Organizational Culture Quotes

“Shaping the company's future requires embracing continuous learning and adaptation as a core value of the organization.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance

“By working together, the entire organization can build a more resilient and adaptable enterprise that is better equipped to navigate the complexities and uncertainties of the modern business landscape.”
― Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr., Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance

“The first step out of the gate has to be knowing where you want to end up. What do you really want from your company?”
― Stan Slap

“Overcoming the blame tendency is a defining issue in the corporate world. Ben Dattner, a psychologist and organizational consultant, tells of an experience when he was working at the Republic National Bank of New York. He noticed a piece of paper that a co-worker had stapled to his cubicle wall. It read:

'The six phases of a project:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Rewards for the uninvolved'

Dattner writes: 'I have yet to come across a more accurate description of how most dramas play out in our working lives.”
― Matthew Syed, Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do

“If a LEADER is using their time wisely, they don't have time to look for attention or feed an ego. The reward just happens as a pleasant byproduct.”
― Donavan Nelson Butler, MSG, US Army Retired

“Organizations need to decide which values they want to emphasize, and clearly communicate them to all members of the team. If you don't actively create the culture that you do want within your organization, a culture you don't want can develop organically.”
― Lyric Rivera, Workplace NeuroDiversity Rising: NeuroDiversity = ALL Brains NeuroDivergent and NeuroTypical working together & supporting each other

“The fact is, [University of Michigan organizational behavior professor Dr.] Wayne [Baker] said, most people do want to help. But that's not always intuitive. "We've shown that engaging in the process of both asking for and receiving help, and building the network actually elevates people's emotional energy and decreases their negative energy."

When the active exchange of help is incorporated into an organization's culture and used over time, Wayne said, people start to build positive relationships that change their behavior at work and also their beliefs. "They see the importance of asking for what they need while they generously help other people. And they start to practice it more in their daily interactions.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“The structure of operations also encourages connection. Any employee can attend meetings of any department, including Zingerman's board meeting. A truck driver can help plan a menu, and a chef can help strategize on the online marketing strategy. To Ari [Weinzweig], part of the benefit of this is disabusing people of the notion that leadership always knows what they are doing. It's okay to acknowledge that everyone is fallible even as they strive to make the company stronger.”
― Vivek H. Murthy, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness

“Organizational Culture influences accountability and decision-making across organizational layers.

The lack of a professionally designed ‘Organizational Culture’ can create serious obstacles for any leadership team.”
― Krishna Sagar Rao

“Organizations that don't take the initiative to design their organizational culture professionally are leaving their goals to chance.

How would one otherwise unify their team's goals with the mission and vision of the organization? Culture can build or break organizations no matter
how small or large.”
― Krishna Sagar Rao

“Elevation into leadership roles must be driven from inside and from the bottom up, especially where a strong culture is professionally designed and implemented.

In organizations where culture is by default & ad-hoc, one doesn't need to care much.”
― Krishna Sagar Rao

“Are you a ‘Listening Organization?’

Organizations that execute constant feedback loops from customers, vendors, and employees will have a competitive advantage in staying agile and evolving.

Building systems to ensure that your firm is empathetic and open-minded is critical to your survival and growth.”
― Krishna Sagar Rao

“Organizational culture is the most underrated management initiative in all sizes of companies.

The lack of a professionally designed Organizational Culture establishes that promoters of the company lack the basic understanding of regulating human behavior for quantifiable positive outcomes & profits.”
― Krishna Sagar Rao

“Rather than blaming people for their poor habits, Behavior Analysis focuses on altering the environment to help them succeed.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“The reality of execution is that nothing changes until people’s behaviors change.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“Consistent behavior can be like a turbo boost for your organization, and it won’t cost you anything extra. In contrast, inconsistent behavior can be a major stumbling block if you underestimate its importance in achieving effective execution.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“Vital Behaviors reflect an organization’s brand, policies, procedures, work processes, terms, and tools.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“Sometimes the cause of behavioral hotspots lies hidden elsewhere in the process.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“Simply relying on leaders isn’t enough to make habits stick in a company.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“Make sure you consider how performance improvement in one area might have a positive or negative ripple effect on the rest of the organization.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“The behaviors must connect at an emotional level for people. They must be personally rewarding, not just for the organization.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“People need to know that leaders are doing everything possible to remove barriers that hamper their doing the “right” things.”
― Julie M. Smith

“External environment is more important than internal, personal motivation— because if you change your environment, behavior change will follow, and so will a change in your thoughts and beliefs.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“Instead of blaming individuals for their poor habits, Behavior Analysis focuses on understanding observable behaviors and how the environment can be adjusted to support desired changes.”
― Julie M. Smith, Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization's DNA

“The establishment is in crisis. Popular opinion is on our side. But we have to step out of our comfortable clubhouse and into the terrain of politics. The little clubhouse called "activism" is moldy and decaying. We no longer fit inside of its self-defeating walls. We have to walk away from the sideshow if we want to seize the main stage. This is not about "selling out" or "watering down" our politics or becoming "less radical". There is nothing "radical" about an atachment to outsiderness and marginality. And what is more radical than believing that everyday people can come together and organize a collective vehicle powerful enough to remake the world?”
― Jonathan Smucker, Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals

“The first criterion of loyalty to the organization becomes complicity. Career advancement is not based on merit. And not even necessarily based on being someone's cousin.

Above all, it's based on a willingness to play along with the fiction that career advancement is based on merit, even though everyone knows this not to be true. Or, a willingness to play along with the fiction that rules and regulations apply to everyone equally when, in fact, they're often deployed as a means for entirely arbitrary personal power.”
― David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy

“The dialogue is key. The hallmark of stewardship in action here is to ask people to talk about what matters to them, not to ask people to support what matters to us. Discuss common values if you must, but do not institutionalize them. Once they appear on a wall plaque they become dogma and lose their meaning. If we need to write them everywhere to remember them, then how important were they? We only make lists of things we would just as soon forget.”
― Peter Block, Stewardship: Choosing Service over Self-Interest

“A common mistake for many leaders is to change the organization's vision structure and systems and overlook the organization's culture and leader and follower capabilities”
― Richard L. Hughes, Robert C. Ginnett, Gordon J. Curphy, ISE Leadership: Enhancing the Lessons of Experience

“When frustrations rise and morale declines, becoming the new norm, it creates an opportunity for employees to leave the organization.”
― Sasha Laghonh

“Once a culture of Extreme Ownership is built into the team at every level, the entire team performs well, and performance continues to improve, even when a strong leader is temporarily removed from the team…. … life can throw any number of circumstances in the way of any business or team, and every team must have junior leaders ready to step up and temporarily take on the roles and responsibilities of their immediate bosses to carry on the team’s mission and get the job done if and when the need arises.”
― Jocko Willink & Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership