How to Create Culture: Actions

Tagline: 3…2…1…Action! 

The culture of an organization, company, church, or army is the foundation from which everything springs—both good and bad. 

If you want to be intentional about your culture, you must follow a three-step process. I talked about the first two in previous articles. First, it must begin with certain beliefs. Second, these beliefs must be described with carefully chosen words. In this article, I want to talk about the third step, how leaders must bring culture to life through action. 

Three precursors top leaders of an organization must achieve before successful action is taken to shape their culture:

1. They must believe in it. Top leaders must believe in the culture they endeavor to create. If written words to describe your culture do not really reflect what the top leaders believe, those principles will not be reflected in the company’s culture. Instead, have the courage to change what is written. After all, how can you lead an organization into a culture when you don’t really believe what is written about it? 
2. They must value it. Top leaders must value positive culture to begin with. If they do not see it as priority one, no one else will either. 
3. They must sacrifice for it. Effective leaders know that positive culture requires consistent resources, sacrifice, and time to come into fruition, maintain, and improve.  

With the top leaders on board, now you get to work. How do top leaders put the culture into action? Leaders, inculcate the words that describe your culture into natural, daily vocabulary.  Use your phrases in founding documents. Speak them and write them often, in creative ways and in a variety of settings.

For instance, every time I’m in a meeting with our executives, every time I’m on stage to represent our company, every time I talk about our people or what we do, I articulate our culture and the words we chose to describe it. I recount one of our values, and I highlight stories that describe our DNA. Action means that we hire, we fire, we promote, and we train based on our values and our DNA. The principles we believe in are at the very heart of everything we do.

If your organization has nothing written, or if you’ve not identified clear beliefs or principles you want to manifest, you must first come to clarity. You must first write the words. Then you are ready to take strong action, beginning with aligning the top leaders. Action to shape the culture must be consistent and creative, highlighting and giving life to the words the top leaders chose to describe the culture they desire.