Much is made of workplace culture and the effect it can have on organization dynamics, functioning and performance.
But what about when culture is overlooked or ignored? What happens then?
One way we have tried to help the leaders we work with is to imagine culture as a leader’s back yard.
With attention and effort, this land can be developed and cultivated. With care and attention, it can be made to produce beautiful flowers and needed fruits.
But if not, if it is neglected, the problem is not that nothing will grow there. The problem, rather, is that everything will grow there.
Without care and attention, the yard becomes choked over with vegetation from seeds blown in from the outside world. It becomes filled with bits of garbage tossed in by passers-by. It becomes overrun by undergrowth planted years ago and left to grow uncheck ever since.
It becomes, in other words, a hodgepodge of the inconsequential, the counterproductive, and the fortuitously beneficial.
Culture is much the same. When not consciously determined, it grows and evolves in multiple directions, according to countless influences, not the least of which being employees’ former workplace experiences.
And while these patterns of thought and action will likely include the good as well as the bad, few of them will optimal. Moreover, the overall effect will be neither coherent nor integrated.
The challenge facing leaders, then, is not how to build workplace culture, but how to guide the culture that already being built, day by day.
Their duty is to shape the culture around them into something beneficial and vigorous, and not simply leave it to chance and hope that they like what they end up with.