Top 6 Mistakes Leaders Make That Sabotage Organizational Culture

I have always viewed organizational culture as the standards to which employees and leaders hold each other accountable. Defining the culture you want your organization to work in might be one of the most underrated strategic ingredients to success. Too many leaders still view culture as an after-thought, a touchy feely objective that is hard to quantify, a management craze that will blow offer, or a non-essential activity handed over to HR to manage. Leaders that think this way could not be further from today’s business reality.

I have become increasingly convinced that properly defining the culture and behavioral expectations that leaders believe will make their organization successful in executing its strategy is as important as defining the mission and vision of the organization. After all, would a fast growing software company whose strategy is to aggressively launch new product revisions every 3 months require the same personal attributes and behaviours from its employees as a finance and accounting services consulting firm doing business in the US following the market crash of 2008? What about the work norms and personal attributes that you need from a team of leaders being mandated to launch a new business within your company (ie. Intrapreneurs) versus those required of your existing leaders who are tasked with managing your existing core business?

Defining and enforcing the culture that your employees will need to demonstrate to win over customers, reach out to partners, secure the best suppliers, and interface with other key stakeholders is as important as telling your employees where the company is heading. The culture is an important part of the “how” you will get where you are heading. This “cultural how” includes the collective behaviours that should act as a compass for how people are to work together, the values that are most important, how people talk to each other and treat your customers and suppliers, and other norms of work life.

What is often forgotten, however, is that a company’s desired culture is defined in slides and on posters but comes to life in the every day transactions and interactions that employees observe from their leadership team. And this is where leaders can get in trouble.

Here are my top 6 leadership mistakes that can sabotage your efforts to create a winning culture:

#6 Not testing for cultural fit when interviewing candidates during the hiring process, or allowing this cultural fit assessment to be conducted subjectively and by gut feel. Consequence: You leave your company’s cultural growth to chance. Chance is no way to run a business and not vetting out the cultural misfits during the hiring stage will weaken your organizational culture and make your company less effective.

#5 Defining the culture that you require to achieve your business objectives based on your historical past and not your desired future. Consequence: I believe that every strategy must be supported with a well thought-out way of how the leadership team and the rest of the organization is expected to work together to be most successful in executing the strategy in the long run. How you worked in the past to be successful may not be what is best suited to meet your new strategic objectives. You can borrow from the past, but do so carefully.

#4 Putting up with - or worst, promoting - an employee who consistently demonstrates counter-cultural behavior. Consequence: Other employees see precisely what is going on and conclude that as long as one is seemed as indispensable, or has a privileged relationships with the right people, culture does not apply. In other words, displaying the right behaviour is a nice to have, and not a must have for advancement.

#3 Not including cultural objectives in our company strategy or minimizing their importance. Consequence: You pass on an incredibly powerful opportunity to set the tone for the rest of the organization and you will make achieving your desired strategic destination a lot harder than it needs to be. Harder means more time... and more time means more money.

#2 Thinking that culture can be put on an on-off switch that is only applied to certain aspects of the business and not others. Consequence: Inconsistency kills cultural aspirations - pure and simple. You either strive to achieve your cultural objectives in everything you do, or you might as well shelve them.

#1 Promoting one culture but allowing yourself or your leadership team to behave another way. Yes, the cliché of walking the talk makes it to number one. If you aspire to a certain culture, then employees will follow the example they see from their leaders. Consequence: Subordinates will scrutinize how you and your leaders handle themselves during day-to-day business such as when: hiring and firing, sharing information, spending money, treating customers, employees, and suppliers, interacting with other leaders, speaking about colleagues when they are not around, behaving around the water cooler, etc. If employees catch you or your leaders saying one thing, but doing another, they will quickly translate those observed behaviours as the real culture and begin to mimic them, regardless of what is written on your culture posters.

Culture is a powerful enabler to strategic success. Keeping these top 6 items in mind when assessing how your organization is doing will ensure that you remain objective when evaluating your team's efforts in embodying your cultural aspirations.