If you ask anyone who is in charge of culture in an organization, they will likely give you one response: The CEO. I agree wholeheartedly that culture starts at the top. In fact, when I speak with business leaders who point me towards their HR team for any discussions on culture, I know I’ll find some significant problems when I get there. It can’t be denied that people in an organization prioritize the things that their leaders prioritize and so for culture to be front and center, the leader has to put in the effort.

              That being said, no matter how much the leader cares about creating a great workplace culture in her organization, one thing is also true: if you don’t make money you won’t stay in business for long. And often it’s true that operations and culture are fundamentally on opposite sides of a given argument or idea. So how is a leader supposed to keep culture as their ultimate goal, when something as important as paying their employees is pulling in the opposite direction?

              As I’ve struggled with this question, it began to remind me often of my job back when I was an officer in the US Army. You see, I was the unit’s intelligence officer, otherwise known as the security guy, the enemy expert, the S2, the spy, and sometimes the witch with freaky amounts of knowledge that nobody else has. To boil it down to a simple explanation, it was the job of my team to provide the military commanders with all of the relevant information on security matters and enemy activity that they might possibly need in order to make a decision. By definition of doing this in a war zone, these were life and death decisions—a big deal for any boss. The thing that I learned about security goals is that they are almost always competing with operations goals. Put it this way, if your job as an operations guy is to ‘take that village’, and my job as the security gal is to ‘keep everyone alive’, in most cases the best way to keep everyone alive is to stay far away from that village. Better yet, let’s just stay safe and sound back in the United States—mission accomplished. Obviously, we wouldn’t win very often if we did that.

              The military deals with this in an interesting way. First of all, the operations planners and security planners have no decision-making authority, they are just there to evaluate the situations and give the most unvarnished and unbiased advice possible to those in charge of making the hard decisions. We’re not supposed to be promoted, hired or fired based on the results of the operations, as long as we did our best with the information that we had at the time and were acting in alignment with the values of that organization. The second thing is an open acknowledgement that operations and security are, in fact, in direct conflict with one another—a professional tug-of-war, back and forth, a war game; red versus blue. Sometimes we fight, sometimes there is drama, but in the end, it works fairly well. I don’t have to feel pressured about the success of the operation, and the operations guy doesn’t have to spend time researching security concerns. This allows for an absolutely necessary balance. Of course, if you ask any military leader in the world, they will say they care about keeping their people safe—but that doesn’t mean they can disregard their missions. Operations must trump safety, to a certain extent, or we will never make progress. Our job was always to help the leader find the right balance and create the best outcomes with both goals in mind.

              To translate this back into business terms, culture and operations can often be diametrically opposed to one another—just like Army operations vs. intelligence/security. Oftentimes the decision that makes the most profit can be harmful to the culture, yet on the other hand, if all we focus on is culture, we have a group of people who are all warm and fuzzy yet get nothing done. Like in most other parts of life, the balance is important. So, what should business leaders do to ensure that culture is remaining front and center and in the focus of operations? Here are a few tips:

1. Make an Actual Plan

If you follow us here at cavnessHR, you’ve heard this before, but it bears saying again. If you don’t have a plan for where you are going, you are very unlikely to get there. Most business leaders do very well at operations-planning, yet culture-planning falls by the wayside. It’s no wonder then that the culture often suffers. There are many ways to make these plans, and we have a simple, proven template for helping business leaders to think about their culture goals and where they’d like to get to. For more information, click here to talk with someone from our team.

2. Appoint Someone to be Your ‘Culture Advisor’

This person doesn’t have to have any specific or formal kind of training to be effective—they just have to be someone you respect and feel exemplifies the values that you are building your culture plan around (see point 1). That person is like the security officer we talked about, they are the one whose job is to think about what culture implications, concerns or potential dangers any decision you make might have. It’s their job to be the broken record, the one that makes everyone else roll their eyes at meetings, when they raise their hands and remind the group to examine this one facet of the plan that everyone else may be forgetting. Your team can be as small as you and one other person, and you have enough people to have a ‘culture gal’.

3. Understand the Opposite Extremes

Acknowledge that culture and operations are often at opposite ends of the decision that you will be required to make—and know that that is okay. The greater danger is in letting yourself get too close to one extreme or the other—and ignoring sound operations in favor of cultivating culture can be just as dangerous to the success of your business as the other way around. Once you acknowledge this reality, you can begin to get closer to a healthy balance in your decision-making. And, come one, everyone enjoys a little game of tug-o-war from time to time.

4. Don’t be Afraid to Take Calculated Risks

Risks are part of operations, whether you’re talking about going to war or launching a new product line. This is why planning is so important. But now that you’ve been through the planning process, you have appointed your culture guy, and you’ve thought through the extremes that you’d like to steer well clear of, go ahead and take some well-judged risks. No pain, no gain, and we all learn through the doing. By proper planning, proper balance, along with measuring and taking stock afterwards, you’ll be well on your way to having the right culture outcomes in your organization.

Finally, let’s not forget that, while culture affects absolutely everyone in the organization, it is also true that everyone’s job is nobody’s job. Understand that as a leader, you must place emphasis where you want your people to focus—the buck stops with you. Making solid plans, and appointing the right people to advise you, sometimes on opposing concerns, can free you up to keep your eye on the prize, and make the right decisions for your organization.

DANIELLA YOUNG IS AN ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR, CULTURE STRATEGY AND LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANT AT CAVNESSHR. DANIELLA SPECIALIZES IN HELPING BUSINESSES CREATE A CUSTOMIZED ROADMAP TO THE GROWTH CULTURE THAT EVERY ORGANIZATION WANTS ACHIEVE, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. WANT TO LEARN MORE? CLICK HERE TO SCHEDULE AN INTRO CALL.