March 10, 2021

1 Thought

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

We’ve all heard this before, but what if I told you you're doing it wrong?

When Peter Drucker said that culture eats strategy for breakfast, he was talking about the importance of the human factor in any organization or institution. No matter how detailed and solid your strategy is, if the team executing it doesn't carry the right kind of culture, the plans will fall through and your vision will fail.

Here's where we get it wrong. Organizations and institutions–the American church is a notorious example of this–have taken this statement and turned it into, "To fit our culture, you have to believe the exact same stuff we do, act exactly the same way we do, and speak exactly the same things we do."

This kind of culture isn't even worthy of being eaten for breakfast.

What you need isn't just a strong culture, you need a strong culture that's the right kind of culture.

Healthy culture isn't about uniformity in belief, word, and action. That's an echo chamber playing a flat note.

The right kind of culture unites different perspectives and challenging ideas around meaningful action. (Share this on Twitter)

You'll know you have the right kind of culture by how your team works together in critical situations, how they respond to high-pressure challenges, and how they treat partners, clients, and each other.

Building that kind of culture then, means you seek diverse perspectives not to confirm their own beliefs, but to challenge them in order to unify around the right beliefs.

1 Resource

Kadi Cole on blind biased thinking:

"It is hard to admit that we have biases when we can be so blind to them. This is especially true for us as Christians when Jesus' unconditional love and mercy are central to our experience and belief system. Bias and discrimination seem to go against everything for which we live. However, as we look through history, it's not hard to find examples of well-meaning believers who thought they were acting in righteous and unbiased ways when they really were not.

Slavery is one practice that comes to mind. Holy wars are another. In fact, there is actually a direct correlation between how strongly we believe we do not have any bias and the amount of biased thinking and behaviors we actually exhibit. It seems counterintuitive, but the more we are certain we are unbiased, the more likely we are to be very biased. We are not open to learning about our blind spots and making changes to our thinking and behavior. The key, though, is to stay open, curious, humble, and realistic."

Source: Developing Female Leaders

1 Question

How can you tell you are open to different ideas and perspectives?