Promote shared values

Organizations that have strong cultures are more productive.

Strong cultures help to “imprint” expectations about extant norms on participants. Whether for good or for ill, culture is a powerful source of normative influence. Successful leadership interactions, ones that model and promote a healthy set of shared values, create and evolve the experience of everyone in the organization. It is therefore critical that leaders promote a deep culture that supports a vigilant, proactive and successful organization.

But normative influence can be even more powerful that individual leadership. Norms are also driven by the physical structures and social processes that surround the organization’s members every day. These powerful non-human actors are called structural attractors.

Because the normative influence of structural attractors is so powerful, it is critical that leaders pay close attention to physical and social structures and continuously work to understand how they are shaping the experience of everyone who comes in contact with them.