The Top Company Culture Report by Entreprenuer.com revealed that high-performing companies with strong cultures had a unique characteristic among their employee group ~ employees had a high level of confidence and trust in their leadership. Additionally, cultural norms within these companies included collaboration, transparent communication, mission-vision-value alignment, employee support, agility, innovation, and the like. A reasonable conclusion is that these companies also had great leaders.
Even the best organizational culture may fall apart without proper leadership. Furthermore, you need a complementary culture to attract or retain quality talent.
This article will explore some actions leaders can take to bring about cultural change and what you, as a leader, can do to promote this process. Steps to completely revamp a culture are beyond the scope of this article.
What is Culture:
It’s the unspoken rules of the corporate road, the behaviors, attitudes, beliefs, and philosophies of the employee group. For example, suppose company placards and value statements espouse a customer-first approach but behaviors and rewards are heavily growth-focused. You could quickly ascertain that the company has a growth-oriented culture. Culture is defined by the collective organization’s behavior and not by the conduct of any single employee or leader.
Ways Leaders Can Positively Affect Culture
As a leader, you must understand and define the culture essential to your company and its stakeholders. Is it innovation, learning, collaboration, agility, caring, relational, or centralized decision-making? Furthermore, you need to identify gaps between the actual and desired culture. If you have a gap, what is the cause? Direct feedback from frontline leaders and employees is a great way to determine your actual culture. You likely have corporate blind spots so pay close attention to processes, management styles, activities, or programs such as reward systems that unintentionally incentivize behavior counter to your desired culture.
Your collective leadership team, starting with you, must set the tone for what’s acceptable within your company or department. If collaboration and feedback are the essential norms, you should be the top collaborator and be overly accepting about receiving and giving feedback.
I started this blog by discussing the correlation between high-performing cultures and employees’ confidence in their leaders. Leaders strengthen culture and build trust when they walk the talk and behaviors align with company values.
Below are considerations that can help leaders be more effective and, in turn, help them shape organizational culture.
- Ensure leadership behaviors are aligned with your mission, vision, and values – there can be no exceptions.
- Attract and hire talent that aligns with the desired culture. Every hiring manager and interview panel must know what cultural attributes are essential for the company. This is an opportunity to improve culture when you’re in a hiring mode.
- Incent employees that exemplify the desired culture.
- Create a culture of trust and respect between leaders and their teams.
- Collaboration: create an environment that encourages cooperation and respect while fostering a healthy sense of competition.
- Create an atmosphere where everyone feels heard and respected.
- Foster an environment that promotes innovation and creativity.
- Create an environment where everyone feels safe and respected. Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety was the top attribute of high-performing teams.
- Promote learning, growth, and development for all employees, especially key leaders.
Final Words
Changing culture or maintaining your current culture requires consistent focus and assessment. Without focus, small sub-cultural changes can occur slowly and undetected. I refer to this as a “slow fade.” It results in small hidden changes that occur over time and manifest in core issues after it’s too late to address. Like stakeholder trust, it takes much less effort to maintain than rebuild.
Keep reinforcing behaviors that exemplify your desired culture and adamantly address behaviors that go counter to your culture, especially if demonstrated by a leader. Take an inventory of your formal and informal reward system to ensure you are not unintentionally incenting the wrong behavior.
One last thought. Align culture with your business strategy. Companies that have failed in this area have encountered severe problems. Getting this right facilitates behaviors that directly support a well-thought-out plan and it helps prevent confusion among your employees. When your culture, long-term strategy, leadership, and employees fully align, you have the “cultural power punch.” It’s a challenging goal, yes. But before you close this document, pause and consider using this as a competitive multiplier.
Vance Crocker