People is to culture as strategy is to vision. The management guru, Peter Drucker, is credited as saying that “culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Most leaders I know subscribe to that axiom. Just as a great vision needs good strategies and tactics to bring it to life, culture is driven by people. Culture is people. People make, sustain, and evolve culture.
I have been at my current institution for two years and walked into a healthy culture that we have been elevating to be more entrepreneurial, resilient, agentic, and joyful. Writing fun into our current strategic plan was not met with skepticism or surprise. It’s simple. We work hard and play hard. Work has to be a place that offers not only psychological safety, but also fulfillment. I consider myself lucky to work with people I like and enjoy being with. We all expect professionalism and we also want people to be themselves at work. We enjoy opportunities to be together, share ideas, challenge each other, and banter.
My approach is rooted not just in textbook learning, but also in lived experience. I learned about Edgar Schein’s work on culture from textbooks and committed to fostering healthy cultures conceptually and in practice early in my professional journey. As a graduate student at Boston College, I took two courses outside my discipline—a management course in human resources and a higher education finance course. Both have served me well through the years, but the on-the-job experience early in my executive career taught me the most about the importance of psychological safety and showed me how a healthy culture can drive performance.
When I first became an executive, I was a mom of two toddlers. I wanted the offices I led to understand and accommodate the challenges of working mothers and others whose lives and responsibilities were different. As an immigrant, I also knew what it was like to be routinely diminished for being a non-native English speaker by a colleague. I wanted every person I worked with to feel appreciated for who they are and what makes them different and unique. I also wanted my office to be joyful because I had spent two miserable years working in a department with someone who terrorized everyone, especially non-tenured faculty and staff. It was demoralizing and affected people’s health. As a middle manager, I had seen how an unhealthy culture undermined the realization of a great vision and a solid strategic plan.
Creating a healthy culture where everyone thrives takes work. Sustaining it through initiatives that are designed by and influenced by the collective is essential. Equally important is periodically measuring the state of the culture because we measure what we value, as the saying goes. Whether using Net Promoter Scores or devising a locally-developed instrument, keeping a finger on the pulse of culture through collective meaning-making of data is critical. Giving folks an outlet to share their experiences and perceptions and disaggregating data by different subgroups, where appropriate, are important to ensuring that the culture is as desired.
At the core of any vision, strategy, and culture are people. The right people and the right folks in the right seats on the bus make sure that the bus runs smoothly on the road.
