Managing Leadership^®

There is a tenuous relationship between the top-down and bottom-up origins of cultural institutions. The bottom-up ones are potentially the most natural and genuine, but they may have little to do with the intended character and aim of the organization’s founders or owners. They may even work to frustrate these.

Top-down ones are often rightly accused of being contrived and insincere. Their more obvious relation to organizational purpose is nevertheless suspected of being superficial, intended to deceive or distract directors and shareholders, and to manipulate employees, creating cynicism all around.

The best cultural institutions, though, seem to spring from roots imbedded in both fields. Organizational virtues and vision are carefully considered and developed into practical guidelines for daily organizational action, giving it meaning and direction. Employees are specifically oriented to these on joining, and the mores are reinforced by their conscious and deliberative integration into corporate management, supervision, and staff development procedures.

These form a value core, a structure, around which daily organizational behavior – and thinking and feelings about that behavior – can form. Employees try these on for size. The ones that fit – that help make everything go, and that create dynamics which encourage everyone to want to help make it so – are reinforced.

A feedback loop develops between the corporate entity and staff at all levels that produces pillars of corporate culture. These are the traditions that remind people why they do what they do, the way they do it, and that they do it together.

United States Marines are doing that, today. From grand balls in world capitals attended by top brass and invited glitterati enjoying catered meals, to quiet gatherings in remote outposts organized by a few grunts huddled around the closest thing to a cake they can find in a field ration, they are all celebrating the 233rd birthday of the Corps.

They honor the occasion by considering what it all means – the mission and history of their Corps, their individual places in those, the bonds with each other forged in pursuing them, the tenuous and perhaps unpromising beginning in a Philadelphia bar, followed by the growth of a most unparalleled combat record and esprit de corps – the development of which was at once unlikely and defiant.

And, ultimately, irresistible. Because it resonated with the naturally informed and proud collaboration of officers and Marines across all the generations of the nation they serve. Marines today will reflect on all that, on their own and their fellow Marines’ dedication to contributing to and perpetuating the grand institutions of their Corps; as well recalling with humility and respect their fallen comrades, whose sacrifices they are dedicated to investing with meaning.

There’s a compelling cultural tradition for you. How do yours stack up?

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Speaking of honoring compelling cultural traditions, tomorrow is Veterans Day in the United States. See you back here on Wednesday.

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