A company’s culture isn’t inherently good or bad. It is what it is. At the macro level, it’s only bad if you’re business isn’t hitting your milestones.
That said, there are good and bad company cultures for each of us as individuals.
At the core of organizations is the need to get stuff done. Culture is nothing more than the values we hold in order to do so. The culture dictates the process and how we interact with one another to produce. Do we solicit ideas from anyone? Do we lay out our vision and expect others to march accordingly?
photo by stargayzerr
On the individual level we are no different. We want to produce, accomplish and succeed too. To best do so an organization must extract what we have to give in a way we’re willing to relinquish it. Personally, I can’t work in a command and control environment that expects me to do as I’m told. That’s just now how I’m wired. Therefore, when I have found myself in those situations in the past I bristle, detach and spend more energy trying to change the system than I do giving the output the organization requires. This was a failure on both sides when assessing how the other operates.
Many of us know this intuitively which is why we spend so much time trying to assess a company’s culture before taking a new job.
But there isn’t an obvious way to look behind the curtain. Both sides rarely ask the right questions, listen for the right answers and or admit the dark side of what isn’t working.
The best defense is for leaders to be more cognizant of the culture they have created. Even if you haven’t consciously set off to do so you have created a culture. You have a way of doing things. That is your culture. Think about what you value, how you get work done and how everyone interacts. It will help when hiring. It will help if you aren’t getting things accomplished. It will also give you a starting point to identify processes that can be improved.
Conversely, job seekers need to know the same of themselves. We only have so much energy we can expend. The less you have to waste fighting the system the more you have to put into doing exceptional work.
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