Want To Build A Great Company Culture?
Culture eats strategy for breakfast, is a famous saying from Peter Drucker. No matter how great your products and services are, you are doomed without employees believing in and understanding the culture you are establishing. Companies often do a terrible job defining their culture with slides, posters, and complicated communications. One hundred-page PowerPoint decks aren’t the way to communicate values.
Culture resides in witness behavior, not well-scripted words on a motivational sign.
Culture isn’t what you say it is, but what your employees observe about what you do. A company may have a no jerks rule if they don’t fire the top sales guy who brings in the most revenue when he is obnoxious to others, then the message communicated is – we don’t mean what we say.
It is that simple.
If you have posters that your culture respects differences and diversity, but all the leaders are white men – perhaps your culture isn’t living up to your words. Employees have learned an easy lesson – watch behavior, not words.
When you hear the BS “we are a family“, yet they treat people like dirt – employees get the message.
Pick Three Values for a Great Company Culture
It isn’t easy to have more than three core values or pillars for a culture, but never more than five.
The founder or leadership team may agree on them – but if they aren’t enforced, practiced, and witnessed by employees, the culture that becomes established is that you don’t honor what you say.
If one of your three value pillars is the importance of taking measured risks to help improve, then the moment someone gets publicly chewed out for trying something different – that pillar slowly crumbles. However, if you use the failure as an example of a measured risk that you want to celebrate and encourage, employees react differently.
What goes on in an employee’s mind is – they must mean it and it is okay to experiment and try new stuff.
With just three to five pillars and an example or two of the behavior desired, you can clearly explain what you stand for and what type of company you are building. Specific examples help because they make the words more real and understandable.
Like the example of the no jerks rule – if you tell people that any jerk will be fired if they are consistently obnoxious to others, helps the team get what you mean. Define what it means to be a jerk – to belittle or demean others publically.
Brownie Culture – It’s A Wrap!
When my wife and I owned our wholesale bakery business, Rachel’s Brownies, one of the cultural pillars of our business was adherence to perfection. We believed in excellence and a dedication to perfection. We wanted every brownie to be an amazing experience and consistency was a critical aspect of our culture.
When our employees watched my wife rewrap the hundreds of brownies I wrapped, they got the point.
I was an okay brownie wrapper- but not to my wife’s standard of excellence. And her name was on each brownie. We lived our pillars – and everyone got the message by seeing me, as President of the business being corrected for not being able to do what we asked everyone else to do. That’s how we built our culture – by demonstrating our values.
Thinking About Culture
As a growing business, how the founders and leadership team behave and adhere to your stated pillars means that your more senior leaders will do the same. If founders or leadership ignores what they have put on the posters in the breakroom – forget building a culture based on those ideals.
Employees are intelligent and observant. When you claim you treat everyone like family – but you blow up at someone who made a mistake, you quickly lose trust.
Want to build a great culture. Identify three to five core values that matter to you. Give specific examples of what that means. Then live those values every day.
I agree with Professor Drucker that culture eats strategy for breakfast.
And a lousy culture is the quickest path to failure, uninspired employees, and indigestion.
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
Photo by Pablo Merchán Montes on Unsplash
