Is Your Culture Visible?

Culture is often invisible. Culture shows up in:

• how people communicate

• how people offer and receive feedback

• how people celebrate and support others

• how people deal with conflict 

• the stories and assumptions people have around who is fired, hired, promoted, and leaves an organization

Making culture visible allows for clarity, consistency, and ultimately builds trust.

Tips to Make Culture Visible:

• Codify your culture by explicitly naming your vision, values, and behaviors (VVB)

• Write a culture narrative describing the employee and client experience.

• Have regular internal VVB discussions. What does it look like? Sound like? Feel like? Talk through scenarios (If ... then ...).

• Imbed VVB into your hiring and on boarding practice, performance review conversations, etc. 

• Practice accountability using the Truth Talk framework.

• Know and share the story of how the culture came to be.

• Share and celebrate stories of how culture is happening across the organization. 

• Develop leaders who model the culture.

How are you making culture visible?

***If you are not yet a senior leader, you can still apply these concepts to your own leadership development and build a strong subculture with your team.