Hi folks,
Last year was an exceptional year at my agency. We built and refined approaches to security, closed material weaknesses, expanded our already awesome team – it’s hard to make more progress in a single year than we did in 2015. So here we are in 2016, and it’s easy to look around and wonder what more we can do – we’ve already accomplished so much.
The summit of Mt Everest is 29,029 feet above sea level. But the effort to reach the summit isn’t linear – it gets increasingly harder the closer you get to the summit. Base camp is at 17,600 feet – well over half-way to the summit – and you can fly there. Yet climbers turn back mere hundreds of feet from the summit because those few extra steps would literally kill them. Last year was our trip to base camp. It wasn’t easy, but we made a ton of progress very quickly. The rest of our journey is our trek to the summit – it’ll be hard and slow, but the further we go, the more we distinguish ourselves among our peers. What does that climb to the summit look like?
There’s a book called How Will You Measure Your Life? which talks about culture and provides this definition:
Culture is a way of working together towards common goals that have been followed so frequently and so successfully that people don’t even think about trying to do things another way. If a culture has formed, people will autonomously do what they need to do to be successful.
It goes on to talk about how to form a culture. Essentially, a culture is formed over time by the repeated responses to actions. Get a negative response? Your culture will adopt a “don’t do that again” position. Get a positive response? Your culture will encourage that action.
Changing a culture is a huge undertaking in any circumstance, let alone when you’re not in the leadership chain. But that’s exactly our task. It’s daunting, it’s challenging, and it’s frustrating. But it’s also necessary and rewarding. Because we can only succeed in our mission if we enable and support our colleagues to adopt the frame of mind that bakes security into everything they do.
None of this is easy – there’s no shortcut to changing a culture, especially when you’re trying to change from the side rather than the top. This is by far the most challenging task in front of us. But if we can make it happen, we’ll be legends.
Rex