What do you see when you look at the organization you manage? If you're the president or CEO, think about your company as a whole. If you're not in charge of the whole company, think specifically about the part of the company that you manage, whether it's a team of ten employees or a division of 1,000 employees.
What is the character of your organization? Do you see suspicion, laziness, and resentment? Do you see trust, enthusiasm, and appreciation?
Do you have an image of your organization in your mind now? Do you have a feel for what it’s "personality" is like?
Now, here is the big news: you are looking in the mirror.
Any organization, whether it has ten employees or 10,000 employees, eventually takes on the true character of its leader. Over time, whoever you really are, whatever is truly within you, will come to be reflected in the organization you lead.
This is an amazingly accurate process. I have seen it in a number of companies, with the workplace culture revealing in surprising detail the leader’s strengths, quirks, and hidden weaknesses. As far as I can tell, you can’t "fool the system" by pretending to be different than who you really are. Your real self shines through in the end.
Whether this is good news or bad news depends on what you see when you look at your organization.
What it means is that if you don’t like what you see in your organization and you want to rebuild your workplace culture, you need to start with yourself, not with your staff. Identify the character traits in your organization that you are not happy with and then look at yourself to figure out where those traits are coming from. The good news is that this gives you enormous leverage: you can achieve dramatic culture changes in your organization in a surprisingly short time simply by making changes in your own beliefs, assumptions, or attitudes.
This also gives you a great opportunity to develop yourself as an individual. Since building a strong culture in your organization is an important part of your job, and since the best way for you to do so is to strengthen your own character, you are literally being paid to improve yourself.
Comments