Building up of a Culture

It’s been sometime when I started observing the behaviors of the people in the society; I always wondered how people just keep doing things which though look unjust? I always wonder how someone can gather such courage to take certain action which though seem very offensive to certain established rules. All such elements lead towards a long term failure. I once read somewhere “People who do wrong things never win in the end”.

 I always wondered how leaders have twisted things around and they always have some reasonable justification. I am calling it reasonable because they were always, one way or another, were able to sell it. You might have come across such situation where you just could not other than bite your tongue. I think there is one and only one reason for all these things that I have been wondering since sometime. In our environments we don’t have a culture of confrontation. Confrontation

Things happen, actions are taken, words are spoken and there is no confrontation, and results start getting persistent, things happen, actions taken, words spoken and there is no confrontation and results are accepted.  This keep on going and soon the acceptance convert into truth and finally, it shapes the truth into a belief. Once this belief has been established whatever people do, they think they are doing it right, in fact; they are using “Wrong ways of doing Right Things”.  Taking your “Right” is a right thing, getting it through discrimination is the Wrong way. These believe are our culture.

Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success—along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like…

I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value

[Louis V. Gerstner]

All those things, which are now part of our culture, you will find these at a different level or stages from persistence, acceptance, and truth and believe. Just because, we have not confronted these things on the previous level and just let it go. Most of the people just don’t conform because they think that the persistence of a particular behavior in a society is not going to impact him, but he is never sure when this persistence will become a truth and it will really hurt him. On the other hand, we have people do confrontation on the other side and pave the way for these behaviors.  Sometimes confrontation is discouraged by the people who are in charge or have any authorities, mainly because of the reasons that either they do not have enough courage to let their subordinates take the credit for something that they had not been able to come up with or they just do not have enough vision.

Where we actually fail when we establish such cultures? We fail when we take different opportunities in terms of the level of the above four categories. We never discuss things in their actual terms. We start ignoring the principles and become unreasonable. Reasons and Principles are two main pillar of focused and visionary leadership. Lose these Lose the Leaders.

What matter of men we are if we don’t have our own reasons?

[Mario Puzo]

Dealing, managing and retaining people is the biggest ask of the current society no matter what industry you are in. Did we ever have thought why people think of leaving? Studies tell us that most of the times people leave their managers not the companies. When we start letting people down by killing their idea, by ignoring their efforts and commitments by discouraging them when they take initiatives. This is the time when they make a decision of leaving you. So they make a belief on the other side and go for what they believed in. once this belief has been established they are is not feeling any shame, they do not have any fear. In fact, they have adopted a “Right way of doing Wrong thing”. For him it’s the right thing, for the company he is leaving is Wrong thing because at the end people are the asset of the companies.

This is our choice, either we start confronting  today to build a culture of doing Right things in Right ways or we can let it go to add one more brick in the building of a culture which is sooner or later will end up in a failure.