Leadership and Culture

Leadership takes place in a theatre and on the stage. And that theatre and that stage have “culture.” There are typically two types of culture – formal and informal. When hiring leaders (or when hiring any one at any level of an organization), culture needs to be given serious consideration. Culture can best be defined as the “around-hereisms” in a work setting – or, essentially the way work is done. Perhaps more properly defined, it is the spoken and unspoken ways that people work together. More illustrative definitions are:

 “Whether written as a mission statement, spoken or merely understood, corporate culture describes and governs the ways a company's owners and employees think, feel and act.” http://www.entrepreneur.com/encyclopedia/term/82104.html

 “A pattern of shared basic assumptions invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration" that have worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems” Schein – From Wikipedia. (I like this one but it is a real mouthful).

Ideally in hiring, a good fit with the culture is key. That fit may correlate to their strengths in certain leadership competencies (one culture may require significant visionary skills while another may require significant day-to-day operational skills) or it may correlate with their motivation or it may correlate to the type of work that needs to be done (one culture may be very service oriented while another may be totally financially driven).

Over the next few blogs I will introduce ideas about how to define culture and its relationship to leadership and hiring leaders.