CULTIVATING CULTURE

“Culture is the strongest force in any organization. The best way to understand
culture is the statement: ‘This is how we do things here.” Sam Chand

“It is the atmosphere in which an organization functions. It is the prevalent attitude. It

is the collage of spoken and unspoken messages.” Sam Chand

➔ Culture is perceivable (but it is easier to perceive other people’s culture than to

recognize your own).

➔ Your organizational culture is either healthy or unhealthy.

➔ Culture is stronger than vision

“The fact is, culture eats strategy for lunch. You can have a good strategy in place,
but if you don’t have the culture and the enabling systems, the [negative] culture of
the organization will defeat the strategy.” Dick Clark1

➔ Just as Vision leaks, CULTURE ERODES

“The tricky thing is that culture has a way of eroding on its own. It has to be
maintained. You can have the best innovative ideas; the best possibilities; the best
opportunities; but if your culture is not strong enough to sustain that, you won’t see
your vision become a reality.” Sam Chand

HOW TO CULTIVATE CULTURE:

#1. Consider this process of transformation:

Environment-Knowledge-Experience-Beliefs-Values-Choices-Actions

#2. Infuse it into your fundamental statements (Make them portable and memorable)

1
A pharmaceutical executive quoted by Sam Chand in his book Cracking your church’s culture Code
#3. Overcommunicate it (use every creative means possible – until they are tired of hearing
you say it, and are finishing your statements for you, you have not said it enough).

#4. Model it (People do what people see) – Experience stretches what we define as
possible – seeing is believing.

#5. Acknowledge and reward it – People repeat what you reward (like the snake
with a frog in its mouth, when the fisherman gave it a piece of chocolate in
exchange for the frog, it returned a few minutes later with 2 frogs in its mouth)
Filename: CULTIVATING CULTURE
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