After reading Steve Denning’s article at Forbes.com “Why Are There No Successful Innovation Initiatives?” I reflected on the “culture” programs that my team promotes in my own workplace, leading me to realize how painfully arbitrary and artificial they are.

Denning’s point is this: if you are forced to create an initiative to promote something such as “innovative thinking”, then you aren’t operating in an innovative culture to begin with (and most likely won’t deftly handle the implementation and upkeep of innovative ideas/programs anyhow).

The result of introducing initiatives into cultures which do not inherently support them according to Denning:

“…the culture will sooner or later crush the initiative—usually sooner. So you can have temporary “successes” as “initiatives” with a lot of flag waving and hoopla ceremonies and celebrations of victories, but they don’t last”

Innovation should be at the heart of every business, not treated as a garnish on an entre.

The reality: a pig is a pig, no matter how much lipstick you smear on it.

The same can be said for Employee Recognition programs: if you are forced to have an employee recognition initiative, your workplace is probably not one where your employees truly feel appreciated for their hard work and effort – program, or not. This is not due to the lack of a program, but rather a lack of culture which creates a need for the program.

So who do you think is better off? A workplace with no formal Employee Recognition program where the leaders invest time and energy into genuinely making their employees feel appreciated; or a workplace where “leaders” are forced to search for reasons to recognize employees to fulfill an obligation to an arbitrary recognition program?

If asked, I think most business leaders would agree with the former, so then why do so many organizations subscribe to the latter?

Culture plays such a key part of our workplaces that Gary Vaynerchuk of Vaynermedia and WineLibrary.com (Vaynerchuk was named the #3 top social media influencer of 2011 by Forbes Magazine) predicts that companies will start to promote “Chief Culture Officers” responsible for leading all aspects of culture from customer service to employee relations.

While that all sounds great, the problem with culture stems from the fact that it is such a nebulous concept. How do you build culture? Where do you start? How do you know when you’ve achieved it? How do you maintain it? With “culture” not being listed on most Profit & Loss or ROI reports, many companies treat it with the type of dismissal the rest of us reserve for bigfoot and el chupacabra.

The hurdle in my workplace has to do with context: most people have never known anything other than the culture we’ve always had. It’s like living your entire life believing that the world is flat and not believing someone telling you otherwise; it just doesn’t register.

Amongst culture building difficulties ranks the fact that it can often takes years to build it, yet only seconds to destroy. According to Frederick Palensky, Executive Vice President of Research and Development and Chief Technology Officer of 3M:

“That’s the thing about cultures — they’re built up a brick at a time, a point at a time, over decades. You need consistency; you need persistence; and you need gentle, behind-the-scenes encouragement in addition to top-down support. And you can lose it very quickly.”

So how do we overcome these challenges and affect real change?

My answer is: with passion, persistence and perspective – one brick at a time.

Q. How do you build culture in your workplace?