Ducks in a Row: Cultural Stain
by Miki Saxon
For 30 years I’ve preached the power of culture to the managers with whom I’ve worked.
I believed that good culture was the difference between great companies and the rest.
As a Silicon Valley headhunter, I made it a point to recruit for companies with good culture and from companies with bad ones, which is why 75% of my placements stayed 4 years or longer.
These days everyone is talking about the importance of culture—the media, bloggers, academics, pundits, CEOs—especially CEOs.
People like me who promote culture know that it must be like stain, not paint, to work.
Unfortunately, many CEOs use “cultural paint,” believing their employees will think its “cultural stain.”
The difference is obvious; cultural stain is absorbed into the very fiber of an organization, thus affecting everybody’s thoughts and actions, while cultural paint sits on the surface where it is paid lip-service and its effects are grounded in convenience.
Cultural stain is the direct result of walking the talk and making sure that everybody else walks it, too. It’s intentional action and it requires paying attention.
It’s not the output of an underling, although it can bubble up from employees if the circumstances are right, but “I didn’t know!” is never an acceptable reason for anything when coming from the person who ultimately is supposed to be in charge.
The ideas and desires that do percolate up may be included in the culture, but only if the top person really buys into them (think ROWE)
But if they are included only to make the employees feel good the result is cultural paint.
Like real paint, cultural 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 how much paint is applied and no matter what the CEO tells himself and his Board, people aren’t stupid and they will vote the culture with their feet.
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zedbee/103147140/
