Cultural Norms - Your Safety Net
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Organisational “Cultural Norms” can either help you … or they can hurt you! It’s your choice.
Cultural Norms are all about behaviour in the workplace. They exist; they are real every minute of every day. For this reason, they will either hurt you or help you - but you ignore them at your peril.
When Cultural Norms are well managed, they become your organisation’s Safety Net. They can:
Stop some (though not all) bad things from happening;
Keep most people productive in their work; and
Keep most of your clients happy.
There are no guarantees. But, if your Cultural Norms are allowing unacceptable things to happen, then you will be constantly cleaning up after problems that didn’t need to happen (legal problems, reputational problems, financial problems, operational problems, ethical problems, and the list goes on).
So, give yourself a break – use your Cultural Norms to make things work better for you.
And that means giving them proactive attention. That’s part of the Leadership Job.
Finally, at BPA we have a saying …
“When things are going well in an organisation, usually the Leader gets the credit.
When things are going badly in an organisation, usually the Culture gets the blame.”
Just look at how often you see this playing out in the news. Think of any organisation appearing in the news for all the wrong reasons. Could better management of their Cultural Norms have been their Safety Net?
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