Your organizational culture can be described as how you habitually run things around the place. If your culture is one of excellence, it will be reflected in the spirit in which work is executed and the manner in which people treat each other. If there is any level of toxicity, that will be reflected in like manner, too! A culture of excellence brings life to your organization. Toxicity brings death. That’s why you need vultures.

Vultures and carrion eaters serve the world by getting rid of dead flesh. If not for them, disease would spread far more rapidly than it does now. Carrion eaters can dispose of rotting flesh so well that you would have thought the carcasses had been burned! Microbe levels after carrion eaters have finished with their meal are that low.

Use that fact to serve your organization well, in at least two ways. First, any vultures circling above? That’s an indicator of dead flesh or flesh that is about to die. Have customer complaints increased? Have they stagnated for the last six months? Have workplace harassment cases been going down, have they been increasing, or have they remained flat? Has the quality of people applying to join your organization gone up, or are you having difficulty getting new hires? Do your people eagerly step up to leadership positions or do they say they are content to remain where they are? Secondly, do not be afraid to let the vultures do their work! You are not going to recover from wounds or a disease if your surgeon doesn’t execute proper debridement! In fact, one of the ways wounds used to be cleaned up was by using maggots. Maggots eat up dead, gangrenous tissue but won’t touch those still living. Clean up your act where you need to, improve in that area and move on!

Seen any vultures overhead recently? Use them!