Culture

When building a culture, I strive for values of diversity, collaboration, warmth, being fairly informal, and mission focused culture to make my organization better. I strive for diversity because it is important to get people that think differently and can contribute collectively to the “pool of thoughts and ideas” that surround everyone in the organization as to encourage creativity. Collaboration is also a value as it is important for members to work well with each other as a means of adding to this pool of ideas. I believe that people are much better at solving problems when they work together at it rather than individually. This helps to contribute to my value of warmth in that it’s very important to have a sense of belonging and comfortableness for a culture. A good degree of informalness is also important in an organization; people should not be afraid to reach out to talk with those deemed in charge. This allows for more transparency, and reinforces my other principles in a culture by fostering conversations and allowing more collaboration and comfortability with everyone in the organization to take place. Finally, having a mission-focused culture is quite important; everyone should believe in the challenges the organization is trying to push to solve, and believe in the values as well.

Short temperedness, closed-mindedness, and a distinct system of hierarchy are red flags to me in culture. Members can definitely be willing to defend their ideas, but they should be willing to hear others and be open to suggestions as well. It is certainly okay to have some hierarchy in the organization to allow order, but not rigid, and should allow for transparency. Otherwise it could temper a feeling of warmth and divide the organization into bubbles of communication between roles, which should not happen.

Avoiding these red flags and sticking to the values stated is what helps me to achieve a strong culture.