Skip to main content

Creating Culture

Students of Our Culture | Michael Stovall




I posted a video this morning on LinkedIn that was focused on credibility and how important that is for a leader.

Credibility is that ability for others to trust and believe in you, and what you say you will do.

How does that play with creating a culture?

True culture is a tribe. It is a group of people that know each other, trust each other, work for each other ... they feel safe together.

A lot of people seem to think that just by joining an organization, by putting a company logo on our shirt and caring you laptop from meeting to meeting that it creates a bond among the employees; maybe, but usually not.

We are human, whether in our professional or personal lives, there are just certain things we need.

People need to feel safe.

We are social animals who learned and developed understanding that our ability to survive, to succeed dramatically increased when we work with others not only for own benefit, but for theirs as well.

As we have become so competitive and as our ability to be 'safe' has been able to be achieved with less help than our ancestors, we forget the importance of this when we do have to work together.

The best teams are the ones that feel safe together. They feel safe sharing their ideas, they feel safe making mistakes, they feel safe that decisions are made for the whole and not the individual.

To create a culture of real collaboration, innovation and unity, you have to be able to make people feel safe, respected and included.

To do that you need to be authentic. You are not your title, your are not your experience, you accomplishments are things from the past.

Each day is about connecting with those around you. Appreciating their contributions, being honest with them, respecting them to talk to them like you would your closest friends.


The days of seeing people as cogs in a machine are past and dead. Value the person, let them know you care. That's culture.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Black Swan

  Maybe I think differently because I have read this? With everything going on with the CoronaVirus, it is incredible to see how people are behaving. Everyone and their cousin is talking about the Supply Chain, about being prepared, about not having enough capacity ... it's crazy. I honestly wonder if the people making all of these comments have ever actually ran any operations, if they ever had to responsibility to actually get things done. It's easy to say how prepared you can be, and what companies should have been doing, or pointing the finger saying "how could you be out of stock". The reality is, we have a lot of choice. The average grocery store for example can easily have 15,000 to 20, 000 skus that move through their stores ... think about that for a minute. That many skus, that are all cycling through the stores on some type of regular rate of sale.  Or let's take something that's more in people's face at the mo...

Growth & Success

  We spend so much of our time focused on results and outcomes. Did we win? Did we lose? Was it a success or a failure? How do we measure it? Track it? Compare it? Everyone wants to "succeed" because that is what we feel is the right answer. That is what gets praise from those all around us. It makes us feel valued and safe as it makes us feel like we have earned our place (at work or within our community). Does every step forward have to have the same outcome? At what point is the growth and learning just as (or even more?) valuable than some expected outcome? Our world is changing so quickly these days, more quickly than it probably ever has in the past. We have access to so much information, to so many more people and communities, we are constantly trying to "measure up" to everything around us. We are experiential creatures. Every experience that we have contributes to our knowledge and understanding our our-self and the world we are a part of and influences the...

Give your best stuff away

    This is an interesting and sometimes polarizing topic. One group of people believe that the more content (ideas, conversations, posts, videos, etc) that you put out into the world, the better your return is as you are connecting with more people and getting greater exposure. Another group feels that by investing all of this energy into giving away "free stuff", takes away from what you could be doing to grow your business, give to your clients or to your employer. That giving your stuff away doesn't pay the bills, so what's really the point other than feeling good. For me personally, I'm all about giving my best stuff away for free, and what follows are really my "whys". First and foremost, I don't really prescribe to the idea that anyone really has "best stuff". That's finite and fixed and I truly don't believe this applies to people the way it can be associated to things. If you are a miner, and you m...