Culture Is What We Create

When you hear the word culture, what do you think of?

Perhaps it's where you come from, your heritage, your traditions, the food you eat, the things you celebrate, or the beliefs passed through generations.

Or perhaps you think of workplace culture, the values, behaviours and expectations that determine what it's actually like to work somewhere.

Culture is much closer to home than either of those things, you are creating it every day. In the way you speak to people, the things you laugh at, the behaviour you accept. The opinions you challenge and the ones you let pass. The things you celebrate, the conversations you avoid and the expectations you place on yourself and the people around you.

There's a culture within our family, our friendships, our relationships and our community, there's even a culture to the way we live our own lives. Being busy is worn as a badge of honour, asking for help feels uncomfortable, so perhaps success is celebrated regularly, or you've learned to play yours down. Does your family talk about everything, or are there are subjects everyone knows not to mention. Is disagreement welcomed or is keeping the peace more important? Maybe you've grown up believing that you work hard, don't complain and just get on with it.

Nobody necessarily sat down and taught us any of these things, they didn't need to. That's the interesting thing about culture, most of it isn't taught through instruction, its learnt through repetition. We watch, we listen, we notice what gets approval and what doesn't, we learn which behaviours help us belong and which make us stand out. Eventually, those behaviours and expectations stop feeling like something we've learned at all, they just become normal.  Normal is incredibly powerful, because once something feels normal, we rarely stop to ask whether it's something we would actually choose.

What have we decided is normal?  I've spent a large part of my career working with people, both inside organisations and now through my own business, and one of the things that continues to fascinate me is how differently we can behave depending on the environment we're in. Someone can be confident, funny and completely themselves with one group of people and noticeably quieter with another. They can trust their judgement in one environment and second-guess themselves constantly in another. They can be the person everyone turns to for advice yet walk into a particular room and suddenly feel as though they have nothing to contribute.

We often look at that person and ask what needs to change; why don't they speak up? Why aren't they more confident? Why don't they put themselves forward? Sometimes those are really useful questions, but I think there's another one we don't ask ourselves nearly enough; what has the environment taught them about what happens when they do speak up.

Confidence doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's considerably easier to use your voice when experience has taught you that your voice will be heard. It's easier to disagree when disagreement doesn't come with ridicule, exclusion or resentment, it's easier to try something and get it wrong when mistakes aren't stored away to be used against you later, and it's easier to be yourself when you're not constantly working out which version of yourself is going to be most acceptable to the people around you.

Sometimes we're trying to make people more confident when perhaps we should also be looking at the culture we're asking them to be confident within. We all help create the room we're standing in and this is where culture becomes interesting to me because none of us is simply a passive participant in it. Yes, we're shaped by the environments around us, but we're shaping our environment to.

Think about your closest relationships.  What happens when somebody shares good news? Are they celebrated, or is there an unspoken pressure not to get too big for their boots? Can somebody say, I don't agree with you, without it becoming personal? Can people change their minds? Can they admit they're struggling? Can they say they've got something wrong? Can they want something different from the people around them without having to justify it? These things might seem small, but together they create an environment, and that environment teaches people something about who they're allowed to be within it.

Exactly the same thing happens in our workplaces, a business might have beautifully written values, but the culture isn't really created by the words on the wall, it's created in what happens between people every day; who gets listened to, whose ideas are taken seriously, who gets interrupted, who receives opportunities, what happens when someone challenges the way things have always been done. What behaviour is rewarded, what is challenged and, perhaps most importantly, what everybody notices but nobody says anything about.

Culture isn't what we say matters, it's what our behaviour demonstrates matters, and that applies whether there are two people in the room or two thousand. The things we inherit, we don't create all of this from scratch, long before we're old enough to consciously decide what we believe, we're absorbing messages about the world around us; from our families, our schools, our friendship groups, our workplaces, our communities, the media and society.

We learn ideas about success, money, gender, work, relationships, status, age and what a good life is supposed to look like. We also absorb ideas about people, who we trust, listen to and expectations of who we see in positions of authority. What makes somebody respectable, successful, difficult, ambitious or one of us.

Not all of those messages arrive as obvious lessons, often they're far more subtle than that, in the stories we hear, the people we see represented, the assumptions nobody questions and the history we're taught and sometimes the history we're not.

History gives us powerful examples of what can happen when ideas, assumptions and behaviours are repeated for long enough that they become embedded within a culture. Whose stories are told, which achievements are recognised, who has access to particular rooms, which voices carry authority and what experiences are treated as the default. That's why representation, education and hearing different experiences matters. Inclusion isn't proved by a statement, a policy or a social media post, it's experienced in everyday interactions. In whether we're genuinely curious about an experience that differs from our own, whether we listen to understand rather than immediately looking for a way to defend what we already believe, in who we invite into conversations and whose perspective we seek and whether we notice our assumptions and are willing to question where they came from.

None of us get all of that right all of the time, we do however need to be willing to notice that normal doesn't automatically mean right. I think that's where this becomes personal again because every one of us will have things we've inherited as normal that we've never consciously chosen. Perhaps yours have nothing to do with race or identity, maybe you've inherited the belief that success means working constantly, that talking about money is rude, asking for help shows weakness, that family comes before everything, regardless of the personal cost. That you shouldn't talk about your achievements because people might think you're showing off, you don't leave a secure career, you don't challenge certain people or that people like you don't do things like that.

Some of those beliefs may still serve you, others might not, but there's an enormous difference between continuing something because you've consciously chosen it and continuing it because you've never stopped to question it.

Changing culture, at home, in our workplace or in our environments doesn't always require a huge declaration, often it happens in much smaller daily actions. It's deciding not to laugh at the joke, asking the person who hasn't spoken what they think, having the conversation your family normally avoids, allowing somebody to disagree with you without needing to convince them you're right. Celebrating somebody else's success without comparing it to your own, admitting that something you once believed might have been wrong, listening to somebody's experience without trying to explain it away or questioning the assumption that has been sitting in the background for years.

Individually, those things can feel insignificant, collectively, they're how culture changes. They are also how culture was created in the first place, one interaction at a time. What are you helping to make normal? There's something about that question that I really like, because culture can feel enormous. We talk about national culture, workplace culture, social culture, organisational culture, things that can feel far bigger than any one of us and they are.

Culture is also happening around your dinner table tonight, it's happening in the conversation you have with a colleague tomorrow, i's happening in the way you talk about somebody when they're not in the room, it's happening in what your children, friends, employees, clients and communities see you celebrate, challenge, ignore and accept. It's even happening in the way you treat yourself.

Every day, we're reinforcing something, and every day, in very small ways, we have the opportunity to question it too.

History though isn't the only thing shaping what happens next, we are. Through the conversations we're willing to have, the assumptions we're prepared to question, the people we're willing to listen to, the behaviours we choose not to accept simply because they've always been accepted, and the things we consciously decide are worth carrying forward.

We don't just live within culture, we create it. Do instead of just asking what culture am I part of? Start asking yourself What am I helping to make normal?