The Refinement Cycle and Your Culture
S. Chris Edmonds is a sought-after speaker, author, and executive consultant. He’s the founder and CEO of The Purposeful Culture Group, which he launched in 1990. Chris helps senior leaders build and sustain purposeful, positive, productive work cultures. He is the author or co-author of seven books, including Amazon bestsellers Good Comes First (2021) with Mark Babbitt, The Culture Engine (2014), and Leading at a Higher Level (2008) with Ken Blanchard.
In our culture refinement process, we have three phases. First, leaders must define their desired culture. Next, they must align all plans, decisions, and actions to their desired culture. Third, the refine phase ensures the effective evolution of your purposeful, positive, productive work culture.
My approach is founded on this hard truth: senior leaders must drive and champion their organization’s culture. They are ultimately responsible for the organization’s clarity of its:
- servant purpose
- values and behaviors
- strategies
Senior leaders can’t delegate this responsibility to any other group or function – they must model and coach their desired culture daily.
The refine phase provides senior leaders the opportunity to do two things: ensure that every leader and team member demonstrates your formalized values and behaviors, daily, in all interactions, and to update your behaviors as needed. Typically, the servant purpose and values don’t require updates.
Intentional culture refinement works. It has helped clients create purposeful, positive, productive work cultures for the last 25 years.
Holding everyone accountable for modeling your values and behaviors requires senior leaders to demonstrate them daily, to celebrate others demonstrating them daily, to measure them (through formal surveys), to coach those that struggle to model those values and behaviors, and, when coaching doesn’t work, to mentor misaligned leaders and players out of the organization.
Every couple of years, it’s important to examine formalized valued behaviors and make edits to improve their application. Refining enables behaviors that are well-embedded in daily interactions to come off the list. It also enables the addition of new, necessary behaviors to help a work culture evolve further.
One client specified an integrity value of: “I align my actions with our values.” This became an important foundation for all of their values – to inspire commitment by all employees to model their valued behaviors. Two years in, they set that behavior aside because it was so well-embedded in their culture. They added a different behavior focus: “I hold myself and others accountable for the commitments made by our team.”
That behavior “update” has helped their work culture strengthen both results and relationships.
Intentional culture refinement works. It has helped clients create purposeful, positive, productive work cultures for the last 25 years.
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