Culture - with intent
We’ve all heard the Peter Drucker quote ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ and read the myriad research supporting the case for inclusive cultures that value diversity. Culture isn’t created via words on a wall, press releases, or just words. It’s built by consistent, authentic, intentional behaviours that are gradually embed over time. A positive, high-performance culture can take many forms in different organisations, but for us, it’s one that is direct but kind, high trust, low judgement, and where everyone feels like they are included and belong.
We know that great cultures lead to better commercial results, yet they don’t happen by accident. Culture starts with leaders – if we’re intentional in defining the culture we want, and taking specific and positive action to nurture it, we’ll create a psychologically safe environment in which people can be themselves and reach their goals. For leaders to be ambivalent about culture will be at their peril.
Many of us will have heard the term ‘psychological safety’ in recent years. Amy Edmonson developed the concept through research - primarily in the medical profession. She found that the surgical teams that made the most mistakes, had the smallest amount of mortality. She found that the problem wasn’t that they made more mistakes, it was that they reported them, discussed them, and learned from them. We can draw a comparison with the safety in the airline industry, where any of the flight crew can speak to the flight deck at any time to raise concerns, all near misses are recorded, data from the flight recorder is fully analysed in the event of a crash.
The similarities here are that the cultures encourage a lack of hierarchy, open candour, respectful challenge, and conflict, in a non-threatening and direct manner. Psychological safety has become a buzz-phrase over the last few years, but for good reason. Cultures with high psychological safety have higher engagement, elevated levels of wellbeing, and better performance. They’re also more inclusive and encourage diversity, which we know is beneficial to the wellbeing and results of a team.
In the last blog, we wrote about the need for leaders to be attuned to the needs of their team and to approach each conversation they have deliberately and intentionally. If leaders want to nurture a psychologically safe culture of candour, challenge, connection, trust and high performance, they must take intentional action. This isn’t easy and takes hard work, so many leaders need help.
In our flagship Lead With Intent programme, we help leaders to define the culture they want in their teams and diagnose how close the team is to its desired destination. We support leaders to connect and engage with their team to jointly create, embed, and protect the culture that suits them, their organisation, and their customers.
Culture creation is exciting. Done intentionally, it’s a wonderful and fulfilling process for a team to work through together.
