“A culture is not a set of beliefs, it’s a set of actions.”

Tim Ferriss podcasts always deliver a valuable nugget of golden insight and actionable guidance and the interview with Ben Horowitz was no exception.

My key takeaways from the interesting conversation were these two points.

Training and development of employees and team members is vital to the success of the team, organisation and the manager. As no matter how smart your employees are they need training in the job that you as manager want them to do. If as a manager you do not train your people, then you are a bad manager. As how can your employees read your mind to find out what you want (about minute 20 of the podcast).

Then at around minute 51 of the podcast Ben talked about culture. The thought-provoking quote from Ben was –

“A culture is not a set of beliefs, it’s a set of actions.”

I took this to mean that an organisation’s culture is what they do, not the words and phrases they put on their website or sales material. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to the actions of an organisation rather than just their words.

Organisational culture is something I have started to think about more often and will be a theme that a number of my future articles will explore.