Episode 175

Main Idea:

• Series: If leaders do not become conscious of the culture and context they interact with and are embedded in, those cultures will manage them.
• Today: Every culture that exists was formed over time to create a specific context today. Knowing how & why that context came to be enables us to better interact with, lead within, and when necessary: shift that culture.

Context is never simply “bad”.

• The effectiveness of any culture cannot be evaluated separately from the environment to which it exists.
• There is no universally correct leadership style because of cultural variation.

Context has layers.

• When seeking cultural change you must impact culture at the deepest level for it to take hold.
• An outsider can often gain a greater sense of “what” is happening at the deepest level, but they will not know “why”.

You do not understand a context if you cannot appreciate a context.

Goal:

• Leaders must understand their own culture well enough to be able to detect where there are potential incompatibilities with their culture and other contexts, and within their culture & their vision.
• Leaders must be able to decipher other contexts well enough to reveal their assumptions, synergies, and incompatibilities.

Assignment:
**Get someone else in your organization & both of you write out a list describing the culture you’re in, compare your list to another person and begin to figure out where your differences came from & what it means about your deeper values.