Contrary to popular belief, great organizational cultures really don’t have to start at the top of the enterprise. In my management leadership experience I have seen many organizations where a great enterprise-wide culture was begun by a subcultural leader (subsidiary, division, department or team) deep down in the organization and then spread out into the surrounding workplace subcultures and eventually permeated the entire enterprise. In my efforts at transformational leadership training, it is a joy to see leaders at the very lowest part of an enterprise ‘get it’ and rise to become an outstanding organizational culture change agent in spite of this or her lower level leadership position.

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.