The Culture Engine

Chapter 2It Starts with You

I'm delighted you have decided to learn more about creating an organizational constitution for your team or company and managing alignment to it daily.

You've learned that leaders are in charge of an organization's culture. Refining or tweaking your team's or company's current culture means that you will be the banner carrier for your organizational constitution.

You are ready to embrace the leader's responsibility to be a proactive champion of your desired culture.

The demands of proactive culture refinement are significant. You'll need to invest time and energy communicating, modeling, and reinforcing your desired culture. You can't delegate primary responsibility for this—this job is yours.

You'll need to embrace servant leadership in daily interactions.

You'll need to promptly and genuinely praise and encourage aligned efforts by team members and teams.

Since there are only 24 hours in a day (I checked Google—it's true), you'll not be able to simply add these activities to your daily workload. You'll need to redirect time and energy to culture-champion activities from less important activities.

The credibility of the culture refinement will rely on the degree to which you, as the culture champion, are consistently modeling the desired values and behaviors.

When you begin the culture refinement journey with your team or company and define different expectations (values and behaviors, particularly), scrutiny of your every plan, decision, and action ...