“Leaders drive values, values drive behavior, behaviour drives culture and culture drives performance. High performance makes new leaders. This is the self-reinforcing circle of excellence every startup needs to succeed.” – Martin Zwilling
Globalisation and all the new technologies and innovative business, healthcare, and education models, undoubtedly, have made life much easier to live on this planet than ever before. However, with increasing production, consumption and living standards (catering to unlimited needs and wants) the world is also experiencing a significant increase of greenhouse gasses, environmental pollution, economic and territorial competitions (fights for limited resources), deterioration of social and cultural values. Whether one focuses on the success or the failure of an organisation or a country, it is the leadership that is highlighted as the most influential factor responsible for the particular outcome.
There is no shortage of gurus and material advising and explaining what leadership means and how to become an effective leader. What is not seen or heard that often is the impact of culture on the definition and the creation of ‘a leader’ and how a leader can establish a certain culture in an organization or a country.
As Martin Zwilling, a former IBM executive, who has been helping startups, mostly in the Silicon Valley, says, it is a cyclic process where people’s perception about a leader depends on the cultural norms they have agreed to accept, and a true leader has a great deal of influence in shaping the culture for the future of the organization. Leadership has been studied through all different angles such as: how to define leadership, whether one is born or made as a leader, whether the leadership can be taught or learned and what characterize a successful leader. Such knowledge can help people as and when they have to play the role of a leader, at some point in their life, irrespective of whether it is in the form of a parent or a teacher guiding your children, a religious leader, a principal of a school, a Vice Chancellor of a university, a CEO of a company, a mayor, a governor, a Prime Minister, or even a President of a country.
The strong connection between the culture and leadership is often overlooked and therefore what people believe to be leadership qualities do not produce true leaders. Sri Lankans have had opportunities to learn this about political leadership since 1948 with life altering examples, especially since 1977. Irrespective of the entity, whether an organization or a country, it is hard to understand leadership without understanding the culture within which the leadership is recognized. It is easier to understand culture if one understands the leaderships through which the culture has been evolving.
Organsations as well as nations are cultural units with pockets of subcultures within them based on different factors such as: occupation, gender, race, religion, language and even age groups. Culture is an abstract concept that is sometimes used to indicate the sophistication of an individual or a group as when we say ‘he/she is a cultured person’. Sociologists and anthropologists use it to refer to the customs and rituals a group of people develop through their history. As people started exploring new ways to improve their businesses to overcome the competition, they started looking at behavioural patterns of employees and managers which gave rise to ‘organizational culture’ or ‘corporate culture’. Countries are sometimes identified by their political cultures such as: democratic, socialist, monarchies and even anarchies. Different political groups or parties may have their own sub-cultures within the main cultural umbrella of the country. Management gurus talk about developing ‘right kind of culture’ within an organization such as: ‘culture of innovations’, ‘customer first culture’ or ‘non-hierarchical culture’. In the political arena people talk about ‘culture of equality’, ‘non-discriminatory culture’, ‘culture of law and order’ and very rarely even a ‘corruption-free culture’. The personality and character of an individual can be viewed as an accumulation of the cultural learning through his/her family, the peer group, the school, the community, the occupation, the workplace, and any other group he/she has been a part of. Though the culture is within us it is in a continuous state of evolution since we, as individuals, are constantly evolving. As one joins or creates a new group that will affect this evolutionary process of one’s culture and the culture of that group.
Cultural norms of an organisation or a nation are the building blocks of the process how that organisation or the nation defines ‘leadership’. If the organisation or the nation has exposed its members only to a culture of corruption, then such a group will accept the corruptive behaviour as an important aspect of a leader. If the organisation or the country has been guided by the members of the same family for a long period of time, then also the members of that organisation or the country would identify the characteristics and culture of that family to be perhaps the necessary and sufficient conditions for the leadership.
The main difference between a leader and a manager or an administrator is that a manager/administrator works within an established culture whereas a leader should have the ability to change the culture if necessary or even create completely a new culture. If the organisation’s survival is threatened due to maladaptation of some elements of its culture, then it is the responsibility of the leadership at all levels of the organisation to recognise it in time and take corrective measures. If not these unwanted characteristics of the organisational culture will be passed onto the next generation and the trouble continues, perhaps even with a greater intensity since the next generation groomed by these same elements is coming with new knowledge and even more advanced technologies.
There are all types of different ways to define culture depending on the context within which it is discussed. In general, ‘culture’ can be considered as a collection of shared behavior patterns learned by a group as it faced internal and external constraints that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to similar situations.
The irony is that the leader who is going to change the culture or introduce a new culture must come through the existing culture and the system, keeping the evolutionary process of his/her own culture, protected from the contagions of the environment he/she is living in and gathering experiences from. Perhaps not an easy task, but achievable, especially if a majority of the group understands that the leadership and the culture are two sides of the same coin.
The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic over twenty years in the USA and fifteen years in Sri Lanka and he can be contacted at [email protected] )