Your culture is what you make it.

People in leadership roles are often surprised to learn that workplace culture starts and stops with the behaviour of the organisation's leaders.

What this means is that the leader(s) set the tone. The leader(s) good behaviour, and of course, in equal measures, their bad behaviour, set the benchmark for what is acceptable behaviour. This happens even if they don't explicitly express this as fact. 

Edgar Schein, the US guru of organisational culture, has described culture as being the shared patterns of behaviour that are to do with (a) how people within the organisation treat each other, and (b) how people within the organisation treat people external to the organisation.

Think about some of the well known large corporates - Apple under Steve Jobs; Virgin under Richard Branson; and the Trump Organization under Donald Trump. It is easy to see each of these entities takes on the characteristics of it's leader or founder. For better or worse.

With this in mind, it's worth thinking about how conscious leaders really are about building a culture that is positive, productive and even pleasurable, for the people who work in it. 

If you are a leader, what are you doing to build a positive culture? Is it something that just emerges by accident, or do you work deliberately and knowingly to build a great culture?

Read this article to get a few tips, and then join us on a leadership workshop to learn more about putting the theory into practice.