Building a sustainability-focused corporate culture

As a society, we love to talk. May our conversations be plentiful, but I wish we would also work a little. Whoever I talk to, the complaint is always the same. It is not just in family settings; in workplaces, we do nothing but deal with each other and wear each other down. When relationships are focused on creating baseless social environments and wasting time rather than being focused on work and production, problems grow like a snowball.

We have never been able to become individuals. Because we cannot complete the mental, spiritual, and emotional processes required for individual development and form a consistent whole within ourselves, we also experience problems in the way we relate to our environment. People try to cover up their own shortcomings by exerting power and pressure over others. This is actually the root cause of mobbing, which is frequently mentioned. Instead of focusing on work and production, people tend to seek ego satisfaction through others.

This ego conflict, stemming from a sense of incompleteness, can manifest its effects from the smallest-scale relationships to all relationships across society. Fights in small groups of friends, domestic violence, mobbing in workplaces, and conflicts at the societal level mostly stem from the individual's own internal sense of incompleteness.

This is often the underlying reason why marriages are not sustainable. Even while signing the papers to spend a whole life together, spouses start a power struggle that will never end by entering a competition to step on each other's feet, accompanied by the cheers of the participants. Later, this war permeates everything from the simplest practices of their lives to their most serious relationships. They can render the institution of family dysfunctional with a host of trivial disagreements, starting with the question of who will prepare breakfast, extending to which program to watch on television, which car model to buy, and whose family to visit first during holidays.

When the human material is the same, similar conflicts occur in workplaces. Who looked at whom, who said what, who wore what, who behaved how, who worked less, who worked more, who is close to whom, etc.—a whole lot of gossip. Instead of setting institutional goals and moving the institution forward, everyone tries to create their own sphere of power within their own capacity. When this happens, power struggles extending from the simplest human relations to the most serious institutional relations, and pressures amounting to mobbing, occur.

When individuals' efforts for personal satisfaction take precedence, institutional benefits, institutional goals, etc., are pushed to the background. People prefer the ease of making others unable to work rather than working and putting in effort to protect their current positions or to move to a higher position. The bill for this usually falls on those who work and those who put in the effort. Our ancestors summarized this beautifully with the saying, “the fruit-bearing tree is stoned.”

Institutional functioning and the formation of corporate culture are, of course, also related to the level of development at the societal level. It is very important for people in society to go through the necessary educational processes, to mature, not to have concerns about making a living, and to feel safe. These types of problems do not occur in welfare societies. The system works like clockwork. There is a smile on the faces of people on the streets and avenues. There is no anxiety about the future, no security problem, no financial hardship. For this reason, everyone lives happily where they are. No one attacks the living space of other people to guarantee their own future. No one tries to take out the resentment of their own shortcomings on someone else. Most importantly, everyone values each other as human beings. No one assigns themselves a higher value than another.

However, we have not yet become a welfare society. People have anxiety about the future. For this reason, when they reach a position, they put their own individual goals ahead of institutional goals. Therefore, instead of institutional continuity, there is a discontinuous, fragmented operation that varies according to individuals. For this reason, institutional goals cannot be set, and a vision cannot be created. Institutional development in accordance with the principle of sustainability is therefore not possible. These institution-based blockages are also reflected in society as a whole. Consequently, we cannot develop, and we cannot make progress.

However, if individuals could prioritize institutional benefit over their own interests, separate institutional goals from their personal ambitions, and overcome their personal desires to focus on institutional success, they would be able to taste a very different kind of pleasure. Institutional success is the secret to success at the personal level. It is important at this point to direct personal benefit to institutional functioning, not institutional functioning to personal benefit.

Creating a corporate culture is very important to give a vision to institutions. The basic principle of corporate culture is not that personal identity determines institutional identity, but that institutional identity determines the person's identity. In other words, the person should belong to the institution, not the institution to the person. After all, people are temporary, while institutions are permanent. Each institution employee can only transfer value to the institution if they prove their own success by ensuring institutional success. Only if institutional value is created can the people within the institution gain value.

For this, institution leaders need to build teams focused on institutional benefit. The leader is a role model in every respect. Because of the leader's presence, all members of the institution should be able to feel safe. Leadership is a process that works and happens from the bottom up, not from the top down. From the lowest to the highest in the institutional hierarchy, all members of the institution should feel that they are valued because of their position. The leader should be able to empathize with each of the institution's members and accept that each one is an important value for the institution.

Cliques pose a serious obstacle in the process of forming a corporate culture. Institution members often form cliques either to create a safer space for themselves or to establish power over each other and strengthen their own spheres of power. The war between cliques is quite harmful to institutional functioning. The institution leader should be aware of cliques and prevent the formation of a clique culture. To prevent the formation of cliques, every person in the institution needs to feel that they are valued, safe, and that their rights are protected. Making them feel this is the duty of the institution leader. But first, the leader must be a leader in the true sense.

Leadership is not managing, but coordinating. It is the leader's duty to direct all people working in the institution to production in line with institutional goals and to ensure that every institution employee takes an active part in the production process. For this, the institution's leader must be able to establish a relationship at an equal distance with every individual in the institution and not fall into cliques. Most importantly, it is important that the institution leader does not assign themselves a value above the institution, sees themselves as having equal value with all employees of the institution, and focuses on the institution's interests and goals together with all employees. This is also present in today's management approach. Participatory management style, democratic understanding, and a corporate perspective focused on human values.

With the hope of seeing days when no one is unhappy because of someone else, where everyone treats each other humanely, and where developing together and progressing together are targeted.