Last week I was talking with a client (we’ll call her Jane, for the purposes this blog) about how to grow her business.

One of the activities I asked Jane to do was to articulate the culture of her business. She looked a bit puzzled when I asked her this and suggested I provide a definition of “culture” for her to work with.

I shared with Jane an extract of an article I found in Public Administration Today (Issue 6: Jan-March 2006, p8):

Culture is the knowledge people use to generate and interpret social behaviour.

This definition refers to “culture” as all aspects of a way of life and includes the following:

People’s living arrangements (all aspects of their day-to-day life, including eating, sleeping, talking, interacting, working);

What people see when they look at something;

What they feel about what is going on;

What they believe.

Culture, therefore, refers to ways of thinking, feeling and believing, as well as the way people go about doing things – their actions, behaviours, activities.

Culture also refers to the customary ways of being, thinking and doing which are shared by groups of people.

Each of us thinks that 'our' way of doing things is, basically, right, good and correct. We tend to view other ways as wrong, bad and incorrect (instead of just different).

When two people are in the same place, but operating from different ways of seeing, thinking, believing, etc, it is sometimes difficult for them to find working together easy.

Cultural differences create problems of understanding: problems about to decide what to do and problems about how to go about doing our work.

Working out problems requires both parties to work together to find ways of doing things that suit them both. Where one culture tries to impose their way of doing things, the problems remain.

While this article was written about “Indigenous Australia – Cultural Awareness” and is a broader definition of culture than what we look for in business, I believe if more owner/managers were culturally aware of their actions, behaviours and activities, they could grow their business without reservations.