Page 99 - Make Work Great

Beginning Your Crystal

cifi cs about the person and your relationship. But there is one aspect
of adult education that will serve you well in your new role as culture
teacher no matter what: the power of role-modeling.
Role-modeling, in its most basic form, means that you must do what
you’re suggesting the other person do. Ralph Waldo Emerson said,
“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” This
is common sense, yet we have all observed someone saying one thing and
doing another. At best, such people come across as confused; more often,
they seem disingenuous and untrustworthy. This is too important a point
to overlook; it’s the reason this book started with y-o-u. If you’re going
to try to get someone else to practice overtness about task and clarity
within relationships, you’d better be practicing both of them yourself!
In fact, teaching by demonstration is the only effective way to infl u-
ence other adults in your workplace. Any other approach will fail. The
moment you present yourself to coworkers as “the professor of the new

culture,” your credibility and influence will evaporate. Classroom-style
instruction may work well in some circumstances, but it’s not the right
approach when it comes to changing culture. The strategy that will
work for you—the only strategy—is for you to become that which you
wish to encourage and then let others learn from your example. As
Mohandas Gandhi said, “We must be the change we wish to see.”

Begin with Purpose and Clarity
As always, overtness about your workplace purpose is a great place
to start. Hopefully, you’ve penned a tentative version of your sum-
mary outputs list. (This list is always subject to revision.) If your list
is well written, it should easily lend itself to being shared verbally.
In fact, as your cultural crystal grows, you will be verbalizing your
summary outputs frequently and listening for feedback from a wide
array of people.
Note that listening for feedback does not necessarily imply ask-
ing for it. In some cases, it may be appropriate to ask someone for
his or her thoughts about your summary outputs list. More often,
however, it is preferable to simply recite your “current understand-

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