Page 18 - Make Work Great

Prologue

such as cult recruiting events, the conscious choice to differ from the
group and stay in the driver’s seat is the critical factor in reducing the
interference of situational infl uences with personal choice. As one
pair of psychologists noted, “going passively along ‘on automatic’ is
often our worst enemy.” 9

You Are the Culture Teacher
The task sounds overwhelming. How can one person—you—possibly
create or change something as big as “culture”?
To answer that question, we must be clear about what corporate
culture is. Consider a defi nition penned by Edgar Schein, who is often
credited with inventing the term:

The culture of a group can now be defi ned as: A pattern of shared
basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems
of external adaptation and internal integration, that has 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. 10

In one sense, this is just a fancy way of saying “culture is how we do
things around here.” But notice that Schein’s defi nition includes both
what the culture dictates and where it came from. How we think,
feel, and perceive “around here” is based on nothing but a set of
assumptions about how to get things done that worked in the past
and is taught in the present.
Consider these points:

• The problems faced “back then” are not necessarily the same
problems you face today.
• The assumptions made in the past were not necessarily the best
assumptions at the time, nor were the solutions the best solutions.
• The people who made those assumptions may not have been any
more qualifi ed to solve their problems than you are to solve yours.

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