One of the challenges of management and formal organization is keeping the people of the organization together, cooperating and moving them towards realization of the set goals. In the past, the administrators and managers used to prefer more of coercive measures to positive incentives for better performance through hard pushed and forced cooperation, collaboration, coordination and so on. Will to cooperate, collaborate and coordinate spontaneously comes from non-coerced, but positively motivated and inspired minds. Such positivity of willing minds is the outcome of tonic feelings arising out of motivating and conducive organizational environment by the administration and management of any organization. Many a present day administrator and manager rely more on financial incentives over other conducive organization measures to enhance the willingness and positivity of people in the organization.

One of the measures to conducive organizational environment is the intended organizational culture consisting of its beliefs, values, norms, worldviews, and traditions and so on. Every organization has its own unique culture to create bond among its people, make them into cohesive organization and enable management coordinate the activities of organization with ease and spontaneity. Super-ordinate universal values like inclusiveness, fair to all, equality of opportunity, honesty and integrity, human dignity, sustainability, transparency, necessary freedom, and similar others indoctrinated and commonly shared by the people of the organization go a long way enabling administration and management to face the challenges of keeping the organizational people together, cooperating and moving them to realize the organizational goal. Sense and force of culture while giving a unique identity to the organization people seem to be so indomitable that no one can ignore them.

Given the might of beliefs, value, norms and so on of culture, one has to go with these powerful drivers of the organization. It is said that when all the people of Tokyo come and settle in Dhaka and all of Dhaka to Tokyo, with some passage of time Tokyo will transform into Dhaka and Dhaka into Tokyo. Similarly when all the people from any coercive institution are brought to a non-coercive one, the fate and future of both organizations will be unlike their earlier identity and character. The coercive one will be non-coercive and the non-coercive will turn into coercive. Then the vision and mission of each of them will meet with failure. The vision, mission and mandate of each organization are not alike. Difference in them calls for use of different approaches, methods, policies and strategies to move through the right course.

Imams and their followers in the mosques, priests and their followers in the churches, temples and pagodas and also rabbis and their followers in the synagogues are all driven by the beliefs, values and rituals in relation to their respective faiths. Like them, other organizational people are inspired and guided by their visions, missions, beliefs and values, worldviews and so on. While every religious institution inculcates a set of values by its sacred scripture, other social, commercial and managerial organizations are driven by the visions, missions and values stated in their formal documents under the relevant laws. But these are internalized by the leaders and followers of each organization and remain hidden in their minds. These are like the invisible contact tenses helping the people to see through them and move on the right course.

So, the cultural contact lenses of organizations are critically important for their leaders and followers to be successful in the light of their visions, missions, values and mandates. The cultural contact lenses of creative and innovative organizations mandated to empower the disempowered and disadvantaged must be different from those with profit motives and personalized gains. People with the mandate of empowering the disempowered muust internalize the relevant necessary values least they miserably fail in their missionary tasks. So, both the leaders and followers as a matter of their prime duty should find out those beliefs, values and norms; understand them very clearly to retain them as cultural contact lenses; and perform their missionary tasks flawlessly.

In management, the students are taught that coordination is the essence of management. So, all the managerial tasks have to be so coordinated that any confusion, duplication, wastage, etc. can be avoided for the benefits of all the stakeholders of the organization. The managerial tasks of coordination which is essentially synchronization of their tasks are invisibly and spontaneously aided by the cultural contact tenses of the organization. So when both the leaders and followers of any organization have the homogenous cultural contact lenses, then the organizational tasks proceed in rhythms without any hard push and toxic stress of all involved. So, the people in the organization both in their roles of leaders and followers should first undergo necessary cultural transformation. This transformation inculcates necessary organizational beliefs, values and norms in people's minds for having the managerial coordination easy and smooth. It is said that believing is seeing, not seeing is believing. So, it is the organizational culture that has to come first to create a win-win situation in the organization.

The author is a columnist and vice-chairman of CDIP.