Lead Your Culture
Or Your Culture Will Lead You
Summary
“Do we have the culture we need for the impact we want?”
Chris Ernst
Great leaders leverage culture to create healthy, successful organizations. They build focused, infectious communities of care and rally people around an ambitious (yet realistic) north star.
Leaders do this by being inclusive and decisive, by balancing daily operations with long-term aspirations, by being simultaneously bold and humble, by cultivating healthy-boundary partnerships with volunteers, and by investing in and caring deeply about creating, cultivating, and growing a great team.
It’s not easy, but if we desire to keep pace, remain relevant, and navigate the future, the right culture – a healthy one focused on growth and momentum – is nothing short of required. While the old association struggles with headwinds, the new association is agile and responsive, capable and ready, relevant and innovative. We are value-creation machines highly in tune with our communities.
The Product Community is a product development learning community designed specifically for associations.
The Culture of Value Creation
“The cultural imprint is strong; people do what the culture asks them to do. Culture drives outcomes across the organizational scorecard. Performance, engagement, retention, innovation, and growth are all affected by culture.”
Josh Bersin
I lead the product community, which is a product development learning community designed specifically for associations. Products are the things we do to attract, connect, and engage our membership. It is the value we create.
Associations are in the value creation business leading, ultimately, to growth. Here is a table that contrasts an unhealthy culture with a growth culture.
Value creation is synonymous with product development, which (when properly designed and successfully executed) is synonymous with meaningful, longitudinal connection.
Most associations do similar things:
Events to drive engagement.
A steady stream of content or news (via a magazine, journal, podcast, or newsletter) to inform the membership.
Learning or professional development experiences to keep your members prepared for an increasingly competitive world of work.
Membership to coalesce and deliver value.
Advocacy or industry relations to connect us meaningfully to changing forces.
Yes, we’re in the value creation business, but I argue we’re still stuck in our old ways: overly siloed, traditional business models, and too operational or tactical in our approach. How can we leverage our standard fare into new and exciting member value? How can we feel more connected and in tune with our community? How can we work together in new ways to build bridges and create the right value?
In part, it’s building and sustaining a culture of innovation, also known as a growth culture.
Creating and evolving culture takes deliberate and focused action. It demands ongoing learning, intentional leadership, and personal commitment. Culture is ultimately a game of managing essential tensions: planning and action, ownership and alignment, persistence and patience, success and failure, ambiguity and certainty, purpose and finance.
Culture is a huge topic. I want to address it in the context of how we create value to keep members permanently connected. Doing this well can help differentiate our associations.
Culture as Differentiator
“Culture isn’t just one aspect of the game; it is the game. Your strategy can be stolen and copied by the competition. They can try to mimic your processes and clone your operations. The culture you create is something that no one can take away or imitate.”
Lou Gerstner
We have culture whether we intentionally shape it or not. In the world of associations, shaping culture often means getting out of our lanes, keeping pace with the unknown, and pivoting to meet members where they are. Culture is one of six association product competencies. The others are vision, customer, design + build, go to market, and performance.
Creating a culture of collaborative value creation is critical because building new things that people love:
Is hard.
Requires strategic focus and operational performance.
Requires diverse perspectives and new capabilities.
Requires support + and hard truths (especially about whether the community wants and is willing to pay for what we’re building).
Enhances the odds for success: people will use what we build to help solve tough problems.
Culture can be tricky. It can be difficult to accurately diagnose and can be tough to change. Good ideas can be crushed by a dysfunctional organizational culture, negative team vibe, or a critical mass of staff or volunteers who resist change. An uneven culture might result in factions of resentment or back channels of negativity.
It can also be a force for positive change.
Building new things is a team sport. This is why we put healthy culture at the center. A healthy culture focuses on people. It is purposeful, team-based, and based in meaningful relationships. A healthy culture helps create the conditions that result in peak performance and successful outcomes.
By partaking in the product community, participants shape culture by learning how to create new products that deliver new value in the context of other peer learners. Developing products in a highly-charged creative environment sparks momentum. The ideal traits of a participant was covered in a previous post.
A culture of optimism and possibility comes from high-impact collaborative work. It also comes from being ready to wrestle with creating new value in an association operating environment that often resists it.
Where Do You Want To Work?
“Great coaches develop a burning desire to improve culture. They generate and bring positive energy daily. They don’t manage people, they coach them.”
Matt Mayberry
Great leaders create leaders. This, by nature, means that great culture is distributed, aligned, and widely-owned.
I’ve worked in lots of different places, but have really only had one good boss. He was a generous, humble visionary who cared deeply about why we existed and balanced this by motivating and helping to nudge our daily actions and cares.
He built relationships and cultivated the careers of young people. He was quiet and self-effacing, but also easy to smile and laugh. He wasn’t a great public speaker, but he was a storyteller and an architect. He waited for others to speak before opening his mouth and often said more in a few words than most people did in several paragraphs.
He was a central reason why we created and sustained a culture of innovation – a powerful community no less – in a university that largely combatted new thinking. I say ‘a’ central reason as opposed to ‘the’ central reason as building, empowering, and trusting the team was how he choreographed success.
He would have rejected the idea that ‘culture eats strategy for lunch.’
Why? Because great strategy is cultural in nature. It is how we design and communicate our intentions and how we execute together with care. Grappling across boundaries to build the best possible association is good, honest, collaborative work.
In a product-led association, it’s not about creating new stuff for the purposes of creating new stuff. It’s about cultivating new thinking, building new relationships, driving new actions, and imprinting our culture in far-reaching ways.
Learning to create new value is intentional and participatory work. It takes shared ownership, accountability, and skin-in-the-game. The outcomes of a culture focused on value creation means getting closer to – and excelling at connecting with – our community.
This will help us propel our growth aspirations authentically and financially and, therefore, increase our potential for success. Over time a growth culture can guide our strategic direction while helping us build new capacity and capability for cross-functional innovation.
Product communities do not work in isolation. Aligning our culture with value creation takes time, patience, buy-in, hard work, commitment, and broad-based participation. Celebrating our collective impact is our most satisfying outcome.
A Garden That Bears Fruit
“Leading as a gardener means that I need to shift my focus from moving pieces on the board to shaping the ecosystem.”
General Stanley McChrystal
Participating in a product community means creating new value with diverse peers. It pushes us to make better choices and deliver better outcomes. Not only is this healthy, it helps grow our association while we grow as professionals.
Yes, a healthy culture is not easy to achieve, but creating new value in a community setting positions us to create momentum that drives focused growth. While the old association struggles with headwinds, the new association is agile and responsive, capable and ready, relevant and innovative.
Remember, product-led growth fuels connection. Join the product community and flip your destiny.
About the Author
James Young is founder and chief learning officer of the product community®. Jim is an engaging trainer and leading thinker in the worlds of associations, learning communities, and product development. Prior to starting the product community®, Jim served as Chief Learning Officer at both the American College of Chest Physicians and the Society of College and University Planning. Please contact me for a conversation: james@productcommunity.us.
Thank you so much, Brian! I truly appreciate the kind works. Enjoy the holiday.
Great article on creating a dynamic culture. It is vital for organizations to create a thriving and healthy culture as it propels trust, builds collaborative teams, helps to foster innovation and showcases the organization's commitment to their employees. I am including this in my curated leadership newsletter.