Corporate Culture Left Adrift
84% of employees do not believe their company’s culture is widely upheld according to a study by the Aberdeen Group. The startling thing is the numbers are only slightly better for executives who answered that same survey – 81% admitted they are not doing a good job upholding the company culture. These are the people who are responsible for reinforcing the culture!
A ship left adrift rarely ends up in port. That ship usually ends up on the reef.
Who Is At The Helm?
The irony occurs when you see in another survey by Deloitte where 88% of employees and 94% of executives said they believe a defined work place culture is important business success.
Who’s Steering The Ship?
If the leaders are not in engaged in the culture of an organization, no one will be. Saying my company has a strong culture, but doing nothing to build or reinforce it is like saying I want to lose weight, but continuing to eat fried chicken and barbeque ribs.
Just saying something is important to me, doesn’t make it important. The importance of something is actually confirmed by my actions.
What Do Leaders Demonstrate?
When my actions work against my proclaimed priorities and values, they aren’t truly my priorities and values. When I discuss culture with my client organizations I actually use the term Organizational Character.
When culture is discussed in business publications too often the focus is on the décor of the office, casual Fridays and paid time off. These are perks. People can have great perks and work in an ugly corporate culture.
Organizational Character is a term I’ve heard my father, General Jim Anderson, use for over a decade now in his talks with multiple Fortune 500 organizations. He defines Organizational Character as:
Organizational Character
An organization’s demonstrated values.
An organization’s proclaimed values have no influence on the character of the organization unless these values are demonstrated by everyone who carry that business card.
Leaders Go First
The first people who must demonstrate the values claimed by the organization are the people at the top of the organizational chart. Without leaders who act in accordance with the values of the company, the organization will likely drift toward another set of values (and rarely are they good ones).
When the leaders do not embrace, reinforce and guard the core values of an organization, the organization will drift with the current until it lands on another set of values.
How Do Leaders Go First?
Leaders must be intentional. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that a system left to itself tends to breakdown. Leaders must not leave the company culture/character unattended!
Define The Values: What does good look like? What do the organization’s values look like in action? Here is an example. This is a company I worked with on defining their values. Below is their company’s description of what integrity looks like for them:
Integrity In Practice
- We will keep our promises to our customers and each other.
- We will only ask of others the things we expect of ourselves.
- We will own our weaknesses and mistakes by eliminating excuses from our vocabulary.
- We will choose the moral and right thing to do even if it costs us personally and financially.
- We will tell people what we think they need to hear, not what they want to hear.
Communicate The Values Frequently: Values should go beyond the website or bulletin board. They must be communicated in both the written and the verbal mediums. A once a year mention at a yearly leadership retreat is not adequate.
Hire For Values: An individual’s values need to be aligned with the values of the organization. Interviews and reference checks need to dig into specific areas in order to confirm that alignment.
Fire For Values: If an employee demonstrates an unwillingness to demonstrate the values the organization professes, that person needs to go.
The Bottom Line:
Saying something is important does not make it important. Though 94% of executives believe that having a good work culture improves performance, only 16% of employees believe they work in a place where that is demonstrated.
An organization’s culture is like a giant battleship. It is not going to turn on a dime. But once the captain at the helm makes the choice to turn the wheel, the ship will follow.
The great news is, once it is heading in the right direction, the battleship just like a company’s culture, has a lot of momentum and is hard to stop. It only takes the decision of the people in the wheel house to begin that process.
Question:
What are some other ways leaders can positively affect the culture of the teams they lead?
To download more resources for building a winning culture click here:
Dave’s even more right that he may know. He listed the positive reasons to live the proclaimed/admirable culture and the good leadership needed to stay there. But let’s face it, leaders living in bubbles (huge organization, family business, surrounded by brown noses, etc.) don’t often react to positive motivation. They’re already the best so what’s to learn?
But they (or their lawyers) sometimes react to fear. Dave’s truisms above also keep an organization from imploding in scandal. Think about it – can you name a disastrously failed business or government organization scandal that befell one of the few groups to actually live their proclaimed culture? I can’t; but I can name piles of ‘we saw it coming’ cesspools that taught the same old lessons.
Those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it!
Hit the nail on the head again Dave.
My absolute favorite part. “When culture is discussed in business publications too often the focus is on the décor of the office, casual Fridays and paid time off. These are perks. People can have great perks and work in an ugly corporate culture.”
I have seen this so much. And the sad thing is that it seems to be a growing trend.
It makes me wonder if we are seeing a viscous cycle. Leaders are told to improve culture. They are then told culture is driven by all the perks. Therefore leaders must take their focus off actual culture and put it on making people feel happy because of all the perks. And then the employees rate the leadership low on living their culture so the leader is told again to improve the culture.
Could all of this stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what culture is? That may be something that goes hand in hand with a fundamental misunderstanding of the role of leaders vs. managers.
Thoughts?
I agree Eric! Also it comes down to adding perks is an easy answer. It is measurable and can be done with a policy. Focusing on the culture is an ongoing exercise that is hard to measure and many feel takes too much time to do.
Excellent Eric! You are on-target.
There may be a education process that needs to happen so leaders understand culture is what they create not the perks the give away.