Rotten Habit #6: The Rotten Season in review
Rotten Season | Hidden factors that could be destroying your culture, and how to fix them
First published onJun 27, 2018
Welcome to the last edition of the Rotten Season, our weekly insights into the hidden factors destroying your culture – and how to fix them.
As a subject, organisational culture is both vital and overwhelming. No other aspect of business management rivals it for sheer scale, pervasiveness and influence. In turn, this makes culture endlessly fascinating – with equal emphasis on the world ‘endless’.
But, relative to the influence it wields, culture is by far the least studied aspect of business management. In turn, the historic lack of credible language and data around culture has led to it being sidelined as a concern in many organisations.
And then a doom loop begins: a lack of serious support for cultural development leads to a lack of serious results in driving it. Which in turn undermines support for future initiatives…and fade to black.
For Corporate Punk – as well as for many of our clients – the question is: where do you start untangling all this? The answer is somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s meaningful. And this has been the whole intention behind the Rotten Season. We’ve tried to give you a start, by sharing a few of the common problems that inhibit cultural effectiveness. (There are so many more.)
Next up, we’ll be looking more at how to start rewiring your culture for impact. In the meantime, here are the highlights from the Rotten Season.
Rotten Habit #1: Your decision-making processes leave you more fragile than agile
What to do: Re-think your processes around a principle of minimum viability
The key word here is ‘really’…Who do we really need in this meeting? What really needs to happen next? Remember that old truism about ‘what assume makes’ that your Dad taught you? He wasn’t wrong.
Rotten Habit #2: Thinking that creativity is fluff
What to do: Understand that risk is both subjective and necessary
Remember that things going wrong are a natural by-product of trying to do anything new. Foster discussion on this. And use this process to define how creativity is confronted, measured and celebrated within your culture.
Rotten Habit #3: Failing to harness the power of optimism
What to do: Find ways to balance purpose and pleasure in your culture
Mustering the energy to change something requires a fundamental belief that things can and will get better. This is a cornerstone of any effective culture. Developing it in the right ways (not least avoiding nonsense and narcissism) is a critical challenge for any leader.
Rotten Habit #4: Ignoring structure as a key driver of your culture
What to do: Make sure that “how should we organise ourselves to best effect, given what we know now, and where the future is going?” is a question asked in the far-reaching spirit that it deserves
Structure drives culture. Why? The way we define and organise our roles at work influences the stories we tell ourselves about what our businesses do and how they do it. To be successful, you need to ensure that intuition gets hardwired into experience, and that talent is secure and flexible enough to go where it’s needed.
Stop the Rot, Step 1: Re-evaluate leadership behaviour to power an impact culture
What to do: Meditate on the proposition that the main problem in your business could be you
The stories that a leader needs to tell to start building an impact culture must contain three elements: purpose, pleasure and profit. And effective storytelling also starts in self-knowledge. 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.
We’ll be starting our next season of insights next week on how to be a leader that actually changes things. In the meantime, take a read of Creativity is Power for more on how to unlock creativity in your employees — the most important leadership challenge facing businesses today.
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