When supporting organizations and leaders in cultivating thriving and sustainable cultures, we have found a few things to be true from all of these experiences.
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These can be known as "Perennial Truths."
When engaging with leaders in culture evolution journies, we make sure to use these truths as a guide for our programs.
Review and reflect on these truths. Think about if they are actively showing up in your own journies today.
- Co-creation is essential for cultures to thrive and to truly cultivate the organization you envision. Culture is a result of collective behaviors and elements within a social system. The strategy to cultivate culture must reflect that.
- Fear and limiting beliefs are the biggest barriers to cultural evolution. There are going to be hidden assumptions behind everything in the culture and the organization. Assumptions around how things should be done and why they are done that way. When evolving ways of doing things, fears of the unknown and limiting beliefs or assumptions will be your biggest barrier. You must uncover these early in the process.
- Plug-and-Play solutions do not work - Believe us from experience... When we first started in 2018, we were mainly offering plug-and-play solutions. We envisioned these deeper impacts that truly benefited the organization and the people but failed to see the results. Culture cultivation needs to be authentic – we have found plug-and-play solutions do not work and if you try to mirror and plug in the “perfect solution” from other companies, or try to plug in some general workshop series as a solution to your cultural challenges, you will see short term results with no long-term impact. It's valuable to learn from others, but it's more useful to design and learn practices that cultivate culture.
- Culture can be the ultimate bonding agent that brings people together deeper than anything else, or it can be the ultimate separating force that pushes people away from each other. Culture is truly a beautiful life force with tremendous power over how your people engage with your company. We should respect and honor its power within our company.
- Work doesn’t have to be just work. All types of work can matter. We believe organizations and the contributions within them provide us the opportunity to create something for a purpose and can create a sense of belonging in the world. Work can be more than an avenue for a paycheck.
- Culture design & development starts with asking powerful questions. When engaging with culture change, you must be guided by questions rather than answers.
- Increased success requires that we focus on developing organizational culture, trust, and higher levels of consciousness. The cultural consciousness that embodies an organization can never exceed the level of consciousness of its people. Specifically its leader. So if we want to evolve and grow our culture, we must develop ourselves as humans and as a collective. (Bonus note - to raise the level of consciousness, we must break through the fears and limiting beliefs within the system.)
- You can reach limitless possibilities when your culture engages, aligns, and harmonizes your people together to drive greater collective impact & results. To do this, you must blur the lines between your people, organization, and systems. These elements should ideally be working in harmony with each other. This is what maximizes the value within the company.
Your organization is unique.
We're here to help you figure out the best path forward for your Cultural Evolution journey.
Schedule a free call with us to get you started!