Great campus culture is like walking into a kitchen with a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies in the oven. It's irresistible, right? 

Sadly, for many campuses, the culture isn't healthy.

Culture is imperceptible. You can't see it, but it defines so much.

A bad culture will consistently undermine a solid mission, vision, and strategy.

As Peter Drucker famously quoted, "culture eats strategy for breakfast."

Think about it:

• Culture is why you love spending money in some stores and won't step foot in others.
• It's why you love flying your airline and would pay more to avoid the other one.
• It's why some families have fun when they're together and why other families stopped doing holidays altogether.

So, the question becomes: how do you create an irresistible culture?

It can start with the easy and fun stuff, such as:

• A book study
• An offsite conference with your team
• An on-site webinar or workshop

I typically start new clients with a bit of a booster like the above. It should be motivating and a pretty easy way to get your people geared up and in the right mindset.

But...if you are simply checking the culture box, make sure you get a lunch out of the deal.

And...if you are serious about shifting the practices and habits on campus, you will want to keep reading.

What's your definition of culture?

I know. It's kind of hard to drill into subjectivity.

Capturing your organization's culture is essential because it allows you to reproduce it and scale it as you grow. If your culture is healthy, it will become one of your greatest performance advantages.

If you want an easy way to align the new batches of people coming into your system each year, having an objectively defined set of social expectations, tools, and language is one of the most effective ways to accomplish that.

If your system's culture is subjective, acclimatizing new team members can take years, or it might never actually happen.

You can half-life the process (typically 5-7 years) and double the buy-in by having your culture objectively defined. Having a healthy, exportable culture is a key to every Higher Performance campus.

What follows is a 5-step guide on how to accelerate a healthy campus culture that echoes an irresistible brand throughout your community.

Step 1: Identify and eliminate the toxins

Campus culture does not come out of a box inherently healthy because people aren't naturally healthy.

As a leader, one of your primary jobs is to discover the health of your team's culture and get to work on anything underperforming.

Side note: If you are curious about finding the right tool for this exploration, you can hit me up HERE to learn more about our Leadership Team 360 Diagnostic.

This tool can help you probe for the toxins that make your culture unhealthy.

Conflict, selfishness, personal agendas, or even contaminants like a lack of passion for the mission can be lethal across your campus.

You can't eliminate what you don't identify. Step one is to identify the things you want gone from your culture.

Step 2: Model the change you want to see

Here's a sobering reality for all of us who lead: your campus will only be as healthy as you are.

Expecting a campus to be healthy when the leader isn't is like expecting a musician to play beautiful music on the guitar without strings. It's simply not possible.

Any conversation about campus health starts in the mirror for a leader who asks, "what is it really like to be on the other side of me?"

The healthier you are as a leader, the healthier your campus will be.

If you want your campus to model excellent communication, you must do it first.

If you want your campus to model great team connection, you must do it well.

If you want your campus to embrace work-life-effectiveness… you get the picture, right?

If you are the leader and you are not in love with your culture, it's yours to improve. Own it.

If you are THE leader, culture starts with you.

Step 3: Start with WHO embodies your values

So how do you find your values? There are many words in the English language. You must choose just a few of them to define the consistent behaviors that you expect from yourself and your team.

Furthermore, how are you engaging in silly platitudes like "Value Excellence." Don't get me wrong, this stuff looks good on your banners and webpages but does very little to influence day-to-day behavior.

We tunnel deeply into campus values in all of our executive strategic work with a twist. Rather than start with what the team values, I start with who embodies the best of the campus.

Let me explain.

I go to the whiteboard and ask, "Who are your invisible heroes? Who best embodies the core beliefs of all the people who work across your campus?

Immediately, names begin bubbling to the surface. I write them all down.

Then I ask a simple question: "Why? What is about them that makes them the embodiment of your mission, vision, and strategy?"

I'll come back to those answers in Step 4.

But before we move on, I also created a second list.

Next, we made a list of people who, honestly, don't embody the campus mission, vision, and values.

We actually write these names down as well.

And then I ask the same question: "Why? What is it about that person that makes them the opposite of what we want to see?"

I know that's potentially dangerous. I also know that the people on the first list are quite pleased to know there is a list #2.

And you should be playing favorites to those on list #1.

This activity is SO clarifying, but I would advise having a 3rd party facilitate.

Fact: Figuring out WHO you value helps you discover what you value.

Step 4: Isolate the unique principles

Discovering why some people embody your mission, vision, and values and why others don't is always a breakthrough for your Senior Leadership Team. It helps you get to the values you most value. And those you don't.

When I ask the executive team WHO embodies the right WHAT, I typically hear:

• Because they serve so selflessly
• Because it's not about them
• Because they are so generous
• Because they are always considerate of other people
• Because they make s$%& happen
• Because they are all about the joint mission, vision, and strategy

What is shared in this exchange becomes the first clue as to the cultural values.

Similarly, when I asked the team why the people who didn't embody the mission, vision, and values didn't make it on the first list, the team typically drops things like:

• Because it's always about them
• Because they criticize but don't contribute
• Because they don't actually value those we serve
• Because they want to be served rather than serve
• Because they don't get s$%& done

Again, that always helps the team clarify what is most important to the work. 

Try it. On a sheet of paper, write the names of ten people who embody what your campus is all about and why. Do the same for people who AREN'T what your campus is all about and why.

Those engaging in this practice learn a ton about what is core to their system's foundational beliefs and principles.

Step 5: Create simple, scalable, and sustainable language

It's one thing to know what your values are as an organization. It's another to phrase them in a way that's both memorable and scalable.

Having 3-5 core values with short, unforgettable definitions makes the practice simple, scalable, and sustainable. 

Also, think of your values as both prescriptive and descriptive of your campus. In other words, you want your core values to be accurate enough that people say, "for sure, that's you," but aspirationally directed to keep you motivated to improve.

Having short, memorable phrases will help the values multiply throughout your entire system.

Capturing your organization's culture is essential because it allows you to scale and sustain it. If your culture is healthy, it will become your greatest performance advantage.