Have you worked or lived amongst good culture and have you worked or lived amongst bad culture? What's the difference?
Above all, good culture is marked by a shared effort to help all succeed. With good culture, people act with honesty. There is far more collaboration than competition in good culture, and with good culture people share common values and goals as well as a commitment to helping one another.
Bad culture includes lots of competitive cliques, dishonesty, poor communication, and a lack of explicit common goals and efforts. In bad culture, people demean one another looking for faults whereas in good culture people seek and support each other's strengths while helping out with regard to the weaknesses.
Leaders of good culture use a systematic approach to support all within that system whereas leaders of bad culture tend to pit groups and individuals against each other with dishonest, conniving, self-serving actions.
As I think about good and bad culture, I believe that honesty is the single most important factor when it comes to creating good culture. Dishonesty, on the other hand, creates a bad culture.
Other attributes of good culture include common goals, positive support, clear expectations, apt communication, and a willingness to know and understand each other. When people are too quick to judge and too competititve, they create a bad culture.
Inclusivity also helps to create good culture, while exclusion creates a bad culture. That's one reason why it's good to keep personal and professional lives separate in the work place. When we bring too much of our personal lives into the work place, there is too much room for exclusion. I remember once in a work place when the leader fraternized with a select group of workers--that fraternization created bad culture in the work place since there was an in group that appeared to get preferential treatment and an out group that was excluded from many of the leader's events. Yet, good relationships will naturally occur in the work place, and when this happens it's good to be discrete and make those relationships part of our private lives--lives outside of the work place.
I want to think more about good culture versus bad culture. I wish I had learned more about this as a young person embarking on a professional career, and I wish we had talked more about this in my family too. The more we can contribute to good culture in the places where we live and work, the better lives we'll lead.