Organizational Culture – It’s Easy To Create A Positive Culture With The Right Tools
Do you ever ask yourself, what the hell is wrong with people? They do things counterproductive to their goals and then act surprised when they do not get what they want! It never ceases to amaze me. As an organizational performance consultant, I’ve seen the most ridiculous behaviors. I’ve seen business owners who wanted their business to grow yet would put their customers behind their desire to do as little as possible. I’ve seen leaders yell at and belittle people with the excuse of, “if they would do what I said, I wouldn’t have to yell at them”. I’ve seen leaders berate employees and say in all seriousness, “do what’s in my head not what I say!”
These are just a very few of the horrid behaviors I’ve seen managers and business owners use. The amazing part is then they are surprised when they have excessive turnover, employee apathy and even active resistance. It’s much easier and so very much more effective to lead people to results instead of verbally abusing and pushing them. The behaviors that are observed and accepted as normal in an organization are its “Culture”.
Many leaders seem not to understand that a corporation’s culture acts a lot like the human body. Give it good food and positive habits, it grows strong and flourishes. Starve it and abuse it and it grows weak and eventually dies. The culture of an organization is its heart. When it’s healthy all things are possible. When it’s not, the possible activities and outcomes are limited at best.
Where the human heart is muscle and tissue, the corporate heart is emotion and action. When the actions in an organization are always positive and in pursuit of the organization’s goals, it creates positive and healthy feelings and results. People feel good about who they are and where they work. They feel uplifted and a part of something larger than themselves, consequently, it’s a positive force in their existence. On the other hand, when the actions and emotions used in an organization are negative, they create negative emotions and it creates a blight or rot in the organizations work culture and environment.
The sad part is, to create and maintain a positive and highly productive work culture is not difficult. It really doesn’t take a team of experts and millions of dollars. All it really takes is adopting positive values and behaviors, training everybody in the organization on them and then enforcing and ensuring they are met by every employee every day! That, by the way, is the whole purpose of leadership! Leaders don’t have to perform the training, but they do have to choose the standards and then once the workforce is trained, lead by example and consistently enforce adherence to those standards.
The health of the organization is its culture. Choose positive standards and consistently follow them and the organization will function well and be healthy. Choose poorly… you get the opposite. It’s not as difficult as you may think to create that healthy culture even if your current culture is ill. Programs like the Team-builder Leadership Institute’s “Workplace Performance Success System” provide a low cost and easily deployable (trained) system that can be used to move an organization to a positive healthy culture. The make or break requirement, once it’s deployed the organization’s leadership team must consistently use and enforce the positive standards and behaviors taught be the training in all four areas: diversity, communication, task achievement and leadership.
This change will take a while (weeks or months) depending on the size of the organization. However, with solid leadership support the culture and performance will change rapidly and the organization’s health improve dramatically. Don’t leave it to others. Don’t waste a lot of money. Don’t try to compete against healthy competitors with an unhealthy organization, fix it!
