Champion your culture, but don’t pick champions

25 Aug Champion your culture, but don’t pick champions

Commonly recommended practices for how to ‘do’ culture often include the idea of champions. I’m not a fan. Because it suggests there’s a special set of people responsible for it. So now, I don’t have to do anything. 

Instead, I advocate that everyone should champion the culture. And the distinction is crucial. There’s a world of difference between encouraging behaviours that you want others to embody and anointing winners of a race.

Time was, I suggested champions. What changed my mind? Watching how choosing them so easily became a competition. And in the process undermined the choices those organisations wanted to highlight.

Culture is how you do things on repeat. So, everyone is already ‘doing’ culture, and every choice is culture in action. Change those hows, and you change it. And because change is always happening in some form, your culture is too. People join and leave, dragging their past ways of working with them. Markets rise and fall. Regulations upend long-standing processes. Geopolitics fray both office relationships and supply chains. 

The practice of championing culture reduces the impact of those tremors, so you can operate on more stable ground.

A recent McKinsey article said, “The highest-performing CEOs … serve as both culture champions and culture ambassadors: They use all channels at their disposal to foster deep dialogues, convey their organization’s values, create more meaning at work, and build bonds at all levels of the organization.”

Switch from CEO champions to CEOs who champion, and I’m onboard. Their leading by example does have an outsize influence on how things happen—”The fish rots from the head” is a popular book and aphorism for a reason! But imagine how an unheroic approach could compound the effect. Where the onus to champion is distributed throughout the layers and spread of the enterprise as well. Where people ‘foster deep dialogues, convey the values, create more meaning, and build bonds’ with their co-workers and teams.

But how? Enter the values pyramid—a series of steps to animate them beyond a poster on the wall and help you bridge the chasm between what is said and people’s day-to-day unheroic work.

Genuine values set up how you do things, before the culture puts them on repeat. And the top section of the pyramid lists ‘encourage others to do them too.’ Or said another way, ‘champion them’. 

In less obvious ways, the idea climbs through each of the steps. Champion how you want people to behave in the values you choose. Champion what they mean by describing the boundaries of what they are, aren’t, and when they go too far. Champion people using them in their work every day when you catch them doing the right things and say thanks. Champion using them when it’s inconvenient by making hard choices. 

People on podiums won’t make a culture tick. But seeing others champion what matters as a normal part of how they do things will. Which matters. Because the energy those cultures generate turns into value the brand stores. And you can’t achieve a brand that sticks without it.

Thanks for reading.