March 12, 2008
CSD: Five Steps to Build a Winning Corporate Culture
By Gary Bradt
Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of a current article from Convenience Store Decisions magazine presented here for discussion. Gary Bradt is the author of The Ring In the Rubble: Dig Through Change and Find Your Next Golden Opportunity.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1) Define three
or four 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.
2) Use the principles to guide every business discussion and
decision going forward. Words are meaningless unless they spur new behavior.
Once you have defined your guiding principles, use them to guide all of your
business discussions and decisions.
3) Build the principles into all your people
performance and management systems. There has to be consistency between what
you say and what you do, and alignment between your words and your actions.
Also, begin screening for and hiring people who share your values and who naturally
adhere to the principles. And, for existing employees, create processes to
indoctrinate and immerse them in the new ways of thinking and behaving.
4)
Create a leadership development experience that reinforces the behaviors and
values consistent with the principles, and insist all senior leaders attend.
Once again, words alone are not enough to drive lasting behavior change. You
have to constantly reinforce your words with action. One way to do this is
to create an experience based leadership development program that reinforces
the values and behaviors consistent with the guiding principles.
5) Expect
resistance, but stay the course with passion and patience. Changing culture
means changing people, and that takes time.
If I have made creating a winning
culture sound simple, that’s because it is. Don’t muck it up by making it more
complex than it needs to be.
Discussion Question: Do you agree with the premise that creating a winning culture is simple? Do you think most company leaders are able to define what their organization is all about without outside help?
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With all due respect I’m forced to disagree.
The five steps Bradt outlines contain some unsupportable assumptions. The most critical mistake here is assuming that culture is the product of management design rather than the product of human interaction. Culture is the end result of linked social actions of everyone involved in a common enterprise whether that’s a village or a corporation.
Of course management can influence culture. In fact, to a degree it can even coerce superficial acceptance of a culture. But, at the end of the day the dominant culture may still be the product of informal employee interactions.
Henry Ford (the first) had definite ideas about corporate culture and what amounted to an army of goons whose principle job was to enforce those ideas. Ford paid factory workers $5 a day and then went around trying to control how and where they spent it. He also didn’t believe in unions, communists, etc., etc. The bottom line? The “Ford culture” was supplanted by the trade union movement; workers spent their money the way they wanted to; and Ford’s antisemitic vision of Utopia is a bizarre footnote in the history of commerce.
Designing and controlling culture is like a lot of things in life. If it was so easy everybody–or at least every company–would do it.
Many consultants in Singapore use the Acronym, NATO to describe the undesirable organisational behaviour of ‘No Action-Talk Only’. NATO harms any kind of corporate mission or initiatives.
Unfortunately words are the only way that we can convey and clarify meaning and mental models. Without a mental models expressed in words, it’s hard to interpret the intent of actions. Constant stream of stories without supporting and aligned actions is of course even more meaningless and quickly become irrelevance.
Creating a driving corporate vision is somewhat like Branding. There are three essential components:
1. The story, the claims in words and images.
2. The feeling, emotion, passion that we want the story to conjure.
3. The actual experience that is felt through coming directly or indirectly from all related physical, mental transactions and sensory experiences created overtly or incidentally
Brand or vision audit must necessarily assess perceptual and cognitive consistency in each of these components.
Wow! It appears that Mr. Brandt’s opinions have really stirred up a hornets nest with our panel.
Culture is such a difficult attribute to put a process around. I think that management or those who devise the strategy for a cultural change,can only set the conditions to be as right as possible, maybe even seeding the medium with initial thoughts, but they cannot control the outcome, at least not in a democratic society.
Change and how to affect it, is extremely interesting to me. During my Masters studies, I found John P. Kotter and his philosophy about change and how it happens, whether it is behavioral, or something as large as a cultural shift. Let me share his eight phases: Establish a Sense of Urgency, Form a Powerful Guiding Coalition, Create a Vision, Communicate that Vision, Empower Others to Act on the Vision, Plan for and Create Short-term Wins, Consolidate Improvements and Keep the Momentum for Change Moving, and finally, Institutionalize the New Approach.
Looking at these phases again, only 1, 2 and 8 are run by management. The rest are handled by those with the passion for change.
I like the way Max Goldberg put it above: a business is a story. Culture flows in large part from the telling of stories, and businesses are no different. There are formal ways to tell the story; a mission statement is one, but press releases and company communications also send signals to everyone about what is important to the company. Informal ways to tell the story: what earns an employee accolades and what actions are held up as great examples at meetings; what questions does management ask when projects are presented, for example.
Here’s a great corporate culture building moment: when I was working for American Lawyer Media, our sister company Court TV was televising the O.J. trial. The cameras accidentally caught the side of the head of an alternate juror; barely noticeable but in violation of the network’s deal with the judge. The producer immediately informed Judge Ito and the cameras were thrown out of the courtroom. Imagine what that cost Court TV! How did the CEO react? He told the entire company that the producer upheld the company’s highest standards for ethics, declared that each year we’d commemorate that day with a company-wide day of discussion and seminars on ethics, and award a $5,000 Ethics award to an employee who acted consistently with those high standards when faced with a choice during the year. The producer was the first (instant) winner.
That’s a pretty dramatic example, but there are opportunities large and small in any organization to have those moments when staff looks to management to see just what kind of company they want to be.
Management may be able to lead employees to culture, but they can’t make ’em drink it in. Command and control has no place when it comes to setting the tone and ethos for an organization.
True leadership by example, on the other hand, can influence how an organization functions. I believe this emanates less from the vision statement and core values posted on the wall in the break room, and more from the everyday business and service practices that are enabled by the organization.
In other words, a culture of competency is tantamount to a culture of decency. When we enable employees to succeed at their individual missions, they are better able to appreciate how their tasks and initiatives roll into the larger corporate objectives and ultimately to corporate social responsibility.
Everybody says they want to enhance stakeholder value, put the customer first, pursue maximum quality, empower individuals and be responsible citizens of the community and the world. Most people probably believe in these values. But winning organizations make these values attainable by equipping every associate to succeed. My motto: lead culture with practices; attitude will follow.
It is not a simple process. It is a combination of philosophies, leadership, and an initial–and at times traumatic–forging of the two.
Without the leadership it is impossible to create a winning culture.
Examples are found in the military. With training and core principles all being equal, it is the units (at any level and size) with the strongest leadership that dramatically stand out from the rest.
All of the points above have merit. But I’d posit that the main challenge retailers face is resistance to change, period. Too many retail companies are internally-focused, unwilling to look outside themselves to see opportunities and act on them. They don’t network enough, or do enough competitive shopping. At a recent Retail IT Network meeting, CIOs identified a “precipice issue,” noting the game-changing effects of electronic commerce and changing demographics that can make many retailers irrelevant. We need an industry-wide dialogue on the need for a better response to the customer, and other key issues that are crying out for attention.
I agree that creating a winning culture is simple when starting a new company. However, changing an unsatisfactory culture to a winning model is much, much tougher. Regarding the system described here today, much of it is a rehash of other systems dating back decades. And point #5., involving changing people, is highly questionable. Just ask any wife about their husbands–and how easy it is to change people. Good luck with that.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read an article where the author was so out of touch. I have to totally disagree with the three areas of emphasis. In my opinion, they should be empowerment, value to the organization, and respect. Find me any company that places these traits at the top of their corporate value list and I’m sure you will find a strong and “winning” culture.
I find it also interesting that there is no mention of a company’s actual product or service or its position in the market place. At the end of the day, employees that truly believe in the quality and strength of the products they create will naturally feel better about both themselves and the company they work for. After all, everyone feels good about being on a winning team.
This is an incredibly critical topic and I am not surprised by the outpouring of opinions. Culture building is never easy, although the process the author describes is certainly straight-forward. The visioning process is necessary, in that it forces leaders to pause long enough to articulate the company story and their own stories; a process which uncovers core values that eventually turn into vision/mission statements and the rest. Until the leaders go through this process, many stumble through their interactions with each other and subordinates never realizing the impact their actions have on the culture.
The visioning process must involve all leadership levels and as many key front line employees as possible so everyone feels a part of the process. Understanding the story of the company, the values represented by that story, and how each employee’s actions impact the story are all critical elements. Once complete, the success of the process long term depends on how leaders’ behaviors do or do not link to the vision/mission, and how people who violate the values are handled.
Finally, the visioning process is never truly finished, as our retail world is ever-changing and companies must constantly evaluate how their story fits in with the changing individual customer and employee stories.
It’s a hard process, but energizing and exciting!
I’m really struggling with what’s being written by my fellow contributors. Organizations, by definition, are hierarchical. The organization does respond directly to cues received from the top of the organization, for better or for worse. Leadership counts, for better or for worse, and the quality and character of the leadership the organization receives will dictate directly the values of the organization and the culture of the organization, not to mention the very success of the organization.
Changing an existing culture is anything but easy. The advice provided here is very standard. Having led culture change and participated in culture change, my experience has been that complex or simple, the process is incredibly hard. While there are success stories, I believe they are well-outnumbered by failures.
That does not mean that companies should give up and not try. Rather, they should acknowledge that the process takes place over a long time period, will face many setbacks, and ultimately depends on a wide-range of factors.
If you can accept a 5 – 10 year period of change that will require constant work, re-work, and uncertainty as to whether the benefits you want will be the rewards you get, go for it.
I don’t believe that creating a culture is simple. The steps you take to develop these principles are simple but the execution of this culture is quite rigorous. Many have trouble and need help in “walking the talk.”
Most company leaders could define what their organization is all about without outside help, except an outsider’s view sees things you don’t. Most look at the “lack of” what they want to be instead of an appreciative assessment of what they have that is unique. The advantage of outside help is developing principles is the easy part, you could just use the “Golden Rule” but developing leadership policies, processes and actions that follow your principle is the hard part.
I am currently a leader working in a health care organization, and we are on the 4th year of a cultural “journey.”
I come from a different setting, whose leaders inspired all to live by the values that the company represented, and my current company has a leader who truly believes in the cultural changes that we can make as an organization.
However, in the core of any organization trying to change its culture, leaders need to be willing to address those employees that will not embrace the values that the company is trying to convey. As I said, I have worked with companies with a strong established culture, and with a company that is trying to build one. It seems to me that the biggest challenge that we face is those that continue to hold out and refuse to accept the impending changes of the organization.
Pablum for the masses. First off, the author uses terms like “winning” and “losing” to describe cultures. Unfortunately, cultures don’t compete–so they can’t “win” or “lose.” Secondly, if the terms are to be accepted–we need to define what “winning” is and what “losing” is–the author serves up HIS vision, but who is to say that is universal? Thirdly, the author wants to denigrate the signs, slogans, and wall charts–and then creates that which he criticizes.
Is creating a culture hard? Not at all. It will happen organically and will be a reflection of all the things mentioned in the article. Is creating a “winning” culture hard? Much more so than this would have you believe (and the author’s suggestion of hiring those that share the same values is the short route to failure if the business requires innovation, creativity, different perspectives, etc–anything outside adhering to a moral, ethical, legal code).
This is “Cosmo” quiz level science or insights.
Mission and vision statements are usually idealistic, not entirely applicable, and often outdated before they get nailed into the round hole in the wall with a square peg.
1. Your customer doesn’t care about your mission statement. They care only about what THEY need, and what YOU do.
2. To grow your business, the culture in your company needs to constantly adapt to the culture you are serving. Remember, business is a moving target and changes occur every day.
3. Your employees might patronize your mission statement over the water cooler but what they really need is the right training, direction, and motivation to be successful and to feel reasonably secure in their jobs.
It really is as obvious as serve the customer, grow the business, and develop your employees. Anything more than that is usually convoluted and not very effective beyond the initial ribbon cutting.
A business is a story. The story begins with why the company was created. Then what it does and for whom. Next come the company values and finally its goals. In successful companies everyone knows the core story and is working towards its goals.
Corporate culture can determine whether or not a company reaches its goals. It is not a simple proposition. It takes time and dedication from management and employees to agree to work together towards common goals.
Every business has a culture, good or bad. They in essence create themselves. I do not agree that management is irrelevant in this process. They control the culture by the type of people they hire.
A person who only cares what the CEO feels and asks forgiveness of his supervisor if he goes out of bounds puts everyone in the organization on guard. An owner who micro-manages everyone to the last detail or capriciously overrules their decisions creates a climate of fear. A manager who looks away with no standards creates a climate of cowboys (see Enron.) Likewise, a store that has a crew where everyone goes out partying on the weekends has more of a tribal culture unable to be managed unless they are all replaced.
Culture is what makes and breaks businesses. It is not easy. I have been both a slash-and-burn type who got rid of a whole crews and watched sales increase immediately and I have built a major company from the ground up with a mission statement, values, etc. I prefer the later because you can make sure people sign on from day one. The hardest part then is how to reward, encourage and grow the business that lives up to those ideals.
Upper echelon managers and executives have lost touch with the field and I can’t place blame squarely on the executives. Creating more paperwork i.e.: mission statements, visions, brand manifestos, etc, is just that, more paperwork. It is usually expected that organizations hire outside contractors to create culture and the reason for that is the outsider is totally unbiased and looks at the entire organization from the customer’s eyes (or that’s what I do, at least).
As for creating ‘culture’ internally, actions do speak louder than words and retail is an ever-changing beast that needs constant attention. The front line people are what will make or break any retailer and it is critically important to cater to that end of the business unit. Once the floor staff is on board…well nothing else matters at that point. Corporate officers have to really listen to what people in the field are saying if they are to embrace any type of new initiative or internal program.
I had a very powerful encounter with corporate culture when I was a consultant. I was working at a very large, and very troubled retailer on their IT strategy. Management knew that if they didn’t get their turnaround plan in place fast, the company was going to close. But they isolated themselves from the rest of the company–didn’t eat in the corporate cafeteria, sat on a separate floor that was reserved only for executives, all that kind of stuff. And so the sense of urgency never got communicated to anyone else in the company.
I sat in interviews with the owners of business applications that lived on hardware so old the manufacturer stopped making spare parts for it–and the application architecture was no better. And one after one, these people would say, “My system works perfectly fine. I see no need to change.” We were flabbergasted. And as consultants–outsiders–we had no ability to convince them otherwise. They were taking their cues from the behavior they saw at the top.
While I agree that executives don’t dictate culture, they are certainly a very powerful influence over the culture–not by the words they craft, but by the actions they take. By the way, that company no longer exists.
In reality, isn’t “company culture” defined by the behavior of the people who work there–top managers and others–rather than by “guiding principles”? The five-step method described in this article can lead to so much process that it becomes self-defeating. Better to define a company mission statement and “values” statement in writing, and then to expect managers to model their behavior accordingly.
The simple approach to building a culture works for perfect organizations. Unfortunately, organizations are made of imperfect people. I agree that too often corporate execs and, yes, we consultants, overcomplicate things and overly wordsmith cultural elements.
However, we must understand that formally communicating an organization’s vision, mission and values helps all stakeholders (employees, customers and shareholders) feel closer to the heart of the company. Upper management may get the simple principles but getting input from the team and ongoing formal communication are important to living the principles.
To recap: Senior leaders define 3 or 4 “guiding principles” and then you “insist” that all these leaders attend an experience where they learn how to apply those principles. Meanwhile you get everyone else to work according to those principles and you hire people who agree with those principles. And bam, you have a winning culture. That’s pretty simple all right.
Anyone else wonder why you’d have to insist that senior leaders act according to their own principles? By definition we always act according to our principles–the one’s we really hold; not the ones we write on flip charts during some executive retreat. And this is exactly where so many totally miss the boat in attempts to build effective and profitable human systems.
We fail to start with the individual human preferring to create the system instead. Corporations do the equivalent of asking starving people to serve food at a banquet. We ask individuals to commit to the corporate vision when they rarely have a vision for their own lives. We ask them to buy into a politically correct set of leadership principles without them examining what they actually believe themselves. This is what makes these simple theories and interventions little more than superficial mush.
When you in essence ‘tell’ people what their principles are and insist they behave accordingly you are headed for a very difficult leadership challenge. Some will say “I’m their employer and I’ll darn well tell them what the culture is.” Well as Dr. Phil would say: “How’s it working for you?”
Most of us were just beginning to figure out what our life is all about when we found ourselves thrown into institutions like school, religion, and work. Someone even labeled marriage an institution! An “institution” is any organization that has the power to reward or punish you depending on your compliance with the institution’s rules. This is why the lack of “engagement” is such a concern these days, why people are so restless and why we see such pathetic service in so many organizations. We try to get people to meet the needs of the company and they’re saying “What about me?” “What do I believe in?” “What is my purpose?”
You cannot have a true winning culture unless it flows from the minds, hearts and spirits of the people themselves. Culture is a spiritual phenomenon not a strategic one. It has to be inspired, not imposed.
Creating a winning–or any–culture is not simple. First of all, it takes absolutely clear thinking by senior management to define guiding principles in simple terms and communicate them throughout the organization. Having done this, it takes holding everyone accountable to live up to these guiding principles, which senior management finds difficult to do because typically senior management is busy fighting fire 24/7! Therefore, they do not have time to think.
I had the pleasure of auditing a ladies’ fashion shoe manufacturing factory in Arkansas that had firmly implanted quality culture. Everyone that I spoke to on the assembly line that for the style of shoes they were making for us, if one pair out of 18 pairs was defective, there went their profit margin for those 18 pairs! This indicated to me that the management of this factory had done a superb job of communicating the importance of quality to the workforce in a language that they can relate to. Having such clear understanding of how poor quality affects profitability on the part of the lowest levels of workers helped that factory produce excellent quality shoes. Unfortunately, this factory closed down here and moved to Far East, like many other manufacturing operations.
In my 37 years of work, I have come across very few companies where senior management has clearly articulated guiding principles and they have been effectively communicated throughout the entire organization.
No company becomes successful because of a mission statement. Actions speak louder than words. Book idea: 100 Best Mission Statements of the Bankrupt.
Here’s the mission statement used by thousands of retailers, whose culture is 100% aligned every day:
Our mission is to pay our suppliers and staff as little as we can, never taking any innovation risk, copying as much as we can from other mediocre retailers, to make enough money that our owners won’t look for someone else.
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With all due respect I’m forced to disagree.
The five steps Bradt outlines contain some unsupportable assumptions. The most critical mistake here is assuming that culture is the product of management design rather than the product of human interaction. Culture is the end result of linked social actions of everyone involved in a common enterprise whether that’s a village or a corporation.
Of course management can influence culture. In fact, to a degree it can even coerce superficial acceptance of a culture. But, at the end of the day the dominant culture may still be the product of informal employee interactions.
Henry Ford (the first) had definite ideas about corporate culture and what amounted to an army of goons whose principle job was to enforce those ideas. Ford paid factory workers $5 a day and then went around trying to control how and where they spent it. He also didn’t believe in unions, communists, etc., etc. The bottom line? The “Ford culture” was supplanted by the trade union movement; workers spent their money the way they wanted to; and Ford’s antisemitic vision of Utopia is a bizarre footnote in the history of commerce.
Designing and controlling culture is like a lot of things in life. If it was so easy everybody–or at least every company–would do it.
Many consultants in Singapore use the Acronym, NATO to describe the undesirable organisational behaviour of ‘No Action-Talk Only’. NATO harms any kind of corporate mission or initiatives.
Unfortunately words are the only way that we can convey and clarify meaning and mental models. Without a mental models expressed in words, it’s hard to interpret the intent of actions. Constant stream of stories without supporting and aligned actions is of course even more meaningless and quickly become irrelevance.
Creating a driving corporate vision is somewhat like Branding. There are three essential components:
1. The story, the claims in words and images.
2. The feeling, emotion, passion that we want the story to conjure.
3. The actual experience that is felt through coming directly or indirectly from all related physical, mental transactions and sensory experiences created overtly or incidentally
Brand or vision audit must necessarily assess perceptual and cognitive consistency in each of these components.
Wow! It appears that Mr. Brandt’s opinions have really stirred up a hornets nest with our panel.
Culture is such a difficult attribute to put a process around. I think that management or those who devise the strategy for a cultural change,can only set the conditions to be as right as possible, maybe even seeding the medium with initial thoughts, but they cannot control the outcome, at least not in a democratic society.
Change and how to affect it, is extremely interesting to me. During my Masters studies, I found John P. Kotter and his philosophy about change and how it happens, whether it is behavioral, or something as large as a cultural shift. Let me share his eight phases: Establish a Sense of Urgency, Form a Powerful Guiding Coalition, Create a Vision, Communicate that Vision, Empower Others to Act on the Vision, Plan for and Create Short-term Wins, Consolidate Improvements and Keep the Momentum for Change Moving, and finally, Institutionalize the New Approach.
Looking at these phases again, only 1, 2 and 8 are run by management. The rest are handled by those with the passion for change.
I like the way Max Goldberg put it above: a business is a story. Culture flows in large part from the telling of stories, and businesses are no different. There are formal ways to tell the story; a mission statement is one, but press releases and company communications also send signals to everyone about what is important to the company. Informal ways to tell the story: what earns an employee accolades and what actions are held up as great examples at meetings; what questions does management ask when projects are presented, for example.
Here’s a great corporate culture building moment: when I was working for American Lawyer Media, our sister company Court TV was televising the O.J. trial. The cameras accidentally caught the side of the head of an alternate juror; barely noticeable but in violation of the network’s deal with the judge. The producer immediately informed Judge Ito and the cameras were thrown out of the courtroom. Imagine what that cost Court TV! How did the CEO react? He told the entire company that the producer upheld the company’s highest standards for ethics, declared that each year we’d commemorate that day with a company-wide day of discussion and seminars on ethics, and award a $5,000 Ethics award to an employee who acted consistently with those high standards when faced with a choice during the year. The producer was the first (instant) winner.
That’s a pretty dramatic example, but there are opportunities large and small in any organization to have those moments when staff looks to management to see just what kind of company they want to be.
Management may be able to lead employees to culture, but they can’t make ’em drink it in. Command and control has no place when it comes to setting the tone and ethos for an organization.
True leadership by example, on the other hand, can influence how an organization functions. I believe this emanates less from the vision statement and core values posted on the wall in the break room, and more from the everyday business and service practices that are enabled by the organization.
In other words, a culture of competency is tantamount to a culture of decency. When we enable employees to succeed at their individual missions, they are better able to appreciate how their tasks and initiatives roll into the larger corporate objectives and ultimately to corporate social responsibility.
Everybody says they want to enhance stakeholder value, put the customer first, pursue maximum quality, empower individuals and be responsible citizens of the community and the world. Most people probably believe in these values. But winning organizations make these values attainable by equipping every associate to succeed. My motto: lead culture with practices; attitude will follow.
It is not a simple process. It is a combination of philosophies, leadership, and an initial–and at times traumatic–forging of the two.
Without the leadership it is impossible to create a winning culture.
Examples are found in the military. With training and core principles all being equal, it is the units (at any level and size) with the strongest leadership that dramatically stand out from the rest.
All of the points above have merit. But I’d posit that the main challenge retailers face is resistance to change, period. Too many retail companies are internally-focused, unwilling to look outside themselves to see opportunities and act on them. They don’t network enough, or do enough competitive shopping. At a recent Retail IT Network meeting, CIOs identified a “precipice issue,” noting the game-changing effects of electronic commerce and changing demographics that can make many retailers irrelevant. We need an industry-wide dialogue on the need for a better response to the customer, and other key issues that are crying out for attention.
I agree that creating a winning culture is simple when starting a new company. However, changing an unsatisfactory culture to a winning model is much, much tougher. Regarding the system described here today, much of it is a rehash of other systems dating back decades. And point #5., involving changing people, is highly questionable. Just ask any wife about their husbands–and how easy it is to change people. Good luck with that.
It’s been a long time since I’ve read an article where the author was so out of touch. I have to totally disagree with the three areas of emphasis. In my opinion, they should be empowerment, value to the organization, and respect. Find me any company that places these traits at the top of their corporate value list and I’m sure you will find a strong and “winning” culture.
I find it also interesting that there is no mention of a company’s actual product or service or its position in the market place. At the end of the day, employees that truly believe in the quality and strength of the products they create will naturally feel better about both themselves and the company they work for. After all, everyone feels good about being on a winning team.
This is an incredibly critical topic and I am not surprised by the outpouring of opinions. Culture building is never easy, although the process the author describes is certainly straight-forward. The visioning process is necessary, in that it forces leaders to pause long enough to articulate the company story and their own stories; a process which uncovers core values that eventually turn into vision/mission statements and the rest. Until the leaders go through this process, many stumble through their interactions with each other and subordinates never realizing the impact their actions have on the culture.
The visioning process must involve all leadership levels and as many key front line employees as possible so everyone feels a part of the process. Understanding the story of the company, the values represented by that story, and how each employee’s actions impact the story are all critical elements. Once complete, the success of the process long term depends on how leaders’ behaviors do or do not link to the vision/mission, and how people who violate the values are handled.
Finally, the visioning process is never truly finished, as our retail world is ever-changing and companies must constantly evaluate how their story fits in with the changing individual customer and employee stories.
It’s a hard process, but energizing and exciting!
I’m really struggling with what’s being written by my fellow contributors. Organizations, by definition, are hierarchical. The organization does respond directly to cues received from the top of the organization, for better or for worse. Leadership counts, for better or for worse, and the quality and character of the leadership the organization receives will dictate directly the values of the organization and the culture of the organization, not to mention the very success of the organization.
Changing an existing culture is anything but easy. The advice provided here is very standard. Having led culture change and participated in culture change, my experience has been that complex or simple, the process is incredibly hard. While there are success stories, I believe they are well-outnumbered by failures.
That does not mean that companies should give up and not try. Rather, they should acknowledge that the process takes place over a long time period, will face many setbacks, and ultimately depends on a wide-range of factors.
If you can accept a 5 – 10 year period of change that will require constant work, re-work, and uncertainty as to whether the benefits you want will be the rewards you get, go for it.
I don’t believe that creating a culture is simple. The steps you take to develop these principles are simple but the execution of this culture is quite rigorous. Many have trouble and need help in “walking the talk.”
Most company leaders could define what their organization is all about without outside help, except an outsider’s view sees things you don’t. Most look at the “lack of” what they want to be instead of an appreciative assessment of what they have that is unique. The advantage of outside help is developing principles is the easy part, you could just use the “Golden Rule” but developing leadership policies, processes and actions that follow your principle is the hard part.
I am currently a leader working in a health care organization, and we are on the 4th year of a cultural “journey.”
I come from a different setting, whose leaders inspired all to live by the values that the company represented, and my current company has a leader who truly believes in the cultural changes that we can make as an organization.
However, in the core of any organization trying to change its culture, leaders need to be willing to address those employees that will not embrace the values that the company is trying to convey. As I said, I have worked with companies with a strong established culture, and with a company that is trying to build one. It seems to me that the biggest challenge that we face is those that continue to hold out and refuse to accept the impending changes of the organization.
Pablum for the masses. First off, the author uses terms like “winning” and “losing” to describe cultures. Unfortunately, cultures don’t compete–so they can’t “win” or “lose.” Secondly, if the terms are to be accepted–we need to define what “winning” is and what “losing” is–the author serves up HIS vision, but who is to say that is universal? Thirdly, the author wants to denigrate the signs, slogans, and wall charts–and then creates that which he criticizes.
Is creating a culture hard? Not at all. It will happen organically and will be a reflection of all the things mentioned in the article. Is creating a “winning” culture hard? Much more so than this would have you believe (and the author’s suggestion of hiring those that share the same values is the short route to failure if the business requires innovation, creativity, different perspectives, etc–anything outside adhering to a moral, ethical, legal code).
This is “Cosmo” quiz level science or insights.
Mission and vision statements are usually idealistic, not entirely applicable, and often outdated before they get nailed into the round hole in the wall with a square peg.
1. Your customer doesn’t care about your mission statement. They care only about what THEY need, and what YOU do.
2. To grow your business, the culture in your company needs to constantly adapt to the culture you are serving. Remember, business is a moving target and changes occur every day.
3. Your employees might patronize your mission statement over the water cooler but what they really need is the right training, direction, and motivation to be successful and to feel reasonably secure in their jobs.
It really is as obvious as serve the customer, grow the business, and develop your employees. Anything more than that is usually convoluted and not very effective beyond the initial ribbon cutting.
A business is a story. The story begins with why the company was created. Then what it does and for whom. Next come the company values and finally its goals. In successful companies everyone knows the core story and is working towards its goals.
Corporate culture can determine whether or not a company reaches its goals. It is not a simple proposition. It takes time and dedication from management and employees to agree to work together towards common goals.
Every business has a culture, good or bad. They in essence create themselves. I do not agree that management is irrelevant in this process. They control the culture by the type of people they hire.
A person who only cares what the CEO feels and asks forgiveness of his supervisor if he goes out of bounds puts everyone in the organization on guard. An owner who micro-manages everyone to the last detail or capriciously overrules their decisions creates a climate of fear. A manager who looks away with no standards creates a climate of cowboys (see Enron.) Likewise, a store that has a crew where everyone goes out partying on the weekends has more of a tribal culture unable to be managed unless they are all replaced.
Culture is what makes and breaks businesses. It is not easy. I have been both a slash-and-burn type who got rid of a whole crews and watched sales increase immediately and I have built a major company from the ground up with a mission statement, values, etc. I prefer the later because you can make sure people sign on from day one. The hardest part then is how to reward, encourage and grow the business that lives up to those ideals.
Upper echelon managers and executives have lost touch with the field and I can’t place blame squarely on the executives. Creating more paperwork i.e.: mission statements, visions, brand manifestos, etc, is just that, more paperwork. It is usually expected that organizations hire outside contractors to create culture and the reason for that is the outsider is totally unbiased and looks at the entire organization from the customer’s eyes (or that’s what I do, at least).
As for creating ‘culture’ internally, actions do speak louder than words and retail is an ever-changing beast that needs constant attention. The front line people are what will make or break any retailer and it is critically important to cater to that end of the business unit. Once the floor staff is on board…well nothing else matters at that point. Corporate officers have to really listen to what people in the field are saying if they are to embrace any type of new initiative or internal program.
I had a very powerful encounter with corporate culture when I was a consultant. I was working at a very large, and very troubled retailer on their IT strategy. Management knew that if they didn’t get their turnaround plan in place fast, the company was going to close. But they isolated themselves from the rest of the company–didn’t eat in the corporate cafeteria, sat on a separate floor that was reserved only for executives, all that kind of stuff. And so the sense of urgency never got communicated to anyone else in the company.
I sat in interviews with the owners of business applications that lived on hardware so old the manufacturer stopped making spare parts for it–and the application architecture was no better. And one after one, these people would say, “My system works perfectly fine. I see no need to change.” We were flabbergasted. And as consultants–outsiders–we had no ability to convince them otherwise. They were taking their cues from the behavior they saw at the top.
While I agree that executives don’t dictate culture, they are certainly a very powerful influence over the culture–not by the words they craft, but by the actions they take. By the way, that company no longer exists.
In reality, isn’t “company culture” defined by the behavior of the people who work there–top managers and others–rather than by “guiding principles”? The five-step method described in this article can lead to so much process that it becomes self-defeating. Better to define a company mission statement and “values” statement in writing, and then to expect managers to model their behavior accordingly.
The simple approach to building a culture works for perfect organizations. Unfortunately, organizations are made of imperfect people. I agree that too often corporate execs and, yes, we consultants, overcomplicate things and overly wordsmith cultural elements.
However, we must understand that formally communicating an organization’s vision, mission and values helps all stakeholders (employees, customers and shareholders) feel closer to the heart of the company. Upper management may get the simple principles but getting input from the team and ongoing formal communication are important to living the principles.
To recap: Senior leaders define 3 or 4 “guiding principles” and then you “insist” that all these leaders attend an experience where they learn how to apply those principles. Meanwhile you get everyone else to work according to those principles and you hire people who agree with those principles. And bam, you have a winning culture. That’s pretty simple all right.
Anyone else wonder why you’d have to insist that senior leaders act according to their own principles? By definition we always act according to our principles–the one’s we really hold; not the ones we write on flip charts during some executive retreat. And this is exactly where so many totally miss the boat in attempts to build effective and profitable human systems.
We fail to start with the individual human preferring to create the system instead. Corporations do the equivalent of asking starving people to serve food at a banquet. We ask individuals to commit to the corporate vision when they rarely have a vision for their own lives. We ask them to buy into a politically correct set of leadership principles without them examining what they actually believe themselves. This is what makes these simple theories and interventions little more than superficial mush.
When you in essence ‘tell’ people what their principles are and insist they behave accordingly you are headed for a very difficult leadership challenge. Some will say “I’m their employer and I’ll darn well tell them what the culture is.” Well as Dr. Phil would say: “How’s it working for you?”
Most of us were just beginning to figure out what our life is all about when we found ourselves thrown into institutions like school, religion, and work. Someone even labeled marriage an institution! An “institution” is any organization that has the power to reward or punish you depending on your compliance with the institution’s rules. This is why the lack of “engagement” is such a concern these days, why people are so restless and why we see such pathetic service in so many organizations. We try to get people to meet the needs of the company and they’re saying “What about me?” “What do I believe in?” “What is my purpose?”
You cannot have a true winning culture unless it flows from the minds, hearts and spirits of the people themselves. Culture is a spiritual phenomenon not a strategic one. It has to be inspired, not imposed.
Creating a winning–or any–culture is not simple. First of all, it takes absolutely clear thinking by senior management to define guiding principles in simple terms and communicate them throughout the organization. Having done this, it takes holding everyone accountable to live up to these guiding principles, which senior management finds difficult to do because typically senior management is busy fighting fire 24/7! Therefore, they do not have time to think.
I had the pleasure of auditing a ladies’ fashion shoe manufacturing factory in Arkansas that had firmly implanted quality culture. Everyone that I spoke to on the assembly line that for the style of shoes they were making for us, if one pair out of 18 pairs was defective, there went their profit margin for those 18 pairs! This indicated to me that the management of this factory had done a superb job of communicating the importance of quality to the workforce in a language that they can relate to. Having such clear understanding of how poor quality affects profitability on the part of the lowest levels of workers helped that factory produce excellent quality shoes. Unfortunately, this factory closed down here and moved to Far East, like many other manufacturing operations.
In my 37 years of work, I have come across very few companies where senior management has clearly articulated guiding principles and they have been effectively communicated throughout the entire organization.
No company becomes successful because of a mission statement. Actions speak louder than words. Book idea: 100 Best Mission Statements of the Bankrupt.
Here’s the mission statement used by thousands of retailers, whose culture is 100% aligned every day:
Our mission is to pay our suppliers and staff as little as we can, never taking any innovation risk, copying as much as we can from other mediocre retailers, to make enough money that our owners won’t look for someone else.