Last week, I had the immense pleasure of kicking off a year-long engagement with a local association. We started with a full-day retreat designed around one big question:
How do we want to work together?
The organization has been through significant change, and new leadership saw an opportunity to not simply move forward, but to intentionally create what comes next.
One of the most important goals of our day was to explore the culture this team wants to create together.
And it got me thinking about the way we usually approach organizational culture.
We talk a lot about leaders defining culture.
But I’m not sure that’s quite right.
Too often, organizational values and culture are decided at the top, packaged into a handful of carefully chosen words, and handed to employees with the expectation that they’ll behave accordingly.
What if we reversed that?
What if the people who actually experience the culture every day had a meaningful role in defining the culture they want to be part of?
That’s what we did.
We spent time building connections and exploring the values people bring to their work. Then we moved beyond the words and asked what those values would actually look like in practice.
What would we see people doing?
What behaviors would we want to continue? What needs to stop? What needs to start?
That’s when values stopped being words and started becoming choices.
Because culture isn’t the values written on the wall. It’s the behaviors people experience every day.
And this is where leadership comes in.
Culture belongs to everyone. But leaders have an outsized responsibility for creating the conditions in which that culture can actually exist.
If the team says, We want open communication, leadership has to make it safe to speak.
If they say, We want collaboration, leaders can’t reward siloed behavior.
If they say, We want trust, leaders have to behave consistently and transparently.
If they say, We want people to feel valued, leaders have to create practices where people actually experience that.
Otherwise, those aren’t cultural values. They’re aspirations.
The team can’t simply hand the culture over to leadership to create. And leadership can’t dictate a culture and expect everyone else to live it.
The work belongs to everyone, but the responsibilities aren’t exactly the same.
A team can articulate the culture that will allow them to do their best work together. They can agree on the behaviors that will bring that culture to life. And they can hold themselves and each other accountable for practicing them.
Leaders have an additional responsibility: to create the environment where that’s possible – and to continually notice where decisions, systems, practices, and their own behaviors are supporting or undermining what the team says it wants.
Which is why yesterday’s retreat was only the beginning of the culture work.
Defining the culture you want is the easy part. The real work is what happens Monday morning – in the decisions you make, the behaviors you reinforce, and the way people experience working together.
So the most important question for leaders is this:
Are we creating the conditions that make it possible for our people to do their best work together?
Recent Comments