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?