Creating Corporate Culture
A corporation’s culture can be as famous as the actual corporation. When you hear about Zappos you think about their wacky culture. Disney has clear aligned values and a strong culture. Closer to home, Nurse Next Door’s and lululemon athletica’s corporate cultures have been written about in magazines and newspapers.
A corporate culture, of course, can be a positive aspect of work life or have a negative impact on employees. An effective workplace can energize and empower employees to achieve big goals. One fueled by politics can be draining and ineffective. At institute B, we say that one’s corporate culture is a direct manifestation of the unresolved issues of its CEO. As a CEO, if your work place is full of negativity, complaining, and politics, look no further than your own mirror.
You cannot avoid having a corporate culture. Every company has one whether it is manifested purposefully or not. If you choose to neglect your work environment, it does not eliminate the existence of your company’s culture. What happens is that your company’s culture is a reflection of your personal management style.
Given that you cannot avoid having a culture, I would like to submit the idea that you may as well choose to build a positive and powerful corporate culture. It worked for Zappos, lululemon and Nurse Next Door. It could work for you.
The question is ‘how?’. Here are a few considerations in developing your unique corporate culture:
- Begin with alignment around core values and behaviours that would be consistent with these values. Make these values a reflection of the group, not just the CEO.
- Ensure that the leadership team listens and empathizes with the employee base. You are all in this together. Ego will kill your culture.
- Find some ‘spiritual leaders’, people who can act as evangelists throughout the organization.
- Hold unique events, share stories, and develop symbols consistent with your values and that reinforce desired behaviours.
- Develop culture based metrics and reward people for these metrics.
- Develop your own unique corporate language that is meaningful only to insiders. At lululemon we gave everything its unique name (Luon, Educators, 80/20, etc.) and even the act of naming is part of the culture now.
- Create rites of passage, like hazing (but fun), to reinforce that people are part of the team
- Be transparent, be cheerleaders, and be consistent.
Crossfit has been a fast growing athletic activity in part because it has developed a unique culture. It uses a unique language to name its workouts; one of the local Vancouver chapters uses weather systems as names. Crossfit has its own rite of passage system; you must prove you are worthy to get into higher level workouts. This keeps those who are ‘in’, in longer. These workout buddies become a tight knit group that ends up becoming the core group of customers for the business.
Culture happens anyway. You may as well strive to bring a little ‘cult’ into your corporate culture.
Written by: Darrell Kopke, Skool Principal