Rotten Habit #5: Stop the Rot: re-evaluate leadership behaviour to power an impact culture

Welcome to the fifth edition of the Rotten Season, our weekly insights into the hidden factors destroying your culture – and how to fix them.

This is a universal truth: culture drives creativity.

Even when leaders accept this, they can resist the personal implications in subtle ways. They behave as if the culture is something that they experience when they come into work rather than something they create when they come into work. 

Culture is hard yards. It’s the emotional labour of an on-going negotiation between you and everyone you work with about what you do, how you do it, and why it’s necessary. Great things can happen in conversations about culture. 

When you accept that nothing is easier to change than the narratives that drive your behaviour, it will feel empowering. The next stage is to start building for impact.

The stories that a leader needs to tell to start building an impact culture must contain three elements: purpose, pleasure and profit. I’ve already touched on a couple of these in this series, but I want to spend a bit more time on them here.

Purpose 

Every organisation needs an answer to the question “Why bother?” Further, to take a more positive spin, a sense of purpose can be the source of a lot of value. None of us are going to be motivated to have good ideas if we think those ideas aren’t going to do any good. Indeed, if management thinker Simon Sinek is to be believed, purpose is the primary source of value. In Start With Why, Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do; they buy why you do it. And what you do simply proves what you believe.” 

The passion felt by people in a business is a valuable and tradable thing. It doesn’t have to be a unique creed, but it does have to feel special to the people inside the business. Unfortunately, branding agencies and the like may, in the absence of doing the required critical thinking to get at the truth, overreach on this subject and produce little more than hype. 

You know the story. After a lot of sitting on beanbags and mood board creation by men with beards and women with terrific hair, a mission statement arrives, full of hyperbole. But a ball bearings manufacturer in Slough is not ‘making the world a better place’ by doing what they do. That’s an empty desire, made ridiculous by being too lofty. But the people who work there would like to think that they are doing a good job in a tough market. Their sense of purpose will take a little longer to describe and may have to be more subtle than a cheap and quick line of crass and inflated prose. 

It is often in trying to articulate nothing more ambitious than some achievable goals that a sense of purpose can be derived. You don’t have to strive to be the best in the world, or to save the world. Aiming for the best customer service reputation in northwest Slough, on the other hand, might feel purposeful and true. A conversation within a business about its purpose must be real and honest. If it is, and it is articulated well, people will get out of bed in the morning with gusto and stay loyal for years. 

Pleasure 

When you’re doing something that you care about, it’s a pleasurable thing. But we must be careful when we talk about pleasure or enjoyment in the context of work. Enjoyment of your work doesn’t mean the easiest path. It doesn’t mean there won’t be barriers to overcome, setbacks to recover from, and late nights. There may indeed be times when you’re tearing your hair out. 

Studies have shown that when children are praised for something they have done, they do not try so hard the next time that they are given a similar task. But if they have had to try hard to achieve the goal, and are praised for the effort, they tend to redouble their efforts next time. 

Adults are no different. The philosopher Immanuel Kant, among many others, saw strife as the very source of pleasure. This isn’t obtuse. Without having to try, achievement has no value. 

Purpose without pleasure is grind. But pleasure without purpose is transient. 

Profit

The profit motive is taken for granted in most businesses. It is, without a doubt, a quick answer to the ‘why bother?’ question. Of course, making money is vital, and the Micawber Principle applies to us all. But no one ever got out of bed to create shareholder value. 

There have been many efforts in large businesses over the last few years to create a wider definition of profit for business as a whole – something more meaningful than money. But these efforts are usually consigned to CSR departments with limited real power. They also fall foul of the hype trap that dogs many purpose-related discussions. 

We can reframe the term ‘profit’ and get a lot more out of it. We should view profit as a catalyst that enables the company to do more of the work it does, in the process creating more value for more people. This in turn creates more pleasure and furthers the purpose. It enriches the whole business, the customers, and everyone whose purposes are served by the business – not just the shareholders. 

Is it me?

Throughout the Rotten Season, when I’ve offered suggestions for the questions you might ask of your organisation, I’ve not been suggesting them as something to ponder, or as a rhetorical device. I actually want you to ask the questions of your business and answer them. 

There is one final question I want you, a leader of the organisation, to ask yourself – and it is the most important one. ‘Is it me?’ is a question we should all ask of ourselves in a spirit of genuine enquiry. 

It is the job of anyone who wants to work in a creative culture to try to identify their own blind spots, and to do this throughout their working life. And this applies particularly to leaders. We’re all blind to the issues that inhibit our own progress and may create bad politics, but with leaders it matters more because of their influence. If you answer those questions with emotional maturity others will follow in the same spirit. If you are guarded, sneaky, slapdash or flippant, why should anyone else give you what you need? 

The advice, then: meditate on the proposition that the main problem in your business could be you.

And don’t think it’s over when you’ve got your head around that. We haven’t even begun to explore the other two vital ingredients of an impact culture: aligned agendas and creative capabilities. But that’s all coming up next Season. See you there.

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