Two Consultants on Leadership: Key Elements of a Strong Culture
Organizational culture can be defined generally as the shared values, beliefs, and assumptions that guide behavior. Behaviorally, it can be defined as the patterns of behaviors that are strengthened or weakened by the people and systems over time. It also can quite simply be defined as how things get done around here. No matter how you choose to define it, every organization has its own distinct culture. An important question becomes, “Is your organizational culture by default or by design?” Default cultures are characterized by a lack of direction or sense of purpose: leaders and/or employees can’t tell you about the organization’s mission and vision, or how they help achieve something greater than “we are here to make money.” With this lack of shared vision and mission, default cultures just exist and are susceptible to wild variability based on market conditions, leadership and employee changes, company performance, and other external/internal factors.
What does it mean to have a strong culture? What do leaders need to do to create a culture by design? This blog is dedicated to identifying three key elements that support a purposeful and strong culture.
Francisco Gomez, Vice President
Think about the last time you had an exceptionally great or terrible customer experience. Chances are, you weren’t just impacted by the product or service but also by the behavior patterns of the employee(s). How they greeted you, how they handled your needs, and what they did to make you feel valued (or not) as a customer made a difference. In other words, you were experiencing that organization’s culture in action.
The same principle applies inside your organization. Whether employees are engaging or disengaging, they’re responding to something bigger than any one policy or initiative. They’re reacting to the overall work environment such as the culture created by leadership practices and the systems leaders implement. Considering how deeply these dynamics influence people and business performance, it’s not something to leave to chance.
In the section below, I highlight three elements we consistently see in organizations that build their culture with intention.
Leaders Understand the Impact They Have on Their Employees. One of the most overlooked truths in culture work is this: employee performance is a direct response to the choices leaders make. That includes the systems they build, the behaviors they model, and the way they interact with their teams.
Branding exercises and inspirational posters won’t build the culture. Daily interactions and leadership choices will. Strong cultures are led by people who understand how their behavior shapes the experiences and choices of others, both at the micro level (how they give feedback, run meetings, recognize effort) and at the macro level (how they structure systems, processes, and expectations).
It’s easy to accidentally shape a reactive, compliance-driven environment if you’ve never learned to frame the workplace in behavioral terms. That’s why the first step in culture design is helping leaders recognize and close the gap between their intentions and the actual impact on the workforce. This means ensuring that their systems and leadership behaviors truly support the outcomes they want to see more of.
Leaders Define the Behaviors That Represent their Cultural Vision. One of the defining features of a strong culture is clarity. Leaders in high-performing organizations can translate their cultural vision into specific, observable behaviors. If you ask them what their culture looks like, they don’t recite vague platitudes. They describe what people are doing and saying at every level of the organization.
This starts by working backward from the company’s mission and corporate values. What would it look like if those values were alive in daily actions? What would a frontline employee be doing? How would a supervisor give feedback? What conversations would happen on the shop floor or during a production meeting?
Culture is shaped by the patterns of behavior leaders reinforce—through their actions, decisions, and the systems they implement. Without a clear, shared picture of what those patterns should be, it’s like coaching a team without a game plan: everyone’s moving in various directions, but no one is aligned with each other or with the outcomes.
Deliberate culture creation begins with a leadership team that shares a precise understanding of the behaviors that define both their current state and the future they want to create.
Leaders Reinforce the Behaviors That Sustain Culture. Strong cultures don’t happen by accident. They’re built by leaders who pinpoint the actions that matter most to their business. Those leaders then use their understanding of the science of behavior to shape those actions into the norm, not the exception.
Organizations that successfully mature their cultures have leaders who know how to motivate behavior in a consistent and meaningful way. They don’t just articulate the behaviors that support their vision. They reinforce them through the way they lead, the systems they design, and the interactions they have with their people. Sustaining a strong culture requires more than intention. It requires skill in motivating behavior.
Bryan Shelton, M.S., Senior Consultant
A strong culture is one that shares a common purpose for everyone inside the organization. To help create this common purpose, I am going to highlight these three elements: having a compelling mission and vision, convincing leadership, and clear expectations.
Compelling Mission and Vision. Mission and vision (MV) statements are a missed opportunity in many organizations. They are ignored framed documents that have no relevance in how the business operates. There are organizations who utilize these statements well. What makes them different is how they use these statements to drive strategy and daily business operations. Both the mission and vision statements should be used in strategy development and in evaluating operational performance. They should also be used in key performance indicators that cascade throughout the organization. Reviewing and discussing how the organization is working towards its mission and living out its vision can align employee performance and be powerful binding forces in an organization’s culture.
Convincing Leadership. Leaders in a strong culture take the MV and turn them into meaningful sources of motivation for employees. The most successful leaders add stories about why the MV is important and create achievable goals employees will work towards. Having strong stories inside an organization can create excitement and positively reinforcing value to the behaviors that people do daily. Leaders also lead by example, for better or worse. Convincing leaders align their daily behaviors with the desired culture, making decisions to do the hard right things (at times) to support the organization’s MV. They sometimes do this even at personal cost. Organizations with weak leadership are left with only the use of threats and discipline to influence the people inside the organization. This destroys culture.
Clear Expectations. Finally, a strong culture is well defined. There are clear behavioral descriptions of what good performance is and what the ideal culture looks like at every level. These pinpointed behaviors allow for precise measurement and feedback to support MV-consistent behaviors. They also add clarity to what leaders should be doing to lead by example and what behaviors they should be actively encouraging (or discouraging when not in alignment). This ability to improve the quality of feedback and positive reinforcement greatly increases the likelihood of consistent practices inside the organization. Knowing what a “good culture” looks like is a valuable tool in creating a strong and compelling culture.
Final Thoughts
An organization’s culture is all about its daily behaviors. Like most things, a strong and purposeful culture needs to be continually defined, developed, and nurtured. As Francisco mentioned, developing a purposeful culture requires defining the behaviors that the organization wants, motivating those behaviors, and having leaders align their behavior to support the culture they’ve defined. Having a compelling MV will help define what good looks like and be a source of motivation leaders can tap into to motivate performance. These elements combined will create a strong culture.
