By Bill Kaiser, Senior Consultant
First and foremost, HAPPY 2018 everyone!
I\’m excited to continue learning and sharing with you in what I\’m sure will be an outstanding year for all of us. Wishing you continued success, massive happiness, and wonderful health for the year ahead.
I enjoy when it’s my turn to write our blog, but admittedly feel the pressure to deliver insightful and original thoughts. It\’s not always easy. Often, I find that I lock in on an idea two weeks before the deadline only to have that collide with some new thought inspired by a random radio ad, recent article, Tweet, or even an Instagram post!
Well it happened again. Just as I was going to go down the ever-so-popular New Year\’s Resolution theme path, with a blog titled, “Avoiding the Empty Parking Lot Syndrome,” I received my latest issue of Harvard Business Review (HBR). The cover reads, THE CULTURE FACTOR: Employee attitudes can make or break your business. Here\’s how to get everyone moving in the right direction.
A worthy read
I recommend the article, not because I agree with everything that is written, but because I\’m excited to see that culture remains in the business spotlight. I love the author\’s point that it\’s too often been either left unmanaged or else relegated to being seen as an HR issue. It\’s so much more important than that and needs to be done intentionally. It\’s when the author takes a deeper dive that I find the culture advice waters getting muddy.
Don\’t complicate culture
As I was preparing this blog, I came across this Instagram post from thegoodquote.co:
It helps highlight the “over engineering syndrome” I see in the HBR article and the approach so many culture authors take when sharing their action plans for addressing corporate culture. The misguided recommendations with complex models and integrated framework tables cause us to “lose the forest for the trees.” At the end of the day, culture is about behavior. If you want to change culture, you change behavior. And changing behavior requires that you clearly articulate what you want, and then teach it to people over and over again in a structured and systematic way.
So, as we embark on crushing our 2018 resolutions, I encourage you to not complicate your culture initiative. Keep it simple. If you\’d like to know more about this just give us a call or shoot us an email.