The Leader-Culture Connection Part 5

Discouraging Cultures are characterized as follows:


• It's all about the top people: their prestige and their power. They act as though everybody else in the organization exists only to make them more successful, and most of the staff members deeply resent it.

• People spend as much time trying to survive the power struggles, protecting themselves from more hurt, and analyzing the top people's pathology as they spend doing their work. Employees become fiercely loyal to a supervisor who protects them, but they actively seek to undermine any perceived adversary.

• As the benchmarks of success decline, the top leaders become more authoritarian and threatening. They demand compliance and loyalty, and they defy anyone who disagrees with them or even offers another opinion.

• The leadership team often tries to remedy the problems, but with the wrong analysis in the wrong solutions. They seldom look in the mirror to find the culprit. Instead, the blame is always put on incompetent or unmotivated people throughout the organization, but these are the only ones who are willing to stay employed there. Leaders may ask that members to go to seminars and workshops, and they may even hire consultants from time to time, but they seldom listen to any outside input.

• When these leaders communicate a new vision, nobody cares. They’ve heard it before, and they don't trust that anything will be different this time.

• These organizations attract malcontents, sycophants, and desperate people who can't find a job anywhere else.

Source: Chand, S. (2011) Cracking Your Church’s Culture Code: Seven Keys to Unleashing Vision and Inspiration. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.