Golden Oldies: What the Boss Contributes
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
You got MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), I got MAP, all us humans got MAP. MAP reflects your values — whatever they may be — and culture is MAP in action.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
What does the boss really contribute to their organization?
The culture; it’s the boss’ MAP that forms and shapes the culture for their organization.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a mom and pop operation, startup or global giant; whether the company has two, two thousand or twenty thousand employees; whether the boss is called owner, founder, president, or CEO.
Cultural ideas can’t percolate up from the ranks without a top boss who enables the bottom-up culture in the first place, as well as providing the fertilizer that allows ideas to bloom.
It’s not enough to announce the cultural attributes in which you believe, such as no politics, and then ignore political actions because you believe that your senior staff are adults and won’t engage in behavior that goes unrewarded.
Even those who manage culture by benign neglect must see to it that there are repercussions for actions that flaunt the corporate culture just as there are for actions that violate legal issues such as harassment.
And all this is just as true for the individual subcultures that establish themselves around every manager in the company all the way down through team leader.
Creating and caring for the culture should be written into every manager’s job description at every level.
If that seems a bit extreme, keep in mind that study after study has proven that culture affects productivity, engagement, innovation and retention.
Image credit: Kumar Appaiah
March 19th, 2019 at 10:15 am
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