Culture builders

Leaders play a seminal role in shaping and reinforcing organisational culture.

- Gary Peacock

The culture of a workplace—an organisation’s values, norms and practices—has a huge impact on our happiness and success.- Adam GrantAccording to Professor Jay Galbraith, leaders need five elements that support each other to build an effective organisation: strategy, structure, people, processes, and rewards.

Leaders commonly change strategy and structure but these make little difference to culture. If you do not make changes in people (and their skills), processes (typically meetings and reports), and rewards (financial and social), then your culture will stay the same. So leaders, these three elements shape or change your culture.

What is culture?

‘It’s the way we work around here’. You cannot explain [it] exactly to someone outside the organisation, ‘but you just know’. The best practical understanding of culture can be had from a book by Ed Schein. Despite outstanding academic credentials, his book Organisational Culture and Leadership practically explains how you can discover culture in an organisation. It is an interesting but not an easy read.

How can you shape your culture? 

In one word: slowly! If you want to understand how to change the culture, imagine you have a glass of water. Take an ink dropper and add drops of ink to it. The colour of the water slowly gets darker as you add each drop. It changes slowly. Changing the water colour is just like changing culture.

However, for large organisations or old organisations, when you think about changing the culture you do not have a glass of water. You have a swimming pool.