Because great culture is one of the factors that will move your company from average to great, be deliberate about building it. Yes, strategy counts, but culture beats strategy any day of the week. Culture in your company will be affected by both the things you do and the things you don’t do. Culture is very fluid and is affected by the people you hire so make it a practice to hire to fit your culture. Great culture will distinguish your company so that the best people want to work there.
What does culture look like? What do staff want? What words indicate a good culture? Respect, support, safety, security, consistency, trust, appropriate autonomy, connectedness, passionate staff who know why they’re doing what they’re doing by watching the actions of their leader.
You set the culture so build it specifically to be what you want. Culture is defined as the sum of the attitudes, customs and beliefs of one group of people. To build the culture you want, define it by the words you use, then live your life as that example demonstrating the way you want staff to act. Data shows that top CEOs consistently display habit patterns involving integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion. But those descriptive words are only words if leaders are unwilling to demonstrate the standards they speak about. Staff quickly learn that words don’t truly represent the leaders’ actions if they are treated differently than their expectation based on your words.
Do your actions parallel your words, or are they as unidentifiable as a parallel universe?