I have seen the consequences of attempting to shortcut this natural process of growth often in the business world, where executives attempt to “buy” a new culture of improved productivity, quality, morale, and customer service with strong speeches, smile training, and external interventions, or through mergers, acquisitions, and friendly or unfriendly takeovers. But they ignore the low-trust climate produced by such manipulations. When these methods don’t work, they look for other Personality Ethic techniques that will—all the time ignoring and violating the natural principles and processes on which a high-trust culture is based.

And leadership is even more lacking in our personal lives. We’re into managing with efficiency, setting and achieving goals before we have even clarified our values.

To paraphrase Peter Drucker, effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems.

In most cases, the culprit is good people behaving badly, not bad people behaving badly. If it's the latter, no cultural shift is going to help, by the way. Toxic or ineffective people simply need to be extracted, in part because of the cultural damage they will do. Keeping them around is an implicit endorsement of their behavior. But if you've got a team of good people and you know what kind of culture they need to deliver your version of excellence, now the fun starts: how exactly are you going to build it?

In most cases, the culprit is good people behaving badly, not bad people behaving badly. If it's the latter, no cultural shift is going to help, by the way. Toxic or ineffective people simply need to be extracted, in part because of the cultural damage they will do. Keeping them around is an implicit endorsement of their behavior. But if you've got a team of good people and you know what kind of culture they need to deliver your version of excellence, now the fun starts: how exactly are you going to build it?