The Culture You Create

Leadership comes with a lot of competing priorities.

There are decisions to make. Problems to solve. Goals to hit. People to care for. Strategies to develop. Meetings to lead. Fires to put out.

But there’s one responsibility that pays dividends across nearly every part of an organization:

Creating culture.

Culture can be difficult to define because we experience it more than we talk about it.

It’s “the way things happen around here.”

It’s what gets celebrated and what gets corrected. What people expect from one another. How we respond when things go wrong. How decisions get made. How people treat each other when nobody important is in the room.

Every team has one.

The question is whether we’re shaping it intentionally.

Culture is how leadership scales

In the book I’m writing, I spend a lot of time thinking about how leaders develop the people entrusted to their leadership.

But there’s an obvious problem.

You can’t personally develop every person through individual conversations and coaching. You can’t be in every meeting. You can’t make every decision. And as an organization grows, your direct influence becomes increasingly limited.

That’s why culture matters so much.

Culture allows the things a leader values to travel farther than the leader can.

A clear and compelling culture shapes what happens even when the leader isn’t there.

It gives people a shared understanding of who we are, what matters here, and how we’re going to go about accomplishing the mission together.

And over time, it doesn’t just shape what people do…

It shapes the kind of people they are becoming.

That’s one of the reasons culture matters so much to the book I’m writing.

You don’t need to be the CEO

When we talk about creating culture, it’s easy to picture the person at the top.

CEOs create culture. Lead pastors create culture. Founders and executive leaders create culture.

Of course they do.

But I think the opportunity is much bigger than that.

If you lead a department, you’re shaping a culture.

If you lead a team of five people, you’re shaping a culture.

If you’re a parent leading a family, you’re shaping a culture.

If you’re volunteering to lead a coalition of Little League baseball parents, congratulations: you’re also shaping a culture.

Wherever people are looking to you for leadership, you have an opportunity to influence the environment they experience.

And I think the best leaders understand that.

They don’t just ask, What are we trying to accomplish?

They also ask, Who are we becoming while we accomplish it?

The twelve

So what kind of environment helps people grow?

What should leaders consistently model, celebrate, teach, and reinforce?

What does a healthy, development-oriented culture actually look like?

I’ve been working on a set of values that attempt to answer those questions. I have twelve.

Twelve traits of a culture designed not only to accomplish a mission, but to develop the people accomplishing it. They’ll make up a significant portion of the book.

I’m not ready to share all twelve yet. But I’m looking forward to introducing you to them along the way.

Because whether we realize it or not, every one of us who leads is creating a culture.

The question is simply, “what kind?”

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