When it comes to the mission and vision of an organization, most leaders pour a tremendous amount of time, energy, and attention into identifying and pursuing a mission, vision, and strategies that ensure organizational success. However, less attention is often given to the one thing that will ultimately make or break your organization: Culture. Peter Drucker once observed that no matter how compelling your vision is or how aligned your strategies are, Culture is king and eats everything else for breakfast.
Your Culture is the lifeblood from which everything else is birthed. Culture is the way that the people in the organization function together… or don’t. While the mission, vision and strategies define your direction and focus, culture is the environment in which these thrive, survive, or die.
Culture happens regardless of your efforts to define it or to ignore it. This is why Culture must be intentionally discerned, defined, and developed at every level of your organization.
Discern
Culture can be found in the unwritten expectations for team members, the unspoken presuppositions for how work will be done, and shared language that the people of your organization encounter each and every work day.
In order to identify your current culture and begin working toward changing your culture for the better, a time of discernment will help you identify areas of your Culture that need to be celebrated or discarded.
Patrick Lencioni suggests 6 Critical Questions to answer as a team in order to clarify their shared Cultural Values:
- Why do we exist?
- How do we behave?
- What do we do?
- How will we succeed?
- What is important, right now?
- Who must do what?
Articulating, acknowledging, and aligning around the answers to these questions creates a pathway forward for your team to create a healthy, sustainable culture.
Define
When creating Value Statements that are meaningful, the team must understand how they currently function and how they wish to function at their best. Value statements such as, “We will work with Integrity.” and, “We value hard work.” are wonderful statements but they are not unique to your organization and they do not specifically identify how these values function within your team. Life.Church, a multi-site church based out of Oklahoma, communicates some of their values through clearly defined memorable and actionable statements such as these:
We always bring our best. Excellence honors God and inspires people.
We will lead the way with irrational generosity. We truly believe it is more blessed to give than to receive.
We will laugh hard, loud, and often. Nothing is more fun than serving God with people you love.
When statements about how we will function at our best are clearly defined it helps team members rally around unifying principles and values. When someone violates these standards, the team can point to the action and focus on the behaviors (not the individual themselves) that fell short of the agreed to standards. Team members become accountable and empowered as they are challenged to live up to and into clearly defined values.
Develop
In Deep & Wide, Andy Stanley details how NorthPoint Church identified specific staff values for their organization. NP began by asking the question, “If we could push a button and every staff member would do the following, what would the following be?” After a long season of discernment and defining, they named these desired behaviors Common Commitments. Stanley says, “This is a list of behaviors that we feel defines our culture.” These 6 staff behaviors that NP believes define their organizational culture are:
- Take It Personally
- Make It Better
- Collaborate
- Replace Ourselves
- Stay Fit
- Remain Openhanded
(For clear definitions and explanations behind these Common Commitments and how they function within the staff of NorthPoint Church, see Deep and Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend pp. 347-354)
Creating clearly defined, memorable, and actionable value statements that are aligned with your mission and strategy is the first step to creating a healthier culture and leading a better team. This isn’t a one time process but a life-long organizational pursuit. Teams change, new personalities join, the vision may need to shift over time. The way your team functions today may not be how the team will need to function in the future. Regularly assessing and refining how your team operates according to your values is something that must be committed to and developed over time. Don’t rush the process. The Culture you have today wasn’t developed in a day but over time. It will take time to create a healthier Culture but know this “the One who started a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”