What Most Leaders Get Wrong About Culture

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

And maybe accounting and legal for lunch. I’ve never actually heard anyone try and complete that quote. And I’ve never really figured out why any leader would want strategy masticated by anything. Let alone culture.

But the idea behind the quote is that culture is paramount. The success or failure of an organization or team depends upon its culture-the norms and behaviors around how employees communicate and collaborate.

Most leaders agree that culture is hugely important. But that seems to be where the agreement stops. Many leaders disagree over exactly what culture is, why it is so important, or even what a healthy organizational culture looks like.

In this article, we’ll cover three assumptions most leaders get wrong about culture.

Culture Is Unique

The first assumption leaders get wrong about culture is that their culture is unique. Most leaders describe how unique and special their culture is and then proceed to tell you about how great the people are, or how supportive of each other the teams are, or how great the benefits are. See where this is going? Most positive company cultures aren’t actually all that unique. While toxic company cultures could be toxic for a variety of reasons, healthy…