Culture is King

CULTURE IS KING

 

At a leadership program, one of the participants shared “At our company, one of our top priorities is to work on our culture. We talk about it all the time. Last year, our company grew 600%. Our focus on culture-building worked splendidly”. Impressive.

 

One of the most sustainable competitive advantages will be developing a culture of leadership. Competitors can copy the products, can copy the services, copy the branding but they can never copy the culture. And culture is the very thing that makes an organization special. An organization’s culture is what sets – and then drives the standards of behavior. The culture tells people what’s acceptable and important. Culture lets people know what organization values are. An organization culture states its philosophy, its mythology, it religion. Culture is King.

 

The five best ways to build culture are as follows:

 

Rituals: I like the cult in the culture. The best companies, like Microsoft, Google, Southwest Airlines, Apple and Wal-Mart have something in common with Cults. They have unique rituals like Ship room discussions, 7 am team huddles or Friday afternoon pizza parties to promote team bonding. Rituals shape culture and keep it special.

 

Celebration: John Abele, founder of the multi-billion dollar Boston Scientific, once told me over dinner that “you get what you celebrate”. Powerful idea. When you see someone living the values your culture stands for, make a public hero. Behavior that gets rewarded is behavior that gets repeated. Catch people doing good.

 

Conversation: Your people become what the leaders talk about; to get your vision and values into your people’s hearts, you need to be talking about that stuff constantly – at employee gatherings, at your weekly meetings, during your daily huddles and at the water cooler. You need to evangelize what you stand for constantly. In his excellent book Winning, Jack Welch said that he spent so much time evangelizing GE’s mission that he could call his people at three in the morning and – half asleep – they could re-state it (He never did)

 

Training: A mission-critical focus to build culture is employee development. If you agree that your organization’s number-one resource is your people, then it only makes sense to invest significantly in developing your number-one resource. Hold seminars and have leadership workshops to instill the values you seek to nurture and build a leadership culture into their hearts and minds. When your people improve, your company will improve.

 

Storytelling: Great companies have cultures where great stories are told from generation to generation. The story about how the company was founded in a basement or the story about how a teammate went the extra mile or the story about how the organization fought back to victory from the brink of disaster. Story telling cements a company’s most closely cherished ideals into the hearts of its people.

 

People want to go work each day and feel they are a part of a community. One of the deepest psychological needs of a human being is the need for belonging. We also want to work for an organization that values us, that promotes our personal growth and that makes us feel that we are contributing to a dream. Get these things right by creating a Culture of Leadership and you’ll keep your stars and attract others.

 

“One of the most sustainable competitive advantages will be developing a culture of leadership”

 

(these are not my thoughts J and are copied from Robin’s book)

 

(Note: Previous posts are available here: http://weeksthought.blogspot.com/)