Tools
The Whole-Person Approach
To lead others with this human-centered mindset, it is helpful to first reflect and understand what drives or deters your …
Workplace culture doesn’t happen by accident, and it doesn’t live solely within HR—it’s cultivated daily by leaders. Whether intentional or not, leaders shape culture through what they choose to reward and what they choose to overlook. Leaders’ actions and inactions alike create behaviors and habits in their team that either help or harm culture.
As such, leaders have an opportunity and responsibility to proactively shape a strong, healthy and high-performing workplace.
There are certain leadership behaviors that often define a “winning culture”, one that engages, inspires and empowers teams to perform at their best. Leaders should integrate these behaviors into their approach to improve culture:
A winning culture begins with leaders exhibiting the values they expect from their teams. Culture is built from the top down, so leaders must act, think and speak in a way that aligns with their desired culture. Modeling organizational values sets an example for others to follow.
Employees are highly observant of how their leaders respond to different scenarios. When leaders do as they say, their authentic leadership earns their team’s respect and trust, inspiring them to buy into the organizational values and demonstrate these qualities themselves.
Leaders shape culture by setting clear expectations. Expectations set the benchmark for behaviors, giving team members a framework for how they should act in the workplace. By setting this standard upfront, leaders can effectively guide their team’s behavior and ensure that daily actions support and strengthen culture.
Recognition is a key factor in shaping the culture. When leaders notice a team member demonstrating a desired value or behavior, they should provide a recognition or reward that is specific, delivered in a timely manner and tied to company values. Remember, what’s rewarded gets repeated. Employees will continue demonstrating the values their leader wants to see. Reinforcement allows culture to grow from within.
A workplace culture thrives when leaders inspire psychological safety. By modeling openness, active listening and accountability, leaders can create an environment where employees feel safe to speak up, take risks and exchange ideas. When leaders prioritize making their team feel valued and heard, they create a culture of resilience, loyalty and high performance, as every team member feels supported and motivated to contribute their best work.
Though leaders are the genesis of a winning culture, they can only do so much. Culture needs to be grown and sustained across the entire organization. Organizations need to develop a common language that their entire workforce can use to keep the culture strong. This common language creates transparent and consistent communication and messaging at all levels, consistently reinforcing cultural values.
In addition to internal messaging, cultural values need to be present in every organizational system, from onboarding and hiring to performance reviews. Strong cultures are built and sustained by systems that support and reinforce them. Leaders should align these systems to the culture and drive their impact organization-wide.
Whether your organization has five employees or 5,000, your leaders’ behaviors directly influence the culture, so building leaders capable of driving your organization’s desired culture is crucial.
The Center for Leadership Studies (CLS) offers numerous courses that can shape your leaders into drivers of a positive work culture. Our Situational Leadership® Essentials course teaches leaders the Situational Leadership® Model so that they can reinforce a winning culture consistently using a proven framework. We also offer a Situational Performance Ownership® course that empowers leaders to use a common language to clearly communicate cultural expectations, driving the organizational commitment to a winning culture.
Explore our various courses, and contact us today to learn more.
