The Culture Engine

Chapter 6Your Organizational Constitution Must Be LIVED

This chapter explains how leaders must champion their desired culture, every day.

As you've moved through the worksheets in the previous chapters, you have crafted your personal constitution—your purpose, values, and behaviors—as well as your team or company's organizational constitution—its purpose, values, behaviors, strategies, and goals.

This chapter has three main themes that describe the best practices that leaders—culture champions—consistently use to ensure that their organizational constitution is being embraced and lived.

These practices build credibility for both the leaders of the change and the desired change itself.

These themes are:

• Describe the way—how leaders must consistently communicate and reinforce their organizational constitution in dozens of ways each week.
• Model the way—how leaders must create credibility for their desired culture by their demonstrated alignment to the organization's constitution in every interaction.
• Align the way—how leaders must spend time daily observing, assessing, and ensuring alignment of team leaders' and members' interactions and decisions to their organization's constitution.

Keep in mind that the practices we'll describe here are the antidote to the plague of managing by announcements (MbA). We'll not let you announce your organizational constitution and then do nothing further to embed the new practices, processes, or systems.

We know that the announcement alone