The Volunteer Premium

If we are serious about becoming a truly conscious company, we must pay attention to our culture. Every company has a culture, whether the company pays attention to it or not. We need to build and sustain a culture in a conscious way.

A great culture creates employee engagement and passion. It leads to greater innovation, creativity, collaboration, and productivity. Instead of people saying “Thank God It’s Friday,” they may say (or feel) “Thank God It’s Monday!” The workplace becomes a fun place of caring, meaning, and fulfillment. A strong culture becomes both an attractor and an immune system; it helps us bring in people who would be a great fit with the organization and dissuades others who would not.

A conscious culture is important because it creates a competitive advantage that is extremely difficult to replicate. Most strategies can be copied, but the culture of every organization is unique and cannot be copied. Peter Drucker famously said, “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” Strategy matters, but culture matters even more. A strong and positive culture results in a volunteer premium: the difference between someone doing just enough work not to get fired and a person who comes in passionate and inspired to do a great job. You can’t pay or coerce people to close that gap; you can only inspire and motivate them. Cultures that can create such motivated employees who care will have a huge impact on the performance of the business.

The purpose, brand, and culture have to work together to ensure the longterm, sustained success of the organization. The purpose has an impact on the external identity or brand and at the same time relates to the inner reality of the organization—its culture.

In this part, we will define and make the case for conscious cultures and discuss the attributes of such organizational cultures (see figure P3-1 for a summary of part 3). We will help you explore and understand where your culture stands today and how to evolve it to become more conscious.