Culture

While watching an assigned Lynda.com course on “Building Accountability Into Your Culture,” I came across a very simple definition of culture that really resonated for me:

Culture is nothing more than the sum of our daily actions.

My first reaction, was, WOW – yes, it really is that simple. Collectively, how we behave every day as an organization creates our culture by default. Having been in this IT organization for 13 years, I can definitely say I’ve seen our culture shift, and in many ways for the better. Most of that change was driven by a desire from our leadership to evolve our organization by adopting practices to make us more efficient, accountable, and accurate with our work (for example, implementing ITIL processes and ServiceNow). These practices are now (for the most part) part of our culture, as these processes really do infiltrate our work daily, and we are all held accountable to practice them.

A few years ago (2013), there was a push to define our organizational values – not from the top down, but from the bottom up. The ITS Ombuds Team bravely led us forward. Many meetings were hosted, ideas brainstormed, and  a great list of 5 core values was created:

  • InnovationWe are an organization built on the power of creative thought.
  • CommunicationWe are committed to meaningful, honest, and rigorous communication with our partners and our peers.
  • TeamworkWe believe our expertise is most valuable when we work as a team to implement solutions.
  • EmpowermentWe empower one another through open dialogue, compassion, and trust.
  • AccountabilityWe take responsibility for both our successes and our failures.

We held a town hall where the values were revealed and explained, we printed up nice posters to put around our offices, added them to our performance evaluation form, worked them into the ITS Stars Nomination, and patted ourselves on the back.

However, I never felt we truly incorporated these values into our daily work or consistently used them to shape our decisions. In 2014 some helpful management guides were put on the wiki. But I could go months without hearing anyone mentioning or invoking our core values. I personally always thought we could have done more to fully incorporate these core values and impact our organizational culture. I’ve been trying to analyze why I felt this way – and my realization was that I don’t know that I was ever really held accountable to actually make conscious changes to better incorporate the values into my daily work life.

The Lynda course I watched went on to talk about how an organization could actively try and evolve their culture:

Communicate those values. Let people know who they’re accountable to. And then figure out those small desired daily actions that you want to see out of your people. Be patient, reinforce those behaviors, and when you see somebody do it right, celebrate that success. Communicate it broadly across the organization so people know what you’re looking for. And if you’re able to be patient, have that clarity of principle, over time, you’ll have the culture… you’re looking for.

Maybe there are some groups or managers that have incorporated these values into their regular check-ins with staff, highlighted successes or failures of those values in their group meetings, or built employee goals around these values (again, not sure that I did). But to really evolve ITS as a whole, I feel like we need figure out how we hold ourselves accountable to these values on a daily basis.

I think most of us would agree its a great list of values. Yes, right now, some of them may be more aspirational the actual, but that’s OK – we need inspiration to push ourselves and our organization to always be better at what we do. And if we do believe in these values, could holding ourselves accountable improve our overall engagement? What if we could link our IT Services core values with some of the University’s core values? What if demonstrating our core values helped us better demonstrate IT Services’ value to the institution? (This might need another blog post!)

Do you agree or disagree? Are core values just cheesey business talk, or can they really make a difference? I’d love to hear other experiences with our core values implementation.