What You Do Speaks So Loudly....

Google "culture" and you'll come up with over 500,000 hits. Ask the person next to you to define it and you'll likely get nut'n. I've asked this to many people and one smart guy said, "well, it's like what Supreme Court Justice Stewart said about pornography, 'I can't define it but I know it when I see it.'"

Here's my stab at "it" -

Culture is the living environment in which people blend the core ideology (mission and values) with behavior, communication, and processes. The culture becomes healthier as the transparencies increase and individual agendas align. The healthiest cultures come from organizations in which leaders strive to be better followers and followers better leaders.

Culture is not about words on a mission or values statement. Culture is not about saying you want to have a good culture.

The Joy at Work Bible Study Companion states "corporate culture is remarkably poweful and amazingly resilient. It is about the values that are intentionally pursued, even when they are painful to uphold. It includes purposeful operating principles, concrete ways of working that reward behaviors consistent with the culture and punish behaviors that are not. Indeed, corporate culture sets the boundaries of behavior. It is not something controlled by a central headquarters, but by the "normal expectations" of how work is to be done by both top executives and front-line workers."

Building and maintaining culture is a way of life at home or at work and it must be purposeful, specific, and relational. It has been repeated many times that what you do speaks so loudly that what you say I can not hear. This biggest complaint I hear when working outside the boardroom is "they have no idea what goes on in the real world. They run this business like it is a mom-pop shop and let me talk and act any way they want as long as the job gets done."

The hardest part of building a healthy culture is liivng the Values....even when they are painful to uphold.

To that end.....

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