I love culture. I believe in the power of culture. I believe that good culture is the difference between great companies and the rest. I believe that pretty much all the people, like myself, who promote culture know that it must be like stain, not paint, to work. Unfortunately, many companies use “culture paint,” believing their employees will think it’s “culture stain.”

The difference is obvious, while culture stain is absorbed into the very fiber of an organization, thus affecting everybody’s thoughts and actions, culture paint sits on the surface where it is paid lip-service and its effects are grounded in convenience.

Culture stain is the direct output of the CEO (or whatever title the top person holds) and can be good, bad or indifferent. It’s the result of walking the talk and making sure that everybody else walks it, too. It’s never an accident and, although it can be unconscious, it shouldn’t be. Nor can it be considered the output of an underling, since “I didn’t know!” is never an acceptable reason for anything when coming from the person who ultimately is supposed to be in charge.

So, like it or not, culture is a product of, and flows from, the top. The ideas and desires that percolate up may be included in the culture, but if the top person only includes them to make people feel good, but doesn’t truly buy into them, the result is culture paint. Like real paint, culture paint can hide the dry rot and structural weaknesses in the company, but in the long run it won’t hold the people, because no matter what the CEO tells himself and his Board, people aren’t that dumb and they will vote the culture with their feet!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 27th, 2006 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Business info, Culture, Motivation, Retention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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