Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.
Make Decisions That Demonstrate Cultural Priorities
The more counterintuitive the leader’s decision, the stronger the impact on the culture. Louverture set his culture by making one of the most counterintuitive decisions of the revolution.
Once the rebels won control of the island, many of Louverture’s soldiers wanted revenge on the plantation owners. It would have been the course of least resistance for Louverture to order the owners shot out of hand. They would certainly have done the same to him. But he abhorred the spirit of revenge, believing it would destroy rather than elevate the culture.
He also had to fund his war against France. If his country went bankrupt, his revolution would fail. Crops were the entire economy of Saint-Domingue: without them, it could never be an important nation. As Louverture declared, “The guarantee of the liberty of the blacks is the prosperity of agriculture.” He knew that plantations had to remain large to be economically viable, and that the owners had the knowledge, education, and experience the colony needed to keep the plantations going.
So Louverture not only let the plantation owners live, he let them keep their land. But he insisted that they pay their laborers one-fourth of the profits. And he ordered them to live on their plantations, so they would be directly accountable for paying their workers and treating them well. If they disobeyed, their land was confiscated.
With these decisions, Louverture established what a thousand speeches could not have: that the revolution wasn’t about revenge and that the economic well-being of the colony was its highest priority. It was all very well for him to say “no reprisals,” but it was what he did that set the culture.
Walk the Talk
No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader. No matter how well designed, carefully programmed, and insistently enforced your cultural elements are, inconsistent or hypocritical behavior by the person in charge will blow the whole thing up.
Imagine a CEO who decides that punctuality is critical to her company’s culture. She delivers eloquent speeches about how being on time is a matter of respect. She points out that employee time is the company’s most valuable asset, so that when you show up late, you are effectively robbing your colleagues. But she then shows up late to all her meetings. How many employees will adhere to that value?
Louverture understood this perfectly. He asked a great deal from his soldiers, but he was more than willing to embody his own standards. He lived with the men in his army and shared their labors. If a cannon had to be moved, he pitched in, once getting a hand badly crushed in the process. He charged at his troops’ head, something Europe had rarely seen from a leader since Alexander the Great, and was wounded seventeen times.
Louverture began building trust by being trustworthy himself. As C. L. R. James observed, “By his incessant activity on their behalf he gained their confidence, and among a people ignorant, starving, badgered, and nervous, Louverture’s word by 1796 was law—the only person in the North whom they could be depended upon to obey.”
Because the culture he wanted was a straight reflection of his own values, Louverture walked the talk better than most. His commandment against revenge was put to the test after he defeated his rival André Rigaud, a mulatto commander in the South, in the bloody War of Knives. Rigaud had not only rebelled against Louverture, but he had scoffed at the basis of his authority, proclaiming that the caste system, which put mulattoes just below whites and blacks at the bottom, was correct. Facing Rigaud’s last supporters, Louverture delivered his verdict: “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Return to your duty, I have already forgotten everything.”
For a culture to stick, it must reflect the leader’s actual values, not just those he thinks sound inspiring. Because a leader creates culture chiefly by his actions—by example.
Make Ethics Explicit
Every company likes to believe it has integrity, but if you asked its employees you’d hear a different story. The trouble with implementing integrity is that it is an abstract, long-term concept. Will integrity get you an extra deal this quarter? Unlikely. In fact, it may do the opposite. Will it make your product ship a week early? No chance. So why do we care about it?
Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments. Their purpose is not to make the quarter, beat a competitor, or attract a new employee. Their purpose is to create a better place to work and to make the company a better one to do business with in the long run. This value does not come for free. In the short run it may cost you deals, people, and investors, which is why most companies cannot bring themselves to actually, really, enforce it. But as we’ll see, the failure to enforce good conduct often brings modern companies to their knees.
One difficulty in implementing integrity is that it’s a concept without boundaries. You can’t pat yourself on the back for treating your employees ethically if you’re simultaneously lying to your customers, because your employees will pick up on the discrepancy and start lying to each other. The behaviors must be universal; you have to live up to them in every context.
Understanding this, Louverture painstakingly, systematically, and relentlessly moved his slave army to higher and higher levels of conduct. He was not playing a short-term game; he was determined to create an army, and then a country, that people would be proud to be a part of. Because he was determined not just to win the revolution, but to build a great country, he knew he had to take the long view.
Louverture’s new state would be based on personal industry, social morality, public education, religious toleration, free trade, civic pride, and racial equality. He emphasized that attaining these goals would be each person’s responsibility: “Learn, citizens, to appreciate the glory of your new political status. In acquiring the rights that the constitution affords all Frenchman, do not forget the duties it imposes on you.” His instructions to his army were particularly direct: “Do not disappoint me … do not permit the desire for booty to turn you aside … it will be time enough to think of material things when we have driven the enemy from our shores. We are fighting that liberty—the most precious of earthly possessions—may not perish.”
Crucially, Louverture’s ethical instruction was explicit. Often CEOs will be exceptionally explicit about goals such as shipping products, but silent on matters such as obeying the law. This can be fatal. It’s because integrity is often at odds with other goals that it must be clearly and specifically inserted into the culture. If a company expects its people to behave ethically without giving them detailed instructions on what that behavior looks like and how to pursue it, the company will fall far short no matter whom it hires.
This is why Louverture underlined his instructions with strict enforcement. Pamphile de Lacroix, a French general who fought against Louverture, wrote, “Never was a European army subjected to more severe discipline than that observed by Louverture’s troops.” The contrast with the French was stark. As C. L. R. James observed, “The soldier emigres, Dessources and some others, vicomtes, and chevaliers, broke the terms of the amnesty, destroyed cannon and ammunition dumps, killed all the animals, and set plantations on fire. Louverture’s Africans, on the other hand, starving and half-naked, marched into the towns, and such was their discipline that no single act of violence or pillage was committed.”
When Louverture’s own army was starving during its campaign against the British, he nonetheless gave food to destitute local white women. He wrote: “My heart is torn at the fate which has befallen some unhappy whites who have been victims of this