Yesterday we started to bridge the gap between leadership and culture, today we will continue building that bridge.

The aggregate of all the behaviors of the members of an organization is how we defined the culture of the organization. It literally is how things “are” in an organization.

As leaders, we are always interested in productivity and results because that is how we are measured as managers. In fact, the definition of management is your ability to impact the hard measurables of your business.

To help tie things together, please allow me to draw on another definition, this time from foremost cognitive psychologist, Albert Bandura. In his book, Self-efficacy The Exercise of Control, he states that all productivity is behavior based.

Now we can build a bridge between the the two definitions. The common word here is behavior. If, in fact, the culture of an organization is the aggregate of the behaviors of all the members of that organization and all productivity is behavior based, well, there is our bridge. The productivity of our organization is literally controlled by the culture of the organization.

A large part of what we do as leaders should be growing the culture of our organization.

Do you recall the quote from George Clemens? He spoke about spending 90% of your time as a leader making sure that your direct reports are successful.

Hopefully, you can now see why we presented that quote for your consideration.

Our ability to be successful as leaders depends not only on us being able to employ the latest in leadership strategies, but also in our ability to create a medium for our people to reach their potential.

We will continue tomorrow.

As always, let us know what you think.

Curt