework of behaviors and language that aligns the performance of everyone in the organization. Everyone must know how to win and fully understand the why behind the what. It is not enough to simply state the path forward; a great leader must deliberately invite every person into that way forward. Everyone must lead. Can you imagine if everyone in your organization behaved like a leader? What results could you achieve?
A great culture must be leader-led, designed intentionally, and have an established framework of behaviors and language that aligns the performance of everyone in the organization.
That’s the reason for this book. The Ultimate Mission Essential for public-sector organizations is the paradigm that everyone on your team should be a leader. Too many see leadership as a title. But leadership is a choice, not just a position. This doesn’t mean the organizational chart is thrown out the window; it simply means all people take ownership of ensuring success.
Leadership is a choice, not just a position.
The first step is adopting the mindset that everyone on your team can lead. It’s your job to make them leaders and to inspire them to embrace their roles. This happens by establishing a framework (or an operating system, which we’ll discuss in Chapter 4) for getting the job done effectively. This framework should be ubiquitous and not role-specific. It demands that leaders “show up” and model the culture, rather than talk about it in generic terms (or worse yet, “talk at” team members about it). It will develop high-character and high-competence leaders at every level of the organization. It will give everyone a common language and a set of behaviors they can depend on as they work to achieve results year after year.
The People Behind the Activities
You and your people are your organization’s only sustainable competitive advantage. No matter which segment of the public sector you work in, when the people quit work for the night, your competitive advantage quits too. The brains of a contributor like Tom can shut down anytime, even during work hours. You might say, “What about our mission? organizational structure? internal rewards program? work processes? computer systems? Aren’t they advantages that will overcome the public sector’s growing competitive cauldron?”
Obviously, competitive advantages can come from many sources, but the bottom line is that none of those advantages exist apart from what people actually do. Your mission, your structure, your rewards programs—whatever your resources and capabilities—are all the product of people working together. If they don’t work well, your advantage is gone.
An organization can have a number of unique aspects, but if people don’t do the things needed to leverage them, sustain them, and live up to them, they will evaporate. Your organization may have well-refined processes, but if your people couldn’t care less about maintaining them, the whole thing is a house of cards. The behavior of your people is the ultimate source of your competitive advantage.
No matter what you think your competitive advantage is, people create it, sustain it, leverage it, and make it work. If they are as engaged as the people of the Bakerloo Line, they will pull the organization forward if they have to. But if they are like Tom—unexcited about the organization, uncaring, indifferent, even alienated from it—your competitive advantage will disappear. If they are not giving their best efforts to your strategy, you can forget the dazzling wording of your mission or the compelling reason the organization exists. If there are enough Toms on your team—and the evidence shows there are many Toms, despite what you may think and no matter how they smile at you as you pass—no matter how many times they nod their head in seeming agreement with your goal, your competitive advantage is over.
The sum of what everyone does every day is called “culture.” It is what the majority of the people do the majority of the time. It’s a reflection of an organization’s collective behaviors, the language and behaviors of its people, and the spoken and unspoken values, norms, and systems that exist. Another way to frame the top-of-mind issue in the Partnership for Public Sector’s efforts is, “How do I build a winning culture?” Clearly, it’s a crucial question: Dr. Stephen R. Covey once said,
“The only sustainable competitive advantage that will long endure is the core competency of a high-trust8, principle-centered organizational culture of committed people aligned to a common vision. Your competitors will copy your marketing, your product, your systems, your structure, your strategy, but they cannot duplicate the unique advantage of the trust, esprit de corps, and performance of your people.”
The leader’s main job is to build that kind of culture, and it is the behavior of the leader that determines the culture. Author and world-renowned business coach Ram Charan said, “The culture of any organization is simply the collective behavior of its leaders. If you want to change your culture, change the collective behavior of your leaders.
Culture is the reason a Bakerloo Line worker keeps things on track and gets the job done. Culture is the reason a nurse stops a medical procedure if she spots a quality problem. Culture is the reason military-aviation ground crews run to meet an arriving plane. Culture is the reason a nonprofit leader travels halfway around the world to meet with volunteers supporting the organization’s cause. These are the behaviors of highly engaged people in a high-trust culture: it’s just what they do.
But culture is also the reason a great potential contributor like Tom comes to work every day, smiles and nods, and contributes nothing.
According to Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, “It is common to describe culture as the visible elements of a working environment: casual Fridays, free sodas in the cafeteria, or whether you can bring your dog to the office…. Those things don’t define a culture. They’re just artifacts of it.”9 Culture is much deeper. It is the habitual, instinctive behaviors of people. They are rooted in the character of people.
That’s why to gain the mission essential that counts most—a great culture—you need to go deep. Human behavior is the product of human character and mindset. It’s the product of paradigms—the ways people see themselves and the world around them. To change the culture, you have to change people’s paradigms.
Here’s a simple example of what we mean by a paradigm that drives behavior. Shawn tells this story: “When my wife and I were newly married, we shared one car. She would drop me off at school in the morning before going to her job several miles in the other direction. Then she would drive back at noon to take me to my afternoon job and return to hers. At the end of the day, she would circle back and we would go home together. We put a lot of miles on our car that semester.
“One day, I needed to be at school early and had a lot of pressing projects at work in the afternoon, so we went carefully over the schedule that morning. I had no margin for error, so when I stepped into the parking lot, I knew she’d be there this time. She wasn’t—and my temperature rose. I waited and waited and waited. I worried that maybe something had happened to her. A crisis at work? But after an hour, I determined