5 Simple Steps to Building a Winning Corporate Culture
Friday, February 1 2008
If I asked your employees, "What's it like to work at your company? What kind of place is it?" their answers would largely describe your company culture. How would your employees answer? Would you like what you heard? If not, a leader's responsibility is to change it.
Some leadership teams attempt to create culture by acting as wordsmiths, spending untold hours carefully crafting vision, mission and values statements. That's unfortunate, because in the end culture is not created by words plastered on the wall or carried around on laminated cards, but rather culture is defined by actions on the ground.
It's what leaders do: what they inspect, what they reject and what they reward that ultimately shapes company culture.
t's not that words don't have a place in creating culture; they most certainly do. But a winning culture is defined by words so simple and basic a child can grasp them easily, and an executive can explain them quickly.
And, in a winning culture, a leader's words and actions are aligned. What leaders say accurately reflects the way things are. In a losing culture, words and actions are misaligned. "Happy talk' masks dysfunctional behavior.
A winning company culture is simple and emphasizes three areas: serving the customer, growing the business, and developing employees. A losing culture is confusing and complex, places customer needs behind those of the company, and emphasizes personal gain over team achievement.
Culture can be consciously created by company leadership, and should be. Below are five steps that will help you consciously create or redefine your company culture. Remember, complexity equals confusion. If your culture is easy to describe, it will be easy to create.
1. Define 3-4 guiding principles that define who you are as an organization. It's the job of senior leadership to define in simple terms what your organization is all about. One of my clients, a consulting group, had a culture marked by mistrust and destructive internal competition. New leadership came in and succinctly defined what the new culture would be and termed it something like this: We are one national practice; we consider our customers in everything we do; we grow our people; and we are committed to each other's success. Rather than worrying about printing these words everywhere, leadership set about making them a reality.