A few months ago, I read a report by the British Cardiovascular Society (BCS) that both shocked and saddened me. The report mentioned that “Monday is the most common day of the week for people to be admitted to hospital with a life-threatening heart attack.” It continues, “We’ve found a strong statistical correlation between the start of the working week and the incidence of heart attacks.” Apparently, the anxiety and fear that most people feel on Sunday evening and Monday morning—and that we have normalised—is slowly killing us. While having a casual discussion with a HR friend over coffee, I stumbled upon another statistic: the most cases of absenteeism occur on Mondays. Apparently, some of us wake up on Monday and fail to muster the strength or motivation to report to work. While most of us survive, the BCS report showed me that some of us don’t. Statements such as TGIF, an acronym for thank God it's Friday, are cultural clichés. Most people will break into song and dance when MIFOTRA announces an unplanned public holiday. All of this triggered my curiosity, and I found myself arriving at this uncomfortable conclusion: for some people, toxic, overbearing, and uncaring cultures have slowly taken root in their teams. As such, work has ceased to be a platform to tackle the problems of the day and has become merely a means to a paycheck—not just in Rwanda, but everywhere. If you ask most team leaders what keeps them up at night, more often than not, the answer will be their team’s culture. Whether it is trying to create, change, or safeguard it, the worry is an ever-present one. This worry isn’t baseless. The past thirty-five years have cemented the role of culture in transformation and growth. Multiple research papers and books have been written on this subject, and the verdict is in: no other variable in an organisation takes precedence over culture. The best product or service will not save an organisation whose culture is retrogressive, passive, or archaic. Two different companies will sell the same product but have different outcomes. The one with the winning culture will almost certainly return superior value to its stakeholders. Do you remember Blackberry? Neither do I. Whether it is “The Toyota Way,” which has made a once meek Japanese organisation the largest car company in the world, or Ray Dalio’s “Radical Transparency,” which turned Blackwater Associates into a $124 billion machine, the reality is that culture separates the players from the jokers. The right culture introduces two competing variables: profit and people. What comes first? Are the two mutually exclusive? The answer is that a well-motivated, connected, inspired, and innovative team will almost always be followed by profits. The opposite is also true. Culture cares for people, and people care for profits. It’s that simple. The right culture provides the relevance, drive, motivation and purpose most people are searching for. It transforms a team from being clock watchers into innovators with skin in the game. So what is the right culture? The answer: I don’t know. Each team, depending on its sector, location, stakeholders, risk appetite, and size, determines it itself. The more important question is: once you have identified a culture that you resonate with, do you have the stomach to embed it? The tools to embed it are a mix of carrot and stick. Bad habits that are misaligned with the team’s culture must be called out and punished, while good habits must be recognized and rewarded. When a critical mass of people within any team gets this, the right culture finds a home and nestles in. If only we knew the billions of dollars that are spent annually by companies on “culture consultants,” only for the end result to be a beautiful pamphlet gathering dust on some dark shelf. For every action, there must be an equal and proportionate reaction. When consequences—good or bad—are absent, a culture of mediocrity and mendacity thrives. Values such as gossip, favour trading, blackmailing, and cliquishness take hold. Likeability becomes the metric for promotions, not performance. These, in turn, lead to negative value for stakeholders that always follows closely behind. So while most leaders wrestle with the question of what the right culture for their team is, the better question to ask is whether you have the stomach necessary to embed whatever culture you decide The writer is a researcher in organisation behaviour, strategy and culture
