Are You Making this Culture Mistake?

Believe it or not, one of the biggest mistakes leaders make when it comes to culture change and culture management is spending too much time defining the “ideal” culture. It is often hard for me to convince people of this, because it  flat-out feels right to people. Identify the ideal state, and then make the changes that will get you there.

As intuitive as that sounds, however, it just doesn’t work with culture. Defining the ideal usually ends up as a word-smithing exercise, describing some amazing culture where we are all collaborative, agile, and transparent (hey, let’s throw in some rainbows, unicorns, and puppies while you’re at it). It’s all fine, and you probably had those aspirations as you were writing up your new core values or culture statement, but that vision is so far into the future, no one knows where to start. There are a million ways to be collaborative, agile, or transparent, so which ones should we choose? The ideal won’t tell you. It can’t actually, because you’re missing a key step: understanding exactly what your culture ACTUALLY is right now.

Your destination (the ideal) is worthless if you don’t know your starting point. That requires an unvarnished truth version of what your culture is, not the polished language in your employer branding materials. Find out exactly how people collaborate, for example. You may discover that people pick and choose with whom that collaboration happens. Inside their teams you see great collaboration, but across functional boundaries…not so much. Maybe you need to be more honest about how your culture supports innovation. Do you value creativity and future focus, but at the same time avoid running experiments that might fail? I see that pattern all the time, and it results in innovation efforts that are disappointingly meager.

Once you see the patterns inside your culture that are operating right now, it will be much easier to design interventions to improve things. I suppose it’s fine to have some ideals to guide you as well, but choosing what you’re going to do over the next three months is so much more important, and those choices are driven primarily by addressing specific issues that are in play right now. If you want to see your current culture patterns, then check out our comprehensive culture assessment, or our free culture pattern quiz.