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What the soil is
The culture is what the business is growing in. If working there feels bad, or doing business with it feels bad, or it feels bad to the community, the culture adds nothing to its growth, no matter how good the business is.
Tending the culture
Tending the soil as a company grows comes down to being clear with everyone about which behaviors get celebrated and which will not be tolerated. Curiosity is one that gets celebrated: wondering what could be done differently, what more could be learned, what more could be taught. When leaders celebrate what they want more of and refuse what they want less of, consistently, the culture can flourish.
Hiring and promotion
Hiring and promotion decisions carry the loudest message. Everyone watches who gets promoted, who gets raises, and who gets hired. The people chosen need to be the best at what they do and the best at who they are for the culture. Compromising on either one tells the whole organization that the stated values were never meant.
What does soil give plants besides support?
Soil supplies the minerals plants cannot get from water and light, chiefly nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. Those three are the numbers printed on fertilizer labels, written as N-P-K. Soil also hosts bacteria and fungi that help roots absorb nutrients. A plant in poor soil can have plenty of sun and water and still grow badly.
How does promotion decide a company's values?
Management scholar Steven Kerr published a 1975 paper in the Academy of Management Journal on the folly of rewarding one behavior while hoping for another. He described organizations that say they want teamwork or long-term thinking while paying and promoting for individual or short-term results. Employees, he observed, work toward what is rewarded rather than what is announced. His examples came from fields including politics, medicine, and universities.
Why do stated values and real behavior diverge?
MIT professor Edgar Schein shaped the modern idea of company culture in his 1985 book Organizational Culture and Leadership. He described culture in three layers: visible artifacts, stated values, and basic assumptions that people hold without noticing. The deepest layer, he argued, is revealed by what leaders pay attention to, reward, and tolerate. Where the stated values and those assumptions disagree, he argued the assumptions govern behavior.
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