A recent HBR article, “Don’t Let Your Company Culture Just Happen,” could not be more relevant given today’s chaotic, hyper-connected business environment. In fact this may the most important task leader’s face for strategy implementation.
The article’s focus is on systematizing culture design through a conversation about three key elements of organizational culture: Outcomes, Behaviors, Enablers and Blockers. While these are vital, we believe that this article, and many others like it, miss the primary point, that leadership is the single most important factor in implementing the key cultural values that drive desirable outcomes, behaviors, and enablers such as people being happy, engaged, and doing their best work through trust, honesty, and collaboration.
The organizational spiritual leadership model is prescriptive in that it identifies cultural values based on altruistic love that inherently produce these desired individual, team, and leadership outcomes and behaviors.
Moreover, while the writers themselves admit, “You can design culture but nature will still be a force”, they fail to acknowledge the spiritual quality inherent in nature and how spiritual leadership, with an inner life or spiritual practice (innate nature) as its source, can channel that nature so that it becomes a benevolent force that facilitates a vision of serving key stakeholders through a culture based on altruistic love to produce the very individual, team, and leadership outcomes and behaviors the authors of the HBR say are so desirable.
