The Gravity Of Culture

Culture is like gravity. You cannot escape it.

It doesn’t matter if you agree with it, want it, like it, or reject it, it will affect you. It will pull you toward its center. Even if just an inch. Inch by inch, always present, always pulling you toward its purposes, its goals, its objectives.

Like gravity, the culture of an organization has destroyed many an ideological idea. Like that of the many attempts mankind has set out to achieve flight and found their ideas wanting and gravity’s reality deadly. Gravity doesn’t care what you wish to be true it only knows what is.

Culture doesn’t care that your vision is amazing or world changing, it doesn’t matter how impactful the idea or how incredible your oratory skills in explaining it are. Like gravity, the culture of an organization will destroy everything that has ignored it or not learned to tame it, bringing it crashing to the ground.

Culture is everywhere. Every organization on the face of the planet, every team, group of friends, and community has a culture.

Culture is the unspoken reality of our beliefs lived out. It underlies our motivations, our reasons, our why, for why we do what we do the way we do them.

You are either pursuing a culture or you are being dominated by one.

The natural state of most organizations that do not have an explicitly stated and lived out culture is that they are being dominated by an influential individual or a dominant semi united group of individuals. Often toward the negative. People are naturally pulled toward the negative, because negativity is easier to do than positivity.

Because being pulled is easier than being pushed.

The weakness of dependence on an individual is that once that individual leaves, the culture leaves. Unless the individual has been able to instill enough of themselves in those around them before they leave so that the culture they established lives on.

The culture of an organization is the hardest thing to change but the most important thing to fight for.

How to fight for a culture

Verbalize your culture

Words matter.

That is why it's imperative to have a culture that is verbalized. Verbalized culture lives outside the individual or the dominant group. But it's only the first step.

• Put it into words, write it down into points.

• Post those words on your walls.

• Talk about them at meetings.

• Reference them in decision making conversations.

Own your culture

Secondly, leadership must own the culture. They must memorize it, believe it, and strive to live by it. If leaders choose to push a culture they themselves do not truly believe or desire it will have as little effect on transforming the organization as random words on a page do. If leaders choose to undercut them, go around them or ‘in extreme cases’ not abide by them, they will have begun to destroy any organizational beliefs in them. The minute it's clear they don’t believe what they say, the verbalized culture is useless.

Meaning is directly derived from belief, and actions speak louder than words.

Every act and word against your written cultural beliefs by those who push those said beliefs is like removing one foundational block at a time from the foundation of a wall, eventually these seemingly small acts of hypocrisy will make the whole wall crash in on itself, and rebuilding a wall that has fallen over is a much harder task than when it was first built.

The long game of establishing culture

Establishing culture takes time and patience and a whole lot of coming up against alternative cultures others try to bring into the fold. Whether intended or not intended, we all have belief systems that affect the way we interact with each other and the motives from which we interact with others. Establishing a healthy culture is counterintuitive at times. At times it means going against a large group of people’s mindset on an issue. At times it means going against something you yourself want in the moment.

The job of leaders is to understand what they want their culture to be, put it into words and then fight for it every moment of everyday.