Too often managers and leaders are waiting for their bosses to take the lead in organizational culture change.  It seems that the majority of leaders have come to believe that great organizational culture has to start at the very top of the organization.  In all of my years doing organizational culture training, I have seen many, many examples of great organizational cultures deep within an otherwise mediocre to even poor overall corporate culture.

You see, every leader has more than enough latitude and plenty of ready resources to dramatically improve his or her organizational culture; as long as that organization and the enterprise as a whole is viable (deserves to exist). In fact, as a corporate keynote speaker, I have made a career of stripping away the excuse often posed by leaders, ‘I can’t fix my culture until my boss fixes his’.

As a matter of fact great leaders of subculture deep within an enterprise often rise to the top of an organization’s leadership ladder because of his or her ability to build high performance workplace cultures in spite of the quality of those organizations around the.

Longtime organizational behavior researcher and business consultant Daniel R. Denison Ph.D., defines workplace culture as:

“Organizational culture is the underlying values, beliefs and principles that serve as a foundation for an organization’s management system, as well as the practices and behaviors that both exemplify and reinforce those basic principles.” 4

A number of authors and researchers have studied the traits of successful businesses. In their book, Built to Last, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras describe companies with consistently strong and adaptive cultures. Called “visionary” because of their ability to sustain success over time, these companies include 3M, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, Marriott, Merck, Motorola, Nordstrom, Proctor & Gamble, and Sony.

No matter how extraordinary we think our culture is, the ultimate measure of its continued success is how well it serves the expectations of all its stakeholders. Developing the human power of the organization drives its financial capital. It is not by nurturing the bottom line that we build high-performance organizations. Rather, it is by nurturing our organizational cultures and subcultures that we build the bottom line.

To sustain success, people need to be excited by the challenge of strengthening their cultures by consistently assessing where they are today and where they want to go. You want champions of culture, in every leadership role, committed to creating outstanding places to work.

An enterprise can’t just declare what its culture is and expect its employees to embrace it. That makes culture a meaningless word. To build strong, adaptive cultures, associates have to feel viscerally motivated to be a key part of everything going on around them.

While there is no one-size-fits-all culture, you can increase the potential for people buying into the effort to develop a positive culture by communicating to them how they are integral parts of the desired changes and how they will be rewarded for their contributions and commitment.

But management often fails to communicate clearly how the changes will benefit the stakeholders as well as the organization. Because the stakeholders don’t understand their roles, they often cling to the status quo -- even to their complaints. The stakeholders want to know, and have a right to be told, “When we get to this better place, here’s what’s in it for you.’’

We all want stakeholders to share our vision for the future. So it can be discouraging to return from a seminar, for example, all excited about the latest trend in building quality organizations and be received by your associates with stony faces and glazed eyes.

The problem is that when you come back and talk about these new ideas that supposedly will make everyone happier and make the enterprise more productive, the associates may hear something all-together different: “Management has found a new way to make us do something we don’t want to do.” Why? You didn’t involve their input as stakeholders in developing the proposed changes.

In many organizations today when things go wrong, someone suggests, “Let’s try this or that new model” -- the so-called management flavor-of-the month approach. That’s ridiculous and fatiguing.

It takes more than just twisting on the cube to solve the puzzle of culture

This all-too-often approach simply tries to solve the puzzle of culture by twisting on the cube and hoping that all the pieces will come together, leading to dramatically improved results. But just as the puzzle isn’t solved that way, culture doesn’t work that way either.

One of the biggest challenges facing organizations over the next few years will be the increasing shortage of talent. Between 1976 and 1986, nearly 25 million people entered the workforce. Between 1986 and 1996, about 19.5 million people entered the workforce.

The biggest tightening is yet to come. Between 1997 and the year 2006, only 14.5 million people entered the workforce, creating a critical need for healthy organizational cultures that can attract and retain talented employees.

But we’re not only talking numbers. People leaving college today are demanding better benefits, salaries, stock options and bonuses. And they are less loyal, making retention one of the greatest pressures on business today.

In a phrase, it’s getting harder to attract and keep high-caliber employees. Making matters worse, when an organization loses a valued associate, it can mean lost productivity as well as the added costs of finding and training a replacement.

In the pharmaceutical industry, we estimated that it cost $200,000 to find and train a new sales representative to replace one who quit. A good deal of this cost is due to lost sales while you wait for the new representative to get hired, trained and up to speed.

There’s also the gamble whether the new person will fit into your culture. Some organizations are so hard pressed that they hire people with fewer skills, lowering the overall skill level of their workforce.

The result is that we begin to lower our standards, not only for whom we hire but also for what we’ll let people get away with once they are hired. Thus we sabotage the potential of our organization to achieve greatness.

To avoid falling prey to these trends, I maintain that if we focus on building strong, adaptive cultures, we will attract high-quality talent. Our cultures will be such great places to work that people will do almost anything to be a part of them -- and stay a part of them. The point is, if you build it, they will come.

Ask yourself, where are the truly great places to work? I’ll bet you conclude there aren’t that many. And since the shortage of talented workers is only going to get worse in the coming years, a strong organizational culture is now more critical than ever.

When Harley Davidson opened a motorcycle plant in Kansas City, it had trouble finding skilled workers who could also adapt to the plant’s flattened management culture in which executives and labor leaders work side by side.

The company formed partnerships with community colleges to train hundreds of new workers, not only how to build a motorcycle, but also how to solve complex problems and read technical manuals. The costs were initially high. But the commitment paid off. Now, a job at Harley-Davidson is highly sought after.

Many organizations face another challenge: When you provide someone with new skills, that person has a better chance to leave for a higher paying job. If you haven’t built a highly effective workplace culture, you’ll just keep churning workers and jeopardize efforts to maximize the potential of your enterprise or the subculture for which you are responsible. You’ll find yourself becoming a training ground for workers and a source of skilled talent for your competitors. That’s no way to get ahead.

Having worked in a number of high-performance cultures, I can tell you that they had a line of quality candidates waiting at the door to be interviewed. The more desirable your workplace culture, the more dramatic your chances to attract and keep the best people.

That’s my argument for a strong, adaptive culture. If you build it, they will come -- and they will stay and perform.