The 10 Commandments of a Healthy Culture (Part 1)

Every home, every school, every church, every business, and every classroom have a culture. Every organization has a culture. The only question is what kind of culture is it? Culture is hard to define but easy to feel. It’s simply the feel of the organization or the way things get done. Culture is how people relate to one another, behave and communicate.

The question is, “Is your culture hindering or helping you to achieve your objective?”

When it comes to organizational leadership, I believe that culture trumps everything. An organization can have skilled workers, plenty of resources, a clear vision, and great systems, but if the culture is toxic, it can’t and it won’t reach its objective. The reason is that a healthy culture creates the right environment for success.

Michael Hyatt compared culture to the air around you. Even though you can’t see the air, you feel it.  Your culture, like the air you breathe, is completely invisible, yet it regulates every aspect of your team’s experience and performance.

If the air is polluted, the team will struggle to function and execute the vision. But if the air is healthy (like when our air has the right percentage of oxygen and nitrogen), the atmosphere around us can work for us and not against us.

Culture is everything to your organization, and when someone resigns, they are not leaving an organization–they are leaving a culture.

Two Types of Workplace Culture

In a healthy culture, people like coming to work, and they work well together. There is plenty of collaboration and synergy. Because teammates care more about the overall success of the organization, they freely share information and help other team members. As a result, things get done well. Team members feel a sense of purpose and fulfillment, and they also feel valued and respected. They have the feeling that what they do matters, and there are high levels of trust because of the honesty and transparency. People are comfortable taking risks because they are encouraged to fail.

In an unhealthy culture, things are toxic. There are lots of turf wars, and information is hoarded. Team members do not willingly try to help each other. There are huge levels of sarcasm and cunningness, and there are low levels of trust. In an unhealthy culture, there are many side conversations and eye rolling. There is little follow-through and poor execution. Underperformance is tolerated and often just overlooked, and because of this, teammates feel undervalued and unappreciated.

So how can leaders create a culture that enables the team to succeed?

In this two-part series, we will look at the 10 commandments of a healthy culture. Here are the first five:

1. Clarify your organizational values.

Remember your culture is how things work. You could say it’s the way the people in your organization behave. Organizational values, heavily communicated and pushed down into the organization, serve as tools to shape behavior. When your values are clear, you can easily reinforce the good and helpful behaviors and eliminate or minimize the toxic behaviors.

2. Clarify expectations and hold people accountable.

In order to create a culture of execution, where the right things are getting done when they need to get done, you must give people clarity and hold them accountable. Team members must know exactly what it is that they are being asked to do, and they must know someone will be checking in. Lou Gerstner said, “People don’t do what you expect but what you inspect.

3. Have fun.

The work place is a social environment. People are not robots; they are social beings. We want to know and be known. We naturally want to like the people we work with. We don’t want to just have a job, so we want to be able to be friends with the people we work with. Having a friend or friends at work has an impact on emotional engagement. We can’t force people to be friends, but we can create opportunities for people to become friendlier with some fun. Here are some real examples we have done to make this possible:

• Have an ice cream truck arrive in the parking lot over the lunch hour and buy everyone ice cream.
• Organize a short staff Olympics with team competition over an extended lunch.
• Close the office half a day and take the team to a baseball game.
• Have cook-offs. (Have a theme such as bacon, chili, tailgating, etc. People make a dish and vote on the top 3 with awards.)
• Celebrate monthly crazy holidays. (National Donut Day, Chocolate Lovers Day)
• Twinning Tuesday (Partner with someone in the office and dress alike.)
• Spirit-wear day (Have all staff wear company logo clothing and have someone come in to take an all-staff picture.)
• Close the office and have a pool party.
• Invest in a ping pong table and play before lunch.

By doing simple things, we are trying to create opportunities for people to make friends and have some fun at work.

4. Invite feedback.

Every leader wants to make progress. A critical element to progress is information… about a person, a system, a strategy, or environment. If that information is not shared with the right people at the right time, the organization will not benefit. Clay Scroggins said it best, “An organization does not benefit from information that is not shared.” Why don’t more people share the information they know would help?

I believe it’s because they haven’t been invited to. Feedback is risky. Because it could hurt the person giving it and the person receiving it, people naturally avoid sharing feedback. If you want a culture that fosters honesty and free-flowing information, you must invite it. Ask for it. Even demand it. What you don’t know can really hurt your organization.

5. Admit mistakes.

All progress requires risk. The problem is that most people don’t want to mess up. Messing up might mean they lose their job. When the leader admits his/her mistakes, the message is clear–you can fail in this organization and maintain your job. By admitting your mistakes, you are freeing up your team to try new things and risk failure.

Organizations don’t grow unless they are willing to make mistakes and fail. Failure is often the only way to succeed. Winston Churchill said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

In Part 2, we will share the final five commandments for a healthy staff culture.

Two Questions:

1. Which commandment do you need to implement immediately to fix a culture problem?
2. Do you feel I missed a commandment that you’d like to implement with your team?