Good Leaders Make the Implicit Explicit
The culture of an organization or team is shaped by the values that leaders hold and the everyday practices that represent those values. From those values, good leaders are able to establish standards of quality, expectations for performance, and competencies that support personal and professional growth.
As organizations bring on new team members, leaders face the challenge of aligning everyone to the values and inculcating the culture they are trying to build. People are busy, and lofty ideas about the culture are often pushed aside to get things done.
Even on the occasions when leaders get everyone’s attention for a one-off discussion about the culture and values, rarely do these conversations get translated into shared understanding, much less action.
While a graphically designed list of the organization’s values that everyone can see looks impressive, it doesn’t do much to bring those values to life. To make matters worse, so many of the ideas and practices that make the values meaningful, such as rules, norms, principles, and standards, are left unspoken and implicit.
So how do the best leaders push the values down and throughout the organization so that everyone feels and becomes committed to them?
It starts with the importance of making that which is ambiguous and cloudy much less so. Good leaders go to great lengths to articulate the many qualities that define the organization’s culture and to make them explicit and transparent for everyone to see.
With every chance they get, leaders discuss the rules and norms that shape meetings and engagement. They call out and praise the behaviors that express key values. They also work hard to identify those actions that breach them. They teach others the standards of quality they expect by pointing out when those standards are met and unmet by the deliverables produced.
By constantly making the implicit explicit, the best leaders teach the culture rather than presuming it will manifest influence over time. Better yet, they insist that everyone else do this, as well.
They don’t rely on posters or graphic images to carry the weight of what it means to live the culture. Instead, they ask everyone to examine and share the details and practices that make the culture so unique and special.
Do the team members in your organization know the norms and rules of meetings, disagreements, conflict, and professionalism? Do they share a deep understanding of the principles and values that the organization holds sacrosanct? Can they point out the standards from which the organization defines quality? You get the point.
Teaching culture begins by making the implicit explicit. In fact, good leaders commit to this idea for just about everything that goes unspoken, including feedback, agreements, and performance expectations, all of which are essential building blocks of culture. If culture is destiny for an organization, then making the implicit explicit is how that destiny best unfolds. Great leaders do their part.
Great field note. People can use the same words but understand or define those very differently, and making cultural expectations explicit can lead to a shared understanding, as noted. One still must practice what is preached, but the making explicit can help clarify what right looks like. Another domain I’ve heard the expression “make the implicit explicit” is decision making in Annie Duke’s writing. Her point is that making assumptions and decision criteria explicit leads to better decisions (and better ability to learn if the decision criteria is explicit). Final thought, making the values explicit would seem to facilitate discussion over values vs incidents, which has been noted in prior field notes. Thx!
"Teaching culture begins by making the implicit explicit." Excellent point! I see value in focusing on our team's norms, specifically encouraging, challenging, giving direct feedback on specific behaviors that are forming the norms (which bubble up to form our culture.) This seems to be where the work gets done and without it, we just have magical thinking.