Intentional Culture, Exceptional Results – Integrating Authenticity with Accountability

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One habit of good leadership is to be out in your culture, shining a light on success, celebrating wins, and catching people doing things right. There are likely some amazing things going on around you that you may be missing if you aren’t intentional. It’s natural for human beings to fixate on what’s not in our lives instead of focusing on what’s in our lives. Lately I’ve been putting this habit into practice in my own community. What I’ve discovered is that our little town is full of small giants (a term coined by Bo Burlingham), companies that deliberately choose to focus on excellence, purpose, and community impact rather than pursuing relentless growth or becoming as large as possible.

One of the small giants in Cochrane, Alberta is the Spray Lake Centre. Erin Wagner and her incredible team of leaders have created a vibrant, thriving, customer-focused environment that is at the heart and hub of our community for fitness, sports and recreation, as well as family and community connection. The SLS Centre also regularly hosts the Cochrane farmers’ market, both indoors and outdoors, and many other community events every year. When you visit Cochrane, stop by and get a shot of energy from this amazing place.

There are also many other small giants in Cochrane such as Found Books, Route 22 – Artist Collective Gallery, Yamnuska Wolfdog Sanctuary, Pink Wand Cleaning Services, Flores and Pine Restaurant, Alberta Metal Works, Align Developments, and the Cochrane Public Library. All of these organizations are part of Innovate Cochrane, a community-driven non-profit dedicated to empowering entrepreneurs and business leaders to build authentic, accountable organizations.

Everyone talks about the importance of culture, but when the pressure to deliver results mounts, culture takes a back seat. Like taking care of your health in times of high demands, it’s easy to declare, “we don’t have time for culture.”

But culture is always present, regardless of whether you are intentional about it. It is not a flavor of the month management fad. It’s the fabric of your entire organization.

Organizational culture is complex and multi-layered. To create and sustain a great culture requires leaders at every level to look beyond visible behaviors and statements from culture surveys to understand and influence the deeper beliefs that truly shape how organizations function.

My framework for organizational culture focuses on integrating the two fundamental elements of a great culture: authenticity and accountability in three areas: organizational, interpersonal, and personal.

The Importance of Authenticity

Authenticity means living in alignment with your true values, living and working in a place where you don’t have to leave who you are at the door, where you can express yourself genuinely, fostering meaningful connections and trust. Authentic cultures encourage open communication, vulnerability, and psychological safety to support people to tell the truth in a respectful way.

Leaders who lead authentically strengthen the overall sense of belonging and engagement in an organization.

The Importance of Accountability

Accountability means that we remember that culture isn’t what we say. Culture is how we hold ourselves accountable for how we act. You can’t build a reputation on what you’re going to do. Accountability starts with ownership. Accountability means that individuals and leaders take ownership for their decisions and their actions. We institutionally deny the fact that each of us – through our perceptions and our choices – is creating the culture that we so enjoy complaining about. Deciding that you have created the culture you are living and working in – and therefore you are the one to step into healing it – is the ultimate act of accountability.

Accountability means taking responsibility to work with clear expectations and agreements and being a person who can be counted on. It means having the tough conversations, providing regular mutual feedback, helping each other grow, and delivering on the promises you make. It means holding each other to the same high standards and asking for the support needed to deliver on agreements made.

How Authenticity and Accountability Work Together

Authenticity and accountability are mutually reinforcing. Authenticity creates the psychological safety necessary for people to be honest, while accountability ensures that this honesty translates into clearly defined and necessary results.

Authenticity supports people to operate from a place of truth, caring, and integrity, while accountability ensures that this integrity is backed by responsible action. Together they foster trust, engagement, and sustainable success in any culture.

Five Ways Leaders Accidentally Create Dishonesty In Employees

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Honesty is a key value for any organization. It sets the tone for the kind of culture you are committed to create. It provides consistency in behavior. And it builds loyalty and trust. Honesty is one of the most effective ways to establish the environment that will propel your organization to long-term success. As a leader, the importance you place on honesty can create a culture where your team members feel inspired, empowered, and validated.

Moral dishonesty, such as stealing, padding expense accounts, or lying about results can unfortunately be a part of an organization. More subtle and every bit as important, however, is psychological honesty.

  • What is the experience of your team members working in this organization?
  • Do people feel free to bring you their concerns, questions, or feedback without fear of reprisal?
  • How tense do people feel working around you?
  • Can people be honest with you about your leadership?
  • And how do you know if people are giving honest answers to these questions? How much are people on your team choosing to be merely polite rather being genuine?

Here are five ways leaders accidently create dishonesty in their team. I say accidently because no one sets out to create a dishonest work environment. Often, however, amid stress, demands, and particularly in a hybrid work environment where we may not be as connected to our team, we may inadvertently overlook some unintended consequences of our behavior.

  1. A lack of transparency with your team about why you made a decision. If you aren’t modeling honesty, it’s difficult to expect it.
  2. Unacknowledged stress, tension, and anxiety. It’s tough enough to be honest with your boss. But when you add emotional volatility to the mix, you are inserting a variable of instability which encourages being polite rather than genuine. It is for this reason that leaders must pay close attention to how they act and communicate. To create an honest workplace, you must attend to your inner state. Whether you see it or not, if you have unrecognised strain, tension, and anxiety, your team is likely going to hold back telling you the truth. Volatility breeds unpredictability. And unpredictability breeds dishonesty.
  3. Talking over people. When we interrupt others rather than sincerely listen, we give the message that we think we are smarter than they are, that they aren’t as valued, and aren’t needed. I, for one, am guilty of this when I’m feeling stressed, pushing for results, and forgetting about the importance of the people on my team.
  4. Ignoring people’s emotions. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to ignore your team members’ feelings. This error often occurs when a leader is either unable to deal with their own emotions or are overly focused on tasks and results. The key here is empathy: you will succeed only when you care enough to attend to those around you. You are less likely to increase anxiety in others if you consider how your actions impact them. It’s your responsibility to be attentive to how people around you are doing.
  5. Defensiveness. This is the big one. If you ask for feedback in these areas, you need to let go of needing to be right to protect your ego. As Steve Covey used to say, “seek first to understand…” That is our work. When people have the courage to bring anything to our attention that creates discomfort in us, our responsibility is to resist the tendency to get defensive and to listen to understand.

In summary, positional leaders impact their employees’ stress and anxiety levels. What they say, feel, and do hugely influences their team’s physical and emotional well-being and how they respond. But sadly, far too few leaders are aware that they have this power. And many are overconfident in their leadership skills, creating a gap between their perceived and actual levels of competence. This explains why even well-meaning bosses may inadvertently contribute to high anxiety levels in their team members and how they inadvertently shut people down.

Journalling – How To Get Going And Keep Going

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Journalling – How To Get Going And Keep Going

Connection to others is critical in good leadership and starts with connection to yourself. Journalling is a great tool for self-connection.

Here are some guidelines to get you going and keep you going:

  1. Buy a nice journal. I love a good leather-covered one I can feel proud to write in.
  2. Have a regular time to write – in the morning, at the end of the day, or, for example, every Sunday morning as you reflect on the past seven days and the week ahead. I like to spend five minutes journalling when I first come in the office, before I turn on my computer. It helps me connect to myself before the barrage of the world’s demands start hitting me.
  3. Experiment with structure. Sometimes journalling is a brain dump, a process I learned from Julia Cameron. Her journalling method is three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing. Other times I use a structure of a) How am I feeling? (Including wins in the past 24 hours, lessons learned, and glitches); b) How will I show up today? c) What am I grateful for?
  4. Write less than you think you “should.” Like exercise, it’s better to have small consistent successes than big failures. Two or three sentences is great while you’re getting into the habit.
  5. Don’t show it to anyone. You aren’t writing to impress anyone. It won’t be graded. It is only for you.
  6. Don’t sweat it if journalling doesn’t work for you. It isn’t for everyone. There are lots of other tools for connecting with yourself.