Celebration of culture carriers often ignores their motivations.
Organisations looking to strengthen culture often do so by finding and celebrating culture carriers. Culture carriers are those people who live the values that an organisation wants to foster and inspire the practice of those values in others. Highlighting and celebrating the work of these change agents can strengthen the practice of key values in teams.
Often, this celebration goes awry for a simple reason. The culture carrier doesn’t see themselves as a change agent. They are just doing what they do. They don’t see their work as differentiated or exceptional. They will resist the celebrations.
Worse still, the organisations motivation for influencing people can be wildly divergent to the individuals practising the target values. Many organisations decide on the values they want without consulting their people, let alone those who demonstrate the desired culture.
Celebrating culture carriers whose actions and motivations are not aligned runs two risks:
- highlighting to these individuals their disconnect to others leading to exit or changes to conform to the prevailing values
- presenting these individuals to the organisations as isolated superheroes without connection to other’s work and goals.
Before you start to celebrate the exemplars of your target culture, take the time to understand their experience, motivations and goals. What you learn may be far more useful to any changes you want to foster and will enable them to present their efforts as human and realistic to others.
