3 steps to implement a culture in your organization.
Find why the culture in your organization is broken.
In the last couple of years, culture has become the utopia every company wants and needs (regardless of them knowing why) to understand, because, you know, “top companies” usually have a “great culture”. The challenge starts with the common assumptions regarding culture are:
- We do not have a culture.
- We miss our chance (time, size or stage) to create a culture.
- Timing: we are too busy to work on it, but we will.
All these assumptions come from the same cause, the lack of clarity on what culture is; there are different definitions but the easiest way to describe it is:
“Culture is the collective behavior of your organization, is how things work when there is no supervision”.
Once you understand what culture is, you can realize:
- You always have a culture, meaning, there is always “the way we do things in this company”
- Since culture is already a “living product” of your organization you can always improve it, or modify it.
- There is no correct timing to improve culture; it does not matter f your organization is super busy, going through a rough time, or thriving all of those are perfect to put your focus on culture.
Culture will happen regardless of you or if there is a plan or not for it.
SO LET’S GET THINGS STARTED:
- -NO EXCEPTIONS
The best and main principle you have to understand is culture needs an infrastructure (mindset & reality of the team) to be deployed. This principle means, if we are going to ask people to be on time or to follow up in x amount of time, this needs to apply for everyone, (yes I’m looking at you founder / CEO).
Think about a company in which everyone is late to meetings, because of that, you think of creating a new practice, no one can go into meetings if they get there more than 5 minutes late. But the CEO decides that applies for everyone but not her.
To the extreme that, culture-wise, it is better to implement that everyone can arrive late than to make the CEO an exception on culture.
2.-WILLPOWER TO LEAVE MONEY ON THE TABLE
Culture is not on-demand, in order to make culture work it must be a priority, for example, is we are optimizing culture to have a more truthful communication, you will need to show the team that it does not matter if it’s a small or a big client, remember why, we are redefining “how we do things here”, if lying will get you that customer and truth will not, you need to be ready to let that customer go.
3.-CULTURE HAVE NO BEST PRACTICES
When you start getting interested in organizational culture, you will find hundreds of books, thousands of talks and posts about it, how A built their culture or how B has “the ultimate culture”. To be honest, there is not a great generic culture, why? because 99% of the culture is the fit with your organization; so you might make decisions based on gut instead of data, is it that bad? we will need to see your organization and understand it before jumping into conclusions, it might not be.
So if you want to start to understand culture:
- first, you have to take a deep dive to learn your present culture and the incentives around it.
- after understanding the present culture, you have to be objective and find the points that hurt, is not about “making” a better culture” is about “optimizing it to meet a specific goal”.
- then you create your first set of soft rules focusing on one issue (that hurts) at a time, remember culture only works if the infrastructure does.
Last but not least, avoid company culture silent killers:
-exceptions
-hierarchy
-lack of priorities
- micromanagement
Be aware of the process and enjoy the ride!
