Patrick Lencioni argues that a leader’s focus should be almost exclusively on organizational culture. That’s because, according to Lencioni, the single greatest advantage any organization can achieve is organizational health. Simon Sinek thinks similarly. He says that organizational culture is not just one of many important components of leadership, but that it must be the primary focus of any organizational leader.
He’s not alone. “Culture” seems to be the leadership buzzword of the day. Between the hundreds of books and thousands of articles available right now, every leader seems to be focusing more and more on the culture of the organization they are leading.
Here’s the issue, though - deep organizational culture change is extremely difficult to execute and even more difficult to permanently anchor. Any pastor who has taken on a role in an older church can identify with that. That’s because changing the culture of an organization is fundamentally changing the DNA of that organization. Culture is the underlying grid of perceptions and understanding that influences the actions and attitudes of an organization, and changing it means shifting the very source of a group’s stability.
The ground is littered with organizational leaders who have walked into all kinds of situations with the best of intentions. They’ve got dreams of establishing a new mission, a fresh vision, and new values for their organization only to find themselves either burned out or out of a job eighteen months later. The reason is simple - changing an organization at the cultural level is extremely difficult.
How, then, can a leader bring about this kind of change? The answer is to stop focusing on the culture so much and start focusing on behaviors.
Edgar Schein, one of the pioneers of organizational culture research, says that culture is developed as a product of shared learning within the organization. That learning has accumulated over the course of time through different leaders, challenging circumstances, and other shared experiences. And that’s exactly why the leader must focus on behaviors if he wants to bring about cultural change.
Consider the example of the early Jerusalem church. Here was a group of believers who had received a clear mandate from the Lord Jesus. In a rephrasing of the Great Commission, Jesus told the early church: “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). As He promised, the early church did receive power shortly thereafter at Pentecost when the Holy Spirit fell (Acts 2:1-4) and great numbers of people believed and were added to their number (Acts 2:41).
But the church did not go out as Jesus instructed them. They had a “Jerusalem” culture. It took a major change in behavior to push them out: “On that day a severe persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the land of Judea and Samaria” (Acts 8:1).
The organization became mobilized and continued to be mobilized throughout the Book of Acts. The remainder of the book contains the account of the church living out this new culture and fulfilling Jesus’ commands to go to the ends of the earth. But this cultural change did not happen because the church fostered a missional and mobilized culture; the culture only changed because the behavior changed first.
If you want to change the culture, stop trying to change the culture. Instead, look first to a few behaviors you can encourage. Then expand those behaviors to the organization. Celebrate them. Fuel them. And through that shared process of learning, the culture will eventually catch up to the behavior.
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By Michael Kelley, Rooted Network Executive Director