Building Culture - Creating The Values Is The Easy Part

When you look around at business, athletics, academics and even ministry, you will often see values created by that organization. Many to most organizations think that once they create the values and communicate them, the culture creation process is underway and they now have a culture they can be proud of. Well, that approach doesn’t represent reality.

Defining the values is the easy part. Getting the organization to believe those values are important and they will consistently have the right attitude to live them out and demonstrate the new culture behaviors takes time, modeling them, reinforcement, accountability, reward and celebration-just to name a few.

If simply defining the values made for great cultures, wouldn’t most organizations on this planet be in great shape and have their people energized, engaged and commitment to the mission and vision. We still have far too much belief by some senior leaders that once something has been communicated (here culture values), that everyone will just fall in line and behave in accordance. That might have worked well 30 to 40 years ago, but not any more. Especially in a world that is moving from interdependence to independence, Culture is what can unite people and create interdependence, when it’s worked properly.