With over three decades of leadership experience, I’ve learned a few things about workplace culture, and I’d like to share some of them with you today.

There are common characteristics within organizations that perform at very high levels, characteristics that are often missing in lower performing enterprises. I call them “cultural elements.”

With over three decades of leadership experience, I’ve learned a few things about workplace culture, and I’d like to share some of them with you today.

There are common characteristics within organizations that perform at very high levels, characteristics that are often missing in lower performing enterprises. I call them “cultural elements.”

Because the essential goal of having values in the first place is to help us clearly understand what is expected of us, values help define the structure in which we work together. Core values accomplish this by:

• Delineating the principles for interactions between all stakeholders

• Communicating those values in a consistent and forceful manner

• Building a basis for reinforcement and enforcement of organizational values

• Providing a basis for personal and organizational accountability

• Setting the boundaries for acceptable behavior for all associates

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No organization has just one culture. Every enterprise culture is comprised of any number of smaller individual subcultures.

Each team, department and division has a distinct subculture that exists as a smaller reflection of the way the associates in the enterprise at large work together, communicate, plan, solve problems, make products and provide services, form friendships, measure progress and reward success. In fact, inside each subculture are usually more informal groups or cliques of employees who share common interests. These groups can become very influential in the absence of strong, positive leadership from the formal leaders of the organization. These internal influences can account for significant differences in performance between subcultures within the same enterprise. Depending on the strength of the workplace culture, the informal leaders can either positively or negatively impact the attitudes of other members of the subculture, dramatically affecting performance. As an example, one sales team may outperform all the other teams, even when those teams sell the same products at the same prices to the same types of customers.

I just returned from giving a keynote address and a couple of workshops to more than 200 leaders of Kansas Department of Transportation. It was really rewarding to see how many of these leaders from every level of KDOT responded to the idea of building their own powerful subcultural organizations – in spite of being in a period of reduced revenue and ever-tightening budgets.

I was amazed at how excited many of them were about the idea of taking the initiative to improve the effectiveness of their own organizations; not waiting for their leaders to do it for them.