Positively impacting society on a global scale through culture awareness, education and action.

Offices have traditionally provided useful starting points for understanding and analyzing organizational culture. But with more us working in virtual teams, and some us working without offices all together, how we connect with and strengthen our cultures is shifting.

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I spent 15 years learning and applying culture insights as a senior executive and consultant across multiple organizations before I started to proactively reach out to top culture pioneers and experts to learn about their culture facts and fundamentals. We can’t learn much about culture from the popular press and most social media is dominated by over-simplified or incorrect culture content. Critical culture change insights from the top culture experts in history are unfortunately “secrets” to the vast majority of leaders. Other leaders turn away from the fundamentals of culture to more exotic and superficial solutions.

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Leaders will often ask me what they can do to accelerate a change in their culture. As someone who likes to find ways to provide simplicity on seemingly complex and theoretical topics, I’ve long been searching for that mythical ‘one thing’ that will make the most difference. I think I’ve found it. I’ll be interested to hear if you agree with me.

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When you think of an effective leader, several characteristics likely come to mind: confident, capable, adaptable. Less obvious are the abilities to conserve capacity by being selective about the projects he or she agrees to take on and then quickly recognizing his or her own demand-to-capacity gaps if the inverse equation of shrinking resources and increasing demands should spike.

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Stories are the programming language of culture. The stories people share in an organization reinforce the underlying beliefs and assumptions that shape the culture. To shift culture, reprogram it with new stories.

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People sometimes tell me that The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (Harvard Business School Press, 1993) helped them understand the difference between great team experiences and terrible team experiences. These readers recognized the value of what my co-author, Doug Smith, and I called a “real team” — a team composed of people committed to common purposes, goals, and working approaches accepting of the diversity in others’ skills and perspectives. In real teams, members hold themselves and their teammates mutually accountable, because of their emotional commitment to the work and to one another. That’s how they get things done rapidly and effectively.

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