Most people treat their company culture like it’s something that is inevitable, like something that will arise or change regardless of what they do. This occurs at both the leadership and the worker levels.
At the leadership level, not seeing that culture is something that you do rather than something that just happens crushes the ability of the group to move toward a preferred future, toward a better culture.
George Washington Carver said:
Where there is no vision, there is no hope.
George Washington Carver
At the worker level, not seeing that culture is something that you do rather than something that just happens contributes to a sense of helplessness, to a sense of victimhood.
Paraphrasing the Bible, Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
Where there is no vision, a people perish.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And both of these contribute to finger pointing. Leadership points to the workers, saying they just won’t do or be the way they are supposed to do or be. And, workers point to leadership, saying they lack vision, are tyrants, don’t want things to be better or different, don’t care about the staff, etc.
Most of the time, both are wrong. Most people want to be part of a strong culture, but because they lack the understanding that culture is not inevitable–it is something you do–they fail to realize that they contribute to the undesirable situations they wish would change.
The culture problem is multifold.
One
If you believe that something is inevitable, you lose the understanding of and motivation for doing the work that actually brings that thing about. Why work on your company culture when it’s just going to be (or become) what it is (or will be) regardless of what you do?
The reality is that a culture becoming something good was often the result of people in the past struggling to make it so. Rarely, do good things like a healthy culture just happen.
Two
If you believe that culture (or anything) is inevitable, you lose your sense of the past and the future. As far as the past goes, none of the struggle that occurred to make your culture what it is today matters because essentially “it would have happened like this anyway”. Sadly, a consequence of this is that you lose the opportunity to learn from the lessons of the past, because again, the struggle didn’t matter, so why worry about doing anything better or different moving forward?
As far as the future goes, you see only one possible future. Your culture is going to be what it’s going to be regardless of what you do. So, you’ve lost the ability to see, discuss, or work with others toward multiple possible futures, which invariably would require work from you in order to realize one over another. No work is required for you to realize the inevitable future, so you do not need to engage with others in any culture-related struggle.
Three
This all leads to an inability to process facts. If you see something as being inevitable, you will move or interpret facts to suit the narrative that supports your view of the past, present, and future. And when the facts cannot be moved or interpreted, you will simply disregard them.
We can see this in our broader culture in our inability to focus on anything, but narratives. When a fact challenges a narrative and we refuse to even admit that fact into consideration, this degrades our trust in “truth”, authority figures, and facts on the whole. It’s as if you can have your facts, and I can have mine. Mine are right. Yours are wrong, so yours aren’t facts. When in truth, mine are potentially Facts In Name Only.
Often, we’re not actually talking about facts, we’re talking about narratives. And narratives cannot generally disprove one another. Facts disprove narratives.
The most obvious early examples of this played out in authoritarian and communist countries decades ago, but you see it increasingly in the west now. So many things are about what I believe and not about what is demonstrably true.
Four
If you lose the sense that culture is something that you do and instead see it as just happening, you lose the ability to understand why others would act in some greater interest. You cannot understand why they struggled the way that they did in the past.
In fact, you have to embody the spirit of the culture you wish to be a part of, and part of that embodiment is participating in the work it takes to make the culture a reality. The culture you see as inevitable actually won’t come about if you do not live both the spirit of the struggle to realize it and also the spirit of that future in which it has come about.
Not living the spirit actually is a large contributor to people espousing a desire for a different culture, but unintentionally working against its realization. This is because their actions support the current paradigm or the alternative futures that they themselves refuse to see. This leads to people thinking that they supported something the whole time (for example, a movement toward a different culture), it didn’t happen, and that the reason it did not happen was that someone else did something to stop it…when in reality, the individual’s non-participation here was part of what stopped it.
What to Do About Company Culture
From leadership’s seat, you have to develop a vision and communicate that it takes everyone to make a culture.
Whether you’re in leadership or anything else though, the key thing to realize is that you are a part of culture and a part of change. Your company’s culture does not just happen to you, and it certainly does not just happen on its own. It is a combination of the people, how they work together and interact, how they make each other and clients feel, and more.
Culture is an active process of cultivation and practice. You live it everyday. If you are not happy with your company culture, you play a role in making it what it will be tomorrow.
To do anything less is to lose sight of the struggles of the past, the lessons you can learn from others, and the understanding that tomorrow can be better than today.
