If you ask any management consultant what’s the secret of truly successful companies? They would almost always invariably tell you that it is culture.
Now, when people say this, it’s very easy for you to roll your eyes. It’s very easy for you to be reasonably suspicious and skeptical because that sounds like a cop out.
That sounds like the typical kind of answer from a professional management consultant that gets paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to diagnose what’s wrong with business organizations. That’s the kind of things that you’d probably pick up from an MBA course or book.
In other words, it doesn’t really strike you as something all that practical. Culture. What is culture? How does it work? How does it interact with other fixed assets within the interior space of a workplace?
How does it fit with a corporate agenda? How does it lead a group of people to achieve a certain shared set of goals?
Well, it turns out that despite the seemingly academic and dismissive ready answer of “culture”, there’s a lot there. You just have to unpack it. You just have to take away a lot of the typical MBA, high-IQ, and overly academic trappings of the word to get to the nitty-gritty of what you can take away.
You need to take away some core roots that would enable you to turn your workplace, whether it’s a factory or some sort of office space, into a high quality work output productivity machine. I know that sounds like a tall order right now, but it is possible.
You just need to wrap your mind around the right concepts. One of these concepts involves culture. Whether you like it or not, when people get together in any kind of space, culture appears.
Either culture works for the company’s benefits or it works against it. Either it speeds things up or slows things down. Either it aids in the flow of ideas, imagination, creativity, and innovations, or it acts as some sort of idea black hole.
Guess what? You can control how culture arises in your workplace. I know this is shocking. A lot of people would think that culture is like some sort of disease that just happens.
They think that you can try to guard against it, work around it, and modify your lifestyle a little bit, but for the most part, it’s just something that’s unavoidable. This is not true.
You can actually engineer culture. Believe it or not, human resources can weaponize their personality profiles so they can fit the right people together.
You might think that a slacker who is completely lazy and unmotivated may drag down a super worker who is focused and extremely motivated. In fact, in the right set of circumstances, these two can actually explode the productivity of their work team.
It really all boils down to how these different personalities click together. It all boils down to synergy. I know you keep hearing that word. You’re probably sick of it, but it’s true.
Your workplace design, in addition to the workplace assignments of different personality types can lead to desired results. It can lead to a culture where innovation, motivation, productivity, and ambition are appropriately rewarded.
This can create a self-sustaining workplace system where everybody brings out the best in each other. This leads to people performing at peak levels. It doesn’t happen overnight. It definitely doesn’t fall into your lap.
It’s something that you have to work at. It’s something that is often arrived at through quite a bit of trial and error. Still, it is worth pursuing because the pay-offs are simply too precious and too crucial for you to dismiss this concept.