Like Rome, business culture is not built in a day, or a year for that matter!
It’s a never-ending process of refinements and experiences, jointly as a team, and also as an individual interacting within the team and the business.
However, culture can be destroyed in a day, or even less time, and often by the actions of leaders within a business.
Over the years I’ve learnt about some key drivers of culture. In this blog I’m sharing my top 4:
1. Desire
Culture starts at the top. As an owner or manager, if you genuinely want to improve your company’s culture you have to ‘live’ the new culture yourself. Both the leaders and the organisation must truly want to change.
If someone external to your business asks you, ‘can you describe your company’s culture as it is today?’, you need to be able to do so effectively.
Start by thinking about real examples of your company’s culture that demonstrate ‘good culture’ versus ‘bad culture’.
Now you’re ready to talk to your team and build your culture from the foundations up!
2. Measurement
In understanding the design standards of your culture, establish baseline metrics to figure out where you are now and define how you'll measure progress toward your goals. Methods include:
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staff surveys
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anonymous testing
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staff turnover rate analysis
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exit interview feedback.
3. Step-by-step approach
In our experience as business valuers, the companies with great cultures embrace the following elements of ‘culture building’:
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Continuous learning – Treat every failure as a learning opportunity and focus on what one might do differently next time, rather than just on the impact of the failure.
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Continuous improvement – Encourage continual betterment, personally and in the work team. If the last job delivered was good, ask ‘how can we improve on it even further?’ Improvement doesn’t have to be in big leaps; baby steps can be just as valuable. Set positive challenges.
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Transparent communication – Don’t sugar-coat communications. Tell it like it is in a manner that is respectful. Communicate to others – whether it’s positive feedback or critical comments – in the same manner in which you would like to be communicated to, if the roles were reversed.
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Positive reinforcement – We all like to feel valued and that we are making a worthwhile contribution. A little positive reinforcement can go a long way to boosting team members’ self-esteem and motivation.
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Sharing knowledge and know-how – Be generous with your knowledge and know-how. Encourage team members not to be ‘self-protective’, but rather to share their ideas and help each other achieve goals.
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Recognising effort, improvement and achievement – Celebrations don’t just need to occur when someone wins a race or delivers a project on time and in budget. Little steps forward, such as tackling a personal or business challenge, mastering techniques and clearly putting in significant effort, are also worthy of recognition.
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Taking a genuine team approach – Team members need to demonstrate that they have each other’s backs, without having to explicitly say so. A leader’s role, in terms of fostering this quality, is to lead by example and also to give positive recognition to this behaviour when seen in others.
4. Customised action plan
While the steps above embody valuable core principles, the actual transformation journey is highly specific to each organisation’s circumstances.
Every organisation is different and – ideally – each company should have a tailored strategy based on its unique context and culture.
Seek an outside perspective from a trusted, experienced advisor who can tailor an approach to your organisation’s unique circumstances.
Valuable knowledge
The advice in this blog is a combination of insights from our ebook Surfer dudes, janitors and the Ritz-Carlton, which was created with Kevin Catlin of Insight Strategies, plus the combined knowledge and experience of the JPAbusiness team.
As business valuers we understand that strong, sustainable business cultures contribute to strong, sustainable financial performance and, hence, business value.
If you’re a business leader, or are aspiring to be one, and you want to take your team and business beyond the norm, we’d love to hear from you.
Our advisors are keen to assist in guiding you and your team on a path to developing a strong culture and enhancing your business value. Visit our 'Get in touch' page to book an appointment.
