Culture Is What You Insist On

There have been entire books written about workplace culture and you can ask any two people in an organization what they believe the definition of workplace culture is, they will have two completely different answers. What I've observed over the last several years of being a coach and prior to that as being an employee as part of both good and bad cultures, it is really two, there are two things that make up workplace culture and there are two sides of the same coin. Number one, What are the behaviors, habits, routines, treatment of others that you insist upon through your core values, through your focus, through your differentiated strategy, through your execution. Number two, it is how much will you tolerate in terms of violation of those habits, those routines, those behaviors, that treatment of others.

How much will you tolerate? And between that becomes your culture. Between those two things is your culture. Meaning the organizations that insist upon team members that have good habit, good routine, good treatment of others.

And yes, of course, we make mistakes. We know people are human. They're going to have errors. They're not going to perfectly live the core values.

They're going to have some habits and routines that have to improve to be able to improve their skill set overall. Hey, we can help people. When it comes to major violations of those things, It's how often and how long do we tolerate those major violations? In a A-player culture, we do not tolerate violations of those for long.

What I mean by long is usually one or two quarters where we, if we start to see mid or major violations of habit, routine, behavior toward others, if we don't see improvement, we have to make a change. And those become what we call cultures of discipline, meaning they're disciplined people having disciplined thoughts, taking disciplined action, as Jim Collins would say. And that discipline action is making sure that people that are not going to live your core values, not going to have consistent habit and routine in how they operate, to be able to grow their skill set, we are not going to have them as part of the organization. And you can still be a very caring culture and give people, you know, several chances to change over that kind of window, but you can't give them forever or it starts to erode the entire organization.

So what we see in the best cultures are organizations that do a better job of hiring up front that really know how to us out the correct behaviors, habits, routines, the way people treat others through process like top grading so that we get better and better at better at not making mistakes, bringing people into the organization where you might have to move on from them. And then you're not, and that takes away a whole other layer of concern. If you're a CEO, a leader, a manager, if you're part of the team, you are part of an A player team and you realize that violations of those areas Again, lack of habits, lack of discipline, how we live the core values and treat others, if there are violations in those areas and they're repeated, we have to do something about it. If you're an organization that wants to grow and you're a CEO or a leadership team member, there is a link in my bio, fill out a free growth assessment and I will go through and walk through with your team how to grow scale and improve your company profitably with less drama.