Culture can be stated, but is mostly revealed. That probably goes without saying. Company can claim culture X, but if leadership behaves Y, culture is Y. The people who came for X, will change to Y (or leave, which also solidifies Y). Further, stated X with revealed Y means Y includes disingenuous-ness (can be mild, can be not). An exercise in culture can help point the way to how leaders should act, but it only points the way and that's step one of ten steps. The hard work is for leaders to continuously do the other nine things. And most likely to do them against the grain of their current situation (there are reasons they're not happening today). One might even call those nine things leadership.
A more downstream observation is that a desire for "bottom up" culture is of course one that inherently diminishes the role of leadership. This can take many shapes, but directionally you should have some form of fewer formal leaders (one can "manage" many because there is far less managing to do) and a much clearer and explicitly stated vision (to align decentralized decisionmaking). Those two go together well—the leader spends less time involved in downstream decisions and more time developing an increasingly stronger and firmer vision. But vision is also one of the hardest things to do/have. I'm not sure if this is for environmental reasons (something like "the world is hard to predict"), that people who can do/have it are very scarce, or that its not rare per se but hard for us to identify in people and so we select poorly. When the vision part of the job gets hard, leaders tend to focus on the other parts (people managing, decisionmaking with weaker vision) which is what the bottom up culture is trying to reduce. So a bottom up approach that doesn't remove leaders (either in headcount or in responsibility) tends to undermine itself. To tie it to above, this is one of the other nine steps not getting done. While a bottom up culture isn't at direct odds, it has some misalignment to a learning culture. The things to learn could be functional expertise, but it can't be to discover the vision.
A couple thoughts.
Culture can be stated, but is mostly revealed. That probably goes without saying. Company can claim culture X, but if leadership behaves Y, culture is Y. The people who came for X, will change to Y (or leave, which also solidifies Y). Further, stated X with revealed Y means Y includes disingenuous-ness (can be mild, can be not). An exercise in culture can help point the way to how leaders should act, but it only points the way and that's step one of ten steps. The hard work is for leaders to continuously do the other nine things. And most likely to do them against the grain of their current situation (there are reasons they're not happening today). One might even call those nine things leadership.
A more downstream observation is that a desire for "bottom up" culture is of course one that inherently diminishes the role of leadership. This can take many shapes, but directionally you should have some form of fewer formal leaders (one can "manage" many because there is far less managing to do) and a much clearer and explicitly stated vision (to align decentralized decisionmaking). Those two go together well—the leader spends less time involved in downstream decisions and more time developing an increasingly stronger and firmer vision. But vision is also one of the hardest things to do/have. I'm not sure if this is for environmental reasons (something like "the world is hard to predict"), that people who can do/have it are very scarce, or that its not rare per se but hard for us to identify in people and so we select poorly. When the vision part of the job gets hard, leaders tend to focus on the other parts (people managing, decisionmaking with weaker vision) which is what the bottom up culture is trying to reduce. So a bottom up approach that doesn't remove leaders (either in headcount or in responsibility) tends to undermine itself. To tie it to above, this is one of the other nine steps not getting done. While a bottom up culture isn't at direct odds, it has some misalignment to a learning culture. The things to learn could be functional expertise, but it can't be to discover the vision.
Hey Casey, you have the spreadsheet set to view only which doesn't allow us to make a copy. It's a brilliant exercise! Roger Auge in Ontario Canada
Try now.
I'll fix it.