Creating culture

In this blog I would first like to analyze the two words that were put together in the title, according to my personal concepts:

• Create: produce, generate something from people's capabilities.
• Culture: The sum of values, principles and beliefs of each one of the members of an organization.

 It means that creating a culture is the effort of generating a set of values, principles, beliefs for a group of people, based on the realities and individual capabilities, allowing to align the efforts of the entire team to achieve common goals.

In the blog of the ASQ, presented this time by James Lawther, part of the Influential Voices of Quality, under the title "Creating a Performance Culture: What Not To Do",  we can find a number of ideas of what  should not be done  to create a culture that projects us to results. If we focus mainly on the rewards, the results in culture are not necessarily accomplished.

The issue of developing a culture of quality has also been investigated by the ASQ  in alliance with Forbes, whose findings of what is said in organizations and what has been done can be found in the study which can be downloaded from this website.

Organizations are a result of people, who are making quality every day  through all the activities carried out. People who are at higher hierarchical levels have more impact in  the culture through their values ​​and actions. The chief executive therefore has the strongest impact on the organization's culture either positively or negatively and should be aware of this responsibility.

A successful culture begins with a common language that everyone use to first communicate positively with each other and then with customers to ensure their satisfaction. It includes all human interactions beginning from the greeting, smile, respect.

Preferably, the culture should be declared through the definition of a mission to give a sense of purpose, vision that allows developing and moving to the future, values ​​and principles that should be shared, the policies set to these values ​​and principles to become reality.

Leaders need to adopt and live the desired culture, identify gaps and generate actions to eliminate anti values ​​that are part of human nature.

The main part of culture is the development of values based on individualities and all of them together give the final values ​​of the organization.

I always find a very interesting method of Benjamin Franklin for the development of virtues and I will share the list trough this link. The most important virtue is humility, which he defines as imitating Jesus and Socrates.

Finally, the questions at the end of each day should be:

What actions did I do  this day to support the improvement of the culture of my organization?

César Díaz