#17 - Building Cultural Identity

Culture doesn't happen by accident—it’s built through your actions, your standards, and what you choose to tolerate.

In this episode, I break down how leaders create a positive culture, why every decision shapes the environment around them, and the practical steps you can take to build a team people genuinely want to be part of.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Building cultural identity. So a really important step that's needed to be taken at the very beginning when you do take over as a leader. Whether you're in a senior role or in a less of a senior role, but you're still leading groups, large groups of people, you can still impact the culture. You can still influence how the day-to-day is run because ultimately the tasks that you were hired for don't really matter anymore. Now you're in charge of the culture, now you're in charge of what processes are needed to improve efficiency amongst the team. And it's important to realize that culture exists whether you create it or not. So you can influence how good the culture is, but culture is always going to be there. So it can either go that way or that way. There's no in between. You don't want a workplace that's full of negativity, full of negative talk about management. You want an inclusive culture, and it's up to you to build that identity from the very beginning because you're the one that's going to be driving it. So it's really important to understand the difference of management and a leader. So a leader is required to get the best out of its people, get the best out of the team, and deliver on a project by using the team's skill set. And you drive the structure, you drive this the system, you drive the environment, you drive the culture. Ultimately, you are responsible for the weather in that workplace. So you drive all the moods. If you come in a shitty mood, it's going to trickle down, it's going to set the tone off to a wrong start essentially every time that happens. You've got to really learn to be professional and leave it at the door. Leave anything outside of work at the door. Come in, be there for your team, and then you go home, and then you've got to deal with what you've got to deal with. But you want to create that culture of people wanting to be there. And that will actually free up your mental overload and your decision making because you've got a team that you fully trust and you understand that they are more than capable. So it's your job to amplify the capability of the team. So we all know that you're capable as a leader, that's why you've been hired and promoted. But now it's your job to amplify the capabilities of your team and get the best out of your people. So one thing that's heavily involved in culture is you are a product of what you tolerate. So if you're tolerating bullshit, essentially, you're tolerating people not doing the one percenters, you're tolerating people bad mouthing people not supporting each other, things like that, having attitude back when you give instruction or another senior person or the senior management team gives instruction and it's not taken seriously, all that kind of stuff. Gradually, people will understand what you tolerate and people will walk over you. Naturally, they will take advantage of that. And you want to nip that in the butt early on. So you've got to make a decision what kind of identity you want with your culture. So standards create culture. So a lot of people connect standards with rules. Rules and standards are completely different. So, for example, if your one of your standards is to make sure the lunchroom's always clean, that's not a rule, that's a standard because someone comes in external or outside the organization or wherever you work. For me, if board members come down into the office space, I would like it somewhat clean and to have the standards be followed. And how we get around that is we've got one person doing lunchroom cleanup every week, and you might they might have to do it once in every 22 weeks or something like that. But it creates a standard for everybody. So when it's your week, you get that standard down pat, you leave your mark on the lunchroom. I know it sounds small, but it's the basic stuff like this that will get you far. And it's really important to introduce high standards from the very get-go. So some leaders that I've worked for come in and they say all these words, they want to make things this great, that great, improve everything, and it's just all words, but they don't lead through action. People follow action, they don't follow just words. If you're saying things and your expectation of the team is they do this and do that, but you don't do it, then why would anyone do it? So it's really important to understand the difference between leading through purely words and leading through action. So it doesn't mean you go out and get on the tools or you go out and do everything that's that somebody else is meant to do. But if you want an inclusive culture where people are actually supporting each other and a lot, do that. And people will follow that. People will follow your character, people will follow the things that you do, and they can see that you do. People will watch what gets rewarded and what gets ignored, and people will naturally just go, Oh, yeah, I'll just leave that today. That got ignored by this person the other week, so that'd be fine. And you don't want that either. That's gonna happen naturally, but you've got to try and minimise it where you can because there's obviously a lot of moving parts, and I understand that you can't be over across everything, but it's about instilling that standard to your senior team to actually enforce that standard as well. If it's just coming from one person, it's very difficult to maintain that, and it might start off strong, but it just naturally goes back into bad habits, and that happens all the time as well. So I think understanding that a lot of these things in leadership are ongoing, it's not just a one and done. So you've got to ongoingly maintain the standard, and it's not just about setting the standard and then walking away and go, remember, we did remember what we did 10 years ago. It doesn't really stack up like that. So you've got to make sure that it's a understanding across the management team and yourself that it's an ongoing exercise. The stronger your culture is as well, the less decision fatigue you'll actually have because you can rely on your team more, you can trust your team, and you trust that they're gonna get the work done to the standard that you want. So, really important to understand that culture for me is the it's everything, it's the middle of everything. Culture's in the middle, everything goes out of culture. So all your results, all your staff engagement, everything comes off your culture. If your culture is no good, your workplace is gonna be no good. Because ultimately, you can have the best planning in the world, you can have the best agronomic plans for my situation, but without your team, you can't action any of those plans. So it's really important to make sure that culture is number one all the time. Culture is not built in one day, it's built daily over a long period of time. So, yeah, and that's as I said before, it's through your actions and what are you actually doing to maintain this culture. So understand that it's not built in one day, but it's built daily by small efforts and small one percenters that contribute to better habits over time. Hopefully that helps.