Characteristics of a Successful Culture: Your Main Thing

This post is in response to Stephen Seay's "Characteristics of a Successful Organization."

Stephen does a nice job of explaining culture as a starting point to his blog entry. Also, I would not refute his multiple points on what cultural characteristics make up highly effective enterprises. He includes a great list of traits and characteristics that both management and the worker need to exhibit, but I do believe he is missing something in this blog entry.

We all know that exercise is good for us, but only a few of us actually believe it enough to do it. We all start out with the best intentions of meeting a New Years resolution, but very few of us take those resolutions to heart through the entire year and stick it out. Finally, many of us want to change, but very few of us harness the power to change.

When examining culture, I think an organization has to keep the message simple and easy to understand. The concept I use is from the book Monday Morning Leadership: 8 Mentoring Sessions You Can’t Afford to Miss. The concept is the Main Thing. Every manager of every department in every company should have what the Main Thing is for their organization posted on the wall. The Main Thing is basically the essence of why you are at work. It defines your work purpose, and if the task you are doing does not match that Main Thing concept, you need to stop doing the task. The Main Thing is a very simple and easy way to define work purpose. A culture is basically an organization understanding its work purpose and executing on it together.

Finally, a Main Thing needs to be posted and visable, it needs to be reinforced and the concepts continuously discussed. The goal is to create a corporate mythology. That way, when new employees come into the organization they will hear about your department or company’s mythology and will more easily assimilate into the culture.

The key mistake people make is trying to hire a profile that matches the culture. Doing this leads you to a very homogenous group that will ultimately lack the creativity of a cognitively diverse team.

Cultural concepts should be kept simple, posted, discussed and taught. The concepts should be easily embraced by cognitively diverse employees and can be department focused, as well as company focused.

A large list of should do’s is not going to cut it, a tight purpose statement that incorporates organizational purpose and can be communicated, posted and discussed is going lead to the highest possibility of incorporation.