Leadership: Building A Culture Not A Brand
Culture Is The Key To Influence
It is fundamental to a leadership mindset that human beings are wired for influence.
Buried deep in our DNA or our psyche, or both, there is a drive to influence our environment more than it influences us; to shape our world more than it shapes us.
This is part of the drive for extreme sports and adventure tours. It's behind our urge to succeed and be promoted. It's a corollary of our innate need for respect.
Influence is hardwired into the human condition and one way or the other influence will flow. Either we will influence the culture around us or it will most certainly force us into its mould.
In every sphere of public life today, there is a battle for influence going on. It's a battle for accountability in leadership versus 'do you own thing and let the chips fall where they will.' It's a fight for truth and transparency versus self-serving spin. It's a struggle for pure profit versus growth mixed with altruism and community-mindedness.
As a leader, you have a decision to make - and it's fundamental to your success. Will you invent the future, or allow someone else's vision of the future to re-invent you?
Will you take the people under your leadership and forge in them a culture that creates opportunities, engaging the future before it arrives? Or will you allow a culture - by your inaction, if not design - that encourages fear of the future and the changes and challenges it represents?
What is the culture in your people group, in your team, among your employees or under-managers? Is it one of despair, or hope? Is it a culture of confidence, or fatalism? Does it encourage innovation or desperation; boldness or timidity?
An international panel of psychiatrists recently declared ours to be the 'age of paranoia'.
In any organisation or professional, leadership begins with creating a culture. The leaders who make their mark in these uncertain times will be those who break through the paranoia and pursue proactive purpose.
Culture is, at its most fundamental level, a set of values based around a vision of reality. Culture defines what is normal and acceptable within a community; it applies an underlying world-view to a group of people in a given environment. A culture is a way of interpreting what is good, acceptable and normal.
It is a fact of sociology that the group within a society which has the strongest and most well-defined culture will become the leading voice in that society. In any group of people, the one who builds the strongest culture always takes the lead.
To overcome the natural timidity, the desire for safety and comfort that people feel in tough times, we must establish a culture within our team that is stronger, more positive and more attractive than that of the surrounding environment.
We need to build into the people we lead a sense that influence is their right and responsibility; that they are meant to shape events in their world, changing their world more than it changes them.
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