Cultures that are creative and innovative in general are good at rewarding such behaviour. I kind of realise in a way I've only ever works in shared leadership situations as experts needed to contribute and be motivated to contribute to developing innovative products and work. Only through collaboration and generating their own motivation could I deliver and thus get promoted. However, I would say some who were more power orientated shot up faster at times, only to eventually fizzle out in the long run.
You can't have a leader that rewards/punishes one way and managers who pick a different approach.
So it only really works if those at the top embrace these ideas, otherwise you end up with this system where they communicate they value innovation, but in their behavior fail to do so.
From my experience, this is true, but reward is not why such behavior becomes culture. Culture is ingrained by leaders who act and lead according to value organization adheres to. The key here is to have leaders at every level who embodies such value. Having such values baked into performance evaluation is how "reward" plays a role in engendering and sustaining such culture. It is about whom does the organization promotes and chooses to be a leader. It's not about simple salary increase or cash rewards, as such things don't last more than a few months.
Culture and individualized incentives. Build a culture that aligns with the values of people hired and performers. Most people are motivated by positive feedback incentives. Others are motivated by monetary incentives. This guides career growth.
Even if they leave, they will be back because most companies lack a unified culture with clear values.
Those are all great and very interesting examples where senior leaders create a culture by taking tough and visible decisions. I wonder if they worked in the same sort of way that the post describes where new people talk about them and it makes them engage with the issues around the culture? That is, did they have a long-lived effect on culture or were they one-off boosts to it? I think you've got a culture when all employees are reinforcing it rather than just the top leaders.
In the US: culture is very important. If you have bad coworkers, no amount of technical excitement can compensate. I am willing to hypothetically trade technical excitement for great colleagues (up to a reasonable extent).
Everything comes and goes. It's just the nature of things. When it's your time to lead the pack, you will, regardless of the cultural environment. Most of us (in the West) don't know it yet, but we're already in the Chinese Age.
How long will their time last?
The funny thing about the influence of culture on innovation is that when this country (USA) was rewriting the rules and breaking down boundaries this way and that way, we were sending minorities to jail like "AI WW" and generally compelling them to behave and know their place.
My experience has been that low performance cultures tend to have a lot of cynical naysayers that like to block things from happening. High performance cultures tend to have optimistic enablers who also know how to do a lot of things and are happy to share their knowledge.
Truthfully? Prioritizing bottom up innovation has to oddly enough happen from the top down. Give middle and front line managers the responsibility and mandate to continually foster such a culture, and that’s what this is, culture. If you’re stuck in a company that doesn’t do this… and if you want to do amazing things, just be honest with yourself - is this the place for you?
Right. I'm automatically sceptical of these practices when it comes from an employer/company. Maybe that's just due to the fundamental power dynamic (which I suspect the concept of co-creators won't mitigate, but I guess anything is possible).
On the other hand, maybe workplaces can't help but promote certain culturally motivated practices, whether they can help it or not? A company that endorses crunch time and regular over time, has already tacitly endorsed a certain philosophy and culture when it comes to how people should be managed and how productivity is leveraged.
If we want innovation out of these startups, we have to focus on culture. We have to stop funding culturally retarded people with MBAs just because they're "credible" and look for people who can lead very smart people (an extremely rare skill).
May you provide more insight into what such culture would be like? I agree that culture is the important factor for innovation, and I'm working hard to develop a good one. So please, share your thoughts on that. Anyone else is also welcome to do so.
That rings true. Somewhat unrelated, but nonetheless important IMHO, is the new trend I see on networks like LinkedIn around culture fit, trust and performance. In a group where trust, a highly subjective concept to begin with, intervenes with heresy the focus on trust over performance can severely hinder innovation and be counterproductive.
Which might explain why certain companies attract certain people.
While a reward structure is crucial, I feel there's more to business culture than a proper positive feedback loop. What about attitudes, creativity, fun, competition, and atmosphere?
You made a generic claim that different cultures bring different ideas and skills. I have a hard time understanding what that means in practice at the workplace. That's why I'm asking for an example.
I still don't see how it would work in practice, and you fail to give an example.
Awesome. I guess my addition to what you said is basically that you can lead your company culture to a degree, by doing the kinds of things you mention and creating a structure that supports a good culture. Also culture really does affect people once you reach a certain size. I think you're mainly talking about smaller companies, basically how to "bootstrap culture", but it's important to keep it going as you grow and realize not only how your employees affect your culture, but how your culture affects your employees.
yeah the culture is all based on promotions.. and you get them by launching something new, not by maintaining or improving existing systems. hence what you said
Brain-wise, I think all nations have the possibility to have some top achievers at any given field. It comes easier when the population is larger. The human beings' organizations come with so many system differences such as ways to cooperate, education system. I recommend to think from a system's perspective. If copy is a way to catch up and serve as the basis for evolving one‘s own true strengths (well, true strength here makes the difference), it's definitely a good thing. If copy only brings almost brain-dead repetition, even others can not stop it, it will implode in the end.
Sorry to reply with such an abstract content. There are just too many things in my mind to say. So I try to provide some general ideas instead of be very specific. BTW, I do not like taking culture as a dimension of answer, since it's too general and culture is the symptom of an organization. When we talk about culture, we just has to accept the symptom of one organization as is. Hence, it brings us not much information. But it is extremely difficult to have some nice insights for culture we don't have enough context with.
I doubt it. Culture is key. Being in the right place at the right time, having a network of folks interested in your welfare, etc is key.
Think of it this way -- how many smart people from school or childhood do you know who didn't amount to much, despite the raw ability to achieve. Now think about your work life -- how many times have worked for or witnessed a blithering idiot in charge of thing at your job or a customers org?
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