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.

The lesson of these two posts is simple: culture can be good or bad; cults are always bad.

Read other Golden Oldies here.

Two Sides Of Cult Culture

Did you do your homework from Saturday?

I asked you to read Heather Clancy’s take on great culture (content isn’t immortal; the link is a 404 error) and said that I’d explain today why I disagree.

The problem I have is with the idea of culture as a cult.

The definition of cult is given as “great devotion to a person, idea, object, movement, or work,” and culture as “set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices;” Heather sees ‘devotion’ and ‘shared’ as interchangeable—and that makes me very uncomfortable.

Another definition for cult is “obsessive, especially faddish, devotion to or veneration for a person, principle, or thing.”

The examples she uses, Apple, Google and Salesforce.com, are superb companies.

But when someone says ‘cult’ to me I think of Jim Jones, whose followers had great devotion, so much that they followed Jones to the death—literally.

Lehman Brothers and other Wall Street banking houses had/have strong cult cultures as does AIG. Their people had great devotion and passion to cultures that were focused on winning no matter what and we all know where that got us. Another enterprise that comes to mind is Enron.

The point I’m making is that cult culture, like most concepts, cuts both ways.

When culture becomes a cult it can lose its flexibility and willingness to grow and change—necessities in today’s fast-changing world.

It’s always tempting to choose examples that highlight the positive view of a business (or any) concept, but it is imperative to avoid assumptions and remember that there are two sides to everything.

Image credit: Gúnna on flickr

Ducks in a Row: Culture Then and Now

Three years ago, in Leadership Turn, I talked about the dangers of allowing your culture to become a cult, but it seems that’s happening more and more.

The same day I explained here the benefits of what I called an ALUC culture.

ALUC is composed of four actions:

• Ask everyone for input, ideas, suggestions and opinions—not just your so-called stars.

• Listen and really hear what is said, discuss it, think about it.

• Use what you get as often as possible, whether in whole or in part, or as the springboard that leads to something totally different.

• Credit the source(s), both up and down, publicly and privately, thank them, compliment them, congratulate them.

The following day I offered some simple advice on implementing ALUC.

All three were worth reading then.

All three are worth reading now.

You want/need a culture, not a cult.

Flickr image credit: Antony Hollingworth

Three years ago, in Leadership Turn, I talked about the dangers of allowing your culture to become a cult, but it seems that’s happening more and more.

The same day I explained here the benefits of what I called an ALUC culture.

ALUC is composed of four actions:

• Ask everyone for input, ideas, suggestions and opinions—not just your so-called stars.

• Listen and really hear what is said, discuss it, think about it.

• Use what you get as often as possible, whether in whole or in part, or as the springboard that leads to something totally different.

• Credit the source(s), both up and down, publicly and privately, thank them, compliment them, congratulate them.

The following day I offered some simple advice on implementing ALUC.

All three were worth reading then.

All three are worth reading now.

You want/need a culture, not a cult.

Flickr image credit: Antony Hollingworth

Yesterday I described how managers can use ALUC (Ask / Listen / Use / Credit) to engage their teams, whether or not the approach is supported by the overall company culture.

But think how much better it would be to have ALUC embedded in your culture as a part of its infrastructure.

ALUC isn’t something that can be mandated, even by the CEO.

All the proclamations, recommendations and demands aren’t going to force managers to do it if they don’t see the value or their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) isn’t synergistic with ALUC.

What you can do is instill its value in those managers who report to you; they, in turn, pass the belief to their direct reports and so on down the ladder.

But how do you embed ALUC up your culture?

As Nike says, ‘just do it’—don’t talk about it—and it will spread by osmosis.

ALUC is a major productivity and retention booster, the results will speak for themselves, the how-to will be questioned, copied and implemented.

ALUC should also be a ‘make or break’ for all new hires in management roles, confirmed not only during the interview, but also through reference checking of previous direct reports, not bosses.

Not rocket science; most of the best cultural practices are simple, ignored, but simple.

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Image credit: ZedBee|Zoë Power on flickr