Leadership Mindset: How to Own & Create Culture

November 11, 2019 Galen Emanuele

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Creating culture is incredibly important and also complex. As a leader, it is your responsibility and unique opportunity to define, articulate, and establish an intentional culture for your team.

The concept and task of creating culture is a very daunting and elusive thing for many leaders and organizations because there are so many dynamics and moving parts involved. That said, if we more deeply understand the science and formula for creating culture, we can break this complex thing down into a simple process.

First things first.

Leadership must own culture

It is uniquely the responsibility and opportunity for those in leadership positions to own culture. It falls to leadership to define, establish, and uphold culture inside a team or organization. If it doesn’t come from the top down, and leadership is not on board, bought in, or accountable to a team’s culture then it simply won’t work.

However…

There is a problem when it comes to organizational and team culture: there is a collective acknowledgement that great culture is important to the success of teams and business, but there is also a profound absence of knowing how to certifiably create and establish it in a tangible way.

Part of the reason for this profound absence is because culture is extremely hard to execute. How do you get a group of people to all show up and adhere to a clearly defined set of behaviors, and hold them accountable to those behaviors?

It’s relatively easy to come up with a handful of values like Trust, Integrity, Respect, and Teamwork and call that culture, but how do we bring it to life? How do we get employees and team members to behave in alignment with those values? We say teamwork, but how do you make people “teamwork”? We say integrity, but how do you make people “integrity”?

There is a way. But before I dive into that, I want to talk about the biggest myth around culture that gets in the way.

The Illusion of Explanatory Depth

The biggest myth is that leaders actually understand culture and how to create it, in a deep, comprehensive way. The truth is that most leaders flat out don’t.

To illustrate this point, I am going to use an intriguing concept from psychology known as the “illusion of explanatory depth,” which is the idea that humans think we actually have a much deeper understanding of things and the world around us than we do. Until we have to explain them — which reveals that in fact we do not.”

Take a refrigerator, for example. If you walk down the street and ask 50 people if they know how a fridge works, pretty much everybody would answer, “Yes.”

But if you then ask them to explain the specifics of how a fridge actually works, most people would stammer and fail to accurately explain it. Generally the same would be true for a zipper, toilet, or a ballpoint pen.

Humans believe they have a deeper understanding of things they interact with on a regular basis than they actually do. And organizational culture certainly fits into that category.

Every team and organization has a culture, whether it’s intentionally crafted or just happenstance. Anyone who’s ever had a job or been on a team has experienced and interacted within a culture; good, bad, exceptional, toxic, or otherwise.

And if you ask 100 leaders how to actually create culture in a strategic, comprehensive, step-by-step way, I think you would be hard pressed to find some, if any, that could give definitive answers beyond broad platitudes about the golden rule, or modeling good behavior, etc.

**Actual living, breathing culture. Not just the concept of culture.**

When I talk about culture, I’m not talking about a handful of obvious values like Trust, Integrity, and Respect to print on a wall poster and subsequently ignore.

I’m talking about establishing a clearly defined and articulated set of ground rules, behaviors, attitudes, and expectations that are universally understood, adhered to, and integrated into the DNA of a team or organization.

In this context, the golden rule is cute and well-meaning, but when it comes down to it — doesn’t cut it. Simply “modeling good behavior” is as far from a specific, strategic plan as ”attract customers” is an executable marketing plan. It’s surface level and denotes a profound absence of tangible knowledge.

Strategic Culture Plan

So, how do organizations and leaders actually create intentional culture in a simple, straightforward way?

I created the Strategic Culture Plan as a resource and guide to walk organizations and teams through a step by step, comprehensive process. You can download it here for free.

There is a much deeper dive and some detailed questions and clarifications that leaders have to uncover that go further than drafting a mission and vision statement and list of core values. Part of that process is translating those values into clearly articulated behaviors.

Some additional work to be done involves deciding what traditions and systems will be put in place to integrate the culture into the fabric of the team to keep it top of mind and reinforced. Leadership must also determine how the organization will hold people accountable to behaving and showing up in alignment with the culture.

The Strategic Culture Plan outlines each of those steps and more as well as the follow through, and gathering feedback and buy-in from the team. Add this to your toolkit. A cohesive, intentional culture is tremendously impactful to how teams and individuals show up and perform together, and the bottom line of any workplace.

Culture impacts literally every single business outcome you’re chasing.

Whether it’s higher performing teams, improved engagement, higher accountability, better employee retention, ability to attract top talent, an exceptional, committed, and intentional culture is the key.