A Culture of Good
By. Matt Monge
In her post titled What’s Keeping Your Company Culture Intact and Thriving?, Laura McKnight suggests that organizations should “[make] the most of your employees’ desire to do good.” Comments like that get my inner philosophy nerd all excited because they point to this idea that I’ve mention a time or twelve on this site. Organizations, culture, leadership, engagement, etc–they’re all about helping all parties involved become more appropriately human.
As humans, there are things we naturally want to do. You’ll notice I didn’t say we naturally always do them; but we have aspirations, at least much of the time, of being kind to our fellow man and so on. It would make sense, then, that organizations would live and lead in light of that understanding. If organizations are indeed clumps of humans working and living life together for the bulk of their waking hours, why wouldn’t you want to integrate doing good into your organization’s way of life? Organizations are literally habitats for humans, after all.
These humans, these folks next to you and me at the office, if given the opportunity, would likely want to help out their fellow man somehow. I mean, we see it inside the organization all the time, don’t we? Or at least when we’re working the way we all want to work we see it, right? We see someone who needs help, so we help them. We see someone struggling, so we come alongside, put our arm around them, and try to assist. This is that desire to do good that Laura was mentioning in her post. So why wouldn’t we, as organizations and leaders, employ proactive strategies to turn that desire inside-out?
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