Collaborative culture building is the only kind of culture building. Nobody can build a culture on their own.
I find that explicit culture building efforts are relatively rare. In fact, one participant in a workshop I led defined culture as “that stuff we don’t talk about.” Another senior leader once told me “I don’t do culture, that’s too hard.”
There’s a lot of culture ignoring and culture avoiding instead of culture building. When we do talk about it, a lot of what happens is just culture describing rather than genuine building.
On a similar note, in a recent course on innovation and culture, the instructor insisted that “culture is invisible.” I really must disagree. Culture is very much visible… if we choose to look at it.
Every group has a culture of some kind, a set of “shared beliefs and behaviors” the group holds in common (that’s my favorite definition of culture). These cultural attributes are often unstated or implicitly accepted, without much deliberate discussion or decision. They often happen without people paying much attention to them. But the healthiest groups I’ve ever known are the ones where we do talk about it, where we do see it, where we do make choices about the beliefs we hold and the ways we express those beliefs. Where we go beyond just describing “how we do things around here” and get into “what do we think is really important?” and “how do we want to do things around here?”
We all play a role in building the culture of the groups we’re a part of, by the beliefs we hold and the behaviors we exhibit, whether we know it or not. Even if we’re not building culture deliberately, our beliefs and behaviors build culture every single day.
Here’s your invitation to play that role on purpose, to spark some conversations and build a culture you can be proud of.