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Anyone who has heard me speak to an audience knows that I define culture as the environment in which we live and work, including beliefs, behavioral rules, traditions, and rituals. Personality is a set of behaviors that hangs together and creates a tendency within our full behavioral repertoire. In short, personality is a tendency to behave in a certain way.
We know this intuitively because if you take someone who is LOUD and BOISTEROUS and ALWAYS TALKING AT THE OF OF THEIR LUNGS and you walk them into a church, a museum, or a bank, what are they likely to do? Most people will go quiet. Have you changed their personality? No, you haven’t — you’ve changed their environment. When you change peoples’ environments, behavior follows. Why?
Human behavior does not occur in a vacuum. Behavior occurs in a context, meaning in relationship to circumstances, environment, and culture. When you change the context of human behavior, behavior follows. Why is this important in business? The context in which we live and work is called corporate culture. The context in which our employees and coworkers live and work is also corporate culture. This means that if we have employees and/or coworkers who are goal oriented, motivated by teams, and driven by performance, it’s because their corporate culture demands it. Conversely, this also means that if our employees and/or coworkers don’t care about goals, don’t care about teams, don’t care about performance, it’s because their culture allows it. Don’t allow unacceptable behaviors to exist in your place of work because of personality — culture trumps personality.
When you change the context in which your employees and coworkers work, when we change the culture of our organizations, behavior follows. When we change culture, behavior follows. Culture trumps personality.
Does this work for everyone? According to clinical data, 10% of people in the United States have a diagnosable personality disorder. People with personality disorders have many issues, one of them being that they are too busy trying to negotiate internal stimuli to understand or attend to external stimuli. This means that they are much less likely to attend or be aware of changes in the environment that other people would notice and therefore change their behavior. So, using the same example from above, if you take someone with a personality disorder who is loud, boisterous, and always talking at the top of their lungs, and you walk them into a church, a museum, or a bank, they will be the person who continues to speak loudly. They will be unaware or indifferent to the change in context, draw unnecessary attention to themselves and/or their group, and quite possibly be thrown out.
In business, rather than bring in clinical terms such as personality disorders, I prefer to speak about people as having a particular personality style. Some people have personality styles that are very aware to context and are responsive to changes in environment or context. Other people have personality styles that are far for more rigid, less adaptive, and less aware of changes in environment or context. I would suggest these are precisely the types of people you don’t want in your organization. They tend to create a culture that is toxic and difficult to change. When I speak about culture trumping personality, I’m really speaking of the majority of people in our population who function within healthy and normal limits. When you create a strong culture in your organization, these are precisely the types of people that come into your organization, and more importantly: they stay.