In this episode, Jenni defines culture and leadership, and their crucial roles in creating calm within organisations. She explains the rationale behind grouping the two together based on the belief that culture must be intentional and that intention must come from the top. And also shares tips and practical techniques on how culture and leadership can create calm.
Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:
Culture shock – why we need to be more intentional when communicating organisational culture blog by Jenni Field
Redefining culture: crowd-sourced views on the meaning of culture
How to future-proof your culture for the new world of work webinar blog by Jenni Field
New Amsterdam on Amazon Prime
Taylorism factory management system
You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn
Transcript for this podcast:
Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with Jenni Field.
Today I’m going to be talking about culture and leadership. In the next 15 minutes, we’ll talk about the definitions of each of these things, why they’re important in the organisation, and how ignoring them leads to chaos.
Now, I’ve already covered hybrid working and culture in my first episode in this season, so I’m not going to focus too much on that area. But what I want to do today is talk broadly about culture and leadership and their importance in creating calm. I’m going to talk about culture first and then leadership, so we can see how the two are linked together for organisations.
So, what is culture and how does it create chaos?
Now, I define culture as how things get done around here. That’s a simple definition, but it’s one that was coined by Deon Kennedy some years ago. There are others and earlier on in the year, I asked my LinkedIn community to define culture, so I’ll pop a link in the show notes to that crowdsource list of definitions that I gathered, but some of them are, are worth sharing.
So, I have one here from Chris Dyer who described culture as the combination of the easily seen ideals like vision statements and values, combined with the harder to see norms, organisations, languages, beliefs, and systems.
We have a more academic definition from Shane, which says it’s a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration.
We have one from Flam, Holtz and Randall, which is describing culture as the corporate personality and John Faulkner Wilcox said for culture tomorrow, I like it’s how we will do our best work together.
So there’s lots of different definitions of culture, and I think that’s something that’s worth exploring immediately because there’s no one definition, there’s no one truth as to how we can define culture. We all have different beliefs and different examples of how we talk about it, but for me it’s culture that doesn’t necessarily create chaos, but it’s the lack of focus on it and the belief that it can be created by osmosis that creates the chaos. Now, in my last episode, I talked about the field model and I shared that culture is nearly always part of the fix, and that’s because the chaos you see when you don’t focus on things like people not knowing how things get done or there’s a poor induction or onboarding experience, or there’s a lack of diversity and inclusion strategies and processes in place, or it’s things like just having that inability to make decisions, not knowing how decisions are made. All of those things are all linked to culture. Now alongside this, we have leadership and I group the two together because I do believe that culture has to be intentional and that that intention has to come from the top.
Now I discuss leadership behaviours in episode two of this season, I talk about the organisations that leaders need to have in order to consider how to go from chaos to calm. And it talks quite a lot about leadership as a group in that episode so the behaviours of a group of leaders, but this is about. Your individual leadership style and impact and how that has a role in culture, how that has a role in the success of your organisation. So, when leadership creates chaos as an individual, that looks like a lack of integrity. So, there’s a gap between what you say you will do and then what you do do. And, and that’s a really important one when it comes to chaos. It’s probably the main one of leaders that creates that chaos in organisations. It’s things like those broken promises that have been made. It’s not being clear on the direction of travel that the organisation is going in. That clarity is so important when it comes to engaging your workforce and also not listening, you know, broadcasting to everybody, not listening to what people are saying. And also, when actions and words are not aligned, that leaves people very confused and it’s an easy trap to fall into where we say one thing and we do another. And it might feel like they’re not particularly linked, but to people on the receiving end of those communications, it can certainly feel that they are very linked.
Now there are a few different leadership styles to be aware of and consider, and I’d encourage you to think about where you are as a leader, now, however uncomfortable it might feel you have to ask yourself if you are contributing to the chaos in your team or organisation, because being able to acknowledge the role that we play in the ecosystem of our organisations is important because we need to be able to step back and ask for help where we need it, and being able to reflect truthfully and honestly on ourselves as to whether or not we are contributing to the chaos that’s around us.
So how can we create calm?
So let’s look at culture first and the three things to consider there. We have to be intentional. That’s the first one. Do you want people to have space to collaborate together and work across the organisation on projects? If you do, you have to create processes and structures to do this. We can’t just hope that things will happen. There’s lots of different techniques you can use to start to change how people work together to enable people to work across organisations. To put things in place where people volunteer to be part of projects rather than chosen, whatever that might be we have to be intentional. We have to create those opportunities, create spaces, change processes, change structures to do that. This comes back to my point around the belief sometimes that culture just happens and just can be created by osmosis. That isn’t the case. We have to be intentional.
The second is focusing on behaviours. What behaviours are acceptable and not acceptable in your organisation? If culture is how things get done around here. Then the way we behave with each other is core to that. So, make a note of the right behaviours for your organisation. You can build that list as a team or as an organisation as a whole, but defining those behaviours is really important. And I often tell a story around my previous experience where in one organisation being on your phone in a meeting was quite normal. You know, it’s incredibly disrespectful, but it was quite normal in the culture of that organisation. When I moved organisations, I’ve carried that behaviour forward and was called out very early on for being on my phone, and what I then realised was that there was a behaviour in that organisation because it was part of the culture to call out anyone that was on their phone in a meeting and tell them to put it away no matter what level you were at in the organisation people would say, you know, you need to put your phone away, it’s rude someone’s presenting. And it was never done in a horrible way. It was never done to make you feel bad. I mean, I felt dreadful when someone said this to me in like my first week, but it wasn’t done to make you feel bad. But what’s important is that it was such a tangible way of understanding the culture and how things were getting done around there. So, behaviours for me is always one to think about when we are looking at how we can create calm.
Now the third one of culture is have consequences. This one we rarely talk about because consequences feels like a really negative word. It feels like it’s something that’s really bad. You know, there’s consequences to what you’ve done, and it’s sort of loaded in this preconceived idea that it’s something really negative but it doesn’t have to be. So if something great happens, then we have to celebrate it. There has to be a consequence of that great thing happening, and that consequence is a celebration. But if someone doesn’t behave in the way that you have agreed as an organisation, or they haven’t behaved in the way that is appropriate in your culture, then action has to be taken because of it. Because if action isn’t taken, then you are not supporting the culture that you’ve created, and you are allowing some toxicity and chaos to come through. So, it’s the actions around the words that really help us create culture.
Now, how do we create calm with leadership?
Now, I mentioned that there are different types, different styles of leadership, and these include things like responsible servant and Taylorism. And this takes us quite heavily into management and leadership theory, which we don’t need to get into detail here, but I’ll just explain each one very briefly.
So responsible leadership is one that’s linked with a focus really on that sustainability, social, ethical practice. The servant leadership is about serving your people. Now, whenever I talk about this, I talk about the programme New Amsterdam, which was on Amazon Prime. And if you haven’t watched it, it’s worth watching. The first episode, there’s a new leader that comes in and they come in with the simple question of how can I help? And it’s a really nice example of servant leadership that real ethos of living to serve for the people that you have. And the third one is Taylorism. Now this one’s been around for a very long time. It has its roots in manufacturing, and it’s very simply that sort of lack of listening to anyone on the front line. It’s quite an autocratic, more of a ruler style approach, really focused on efficiencies, really focused on kind of that production line thinking that you know more people, more boxes, let’s make things more efficient, let’s have less people, but more boxes and not listening to the people that are there.
So, there’s three there to just kind of think about, and there’s other types of leadership, other styles or the management theories that we could go into but in the 15 minutes we have to, I’m not going to explore all of them. So let’s think about how we create calm with leadership and there’s three things to do.
The first is to reflect on your style in meetings and conversations with others. So how much are you listening to everybody around you and I mean, really listening, not listening to respond, but really listening to understand when you are in those meetings or having conversations with others are you truly present? Are you building relationships with those people that are there, or are you just doing it because it’s a bit of a tick box that you’ve got to go? Think about how you are showing up and thinking about how you are representing yourself with others around you.
The second is linked to the three leadership styles we’ve touched on which one resonates with you. So where are you now in terms of your leadership style? You might say that you are more autocratic, you have more of that ruler approach, more of the, you know, just do as I say, kind of thinking, but you might want to move into the responsible or the servant leadership style. So have a bit of a reflection of where are you now and where do you want to be. We can all change our approach and our style. We can do that through coaching, we can do it through reading and developing ourselves, and it’s important to acknowledge where we are and where we want to be, not just as leaders, but in, in kind of every facet of our lives. So just think about which one resonates with you and which one you might feel like you want to head towards if you’re already somewhere else.
And the third is to invest time in making sure that what you say and do are aligned. Now, I called this out as a specific cause of chaos because it’s genuinely the one that comes up most, and that’s because following through on what you say you’re going to do means that people can rely on you, you can be trusted. They are some core values that come through for people that they’re looking at from leaders. And you know, sometimes we do change our minds and that’s absolutely okay, but we have to talk about the reason why that’s happened and that needs to be shared. But making sure that we are going to do what we’ve said we’re going to do is really important. Now, we might have said we’re going to do something in three months. You know, make a note of the fact that you’ve said you’re going to do it. Don’t let that disappear because your people will always remember what you’ve said you’re going to do.
Now in my next and final episode of the season, I’m going to talk about business growth. Now a lot of the conversations I’m having at the moment are with business leaders who are growing their businesses or have experienced rapid growth in the last few years. So, I want to talk about the sort of chaos this creates and then how to fix that to create calm.
All that’s left for me to say now is just thank you for listening. As always, I’d love to continue the conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn, so please connect, ask questions, and share your thinking with me. I’ve popped details in the show notes of how you can stay in touch and anything I’ve referenced today and as we approach the end of the season, I’m really keen to hear from you about whether or not I do another one so please get in touch. Just take a few minutes, drop me a DM or an email or a message, however you choose. And thanks for listening.
