On New Skool Corporate Culture
Hey managers, if your corporate culture is toxic, look in the mirror.
An organization’s corporate culture is the manifestation of the unresolved issues of its leadership team. Look around you. Is your workplace full of office politics, information hoarding, negative water cooler conversation, and back talk? If so, chances are strong you are, unintentionally or not, the root cause.
If your environment is toxic, you are wasting money compensating for a lack of shared vision and effective communication. Your customer experience is surely affected and if so, this impacts negatively on your company’s growth potential. Plus it just isn’t any fun. This toxicity even extends to those managers who develop a team of yes people. In my opinion, the only way to fuel a high growth company is via a positive environment full of idea sharing and feedback.
I recently visited the head office of Nurse Next Door, a fast growing franchisor of home care nurses. The co-founders John DeHart and Ken Sim are adamant that corporate culture is their most powerful tool in ensuring powerful growth. What I loved seeing in their work environment was their core values coming to life. The value “Find a Better Way” fuels their continuous improvement philosophy; their employees are rewarded for how many of their improvement suggestions get implemented. At no point do they sacrifice their values, especially their core belief “Admire Our People”, for the sake of growth. On my tour Sim pronounced proudly that the company ‘fired’ their largest customer for continuously mistreating Nurse Next Door’s employees.
Does this good mojo really work? Nurse Next Door was ranked in 2009 as the top BC Company for which to work. They are expanding into the United States and since its founding in 2001 have grown to 37 franchises and 4000 employees.
What DeHart and Sim understand is that leading with ego limits our success as business professionals. Creating an open listening culture, however, benefits both the employees who feel enrolled in the success of the company as well as the company itself. In a toxic environment, we notice that leaders lead in a manner that compensates for self-consciousness or other unresolved past issues and this limits the propensity for employees and the community to support the company in any meaningful way.
At institute B we deliver strategic planning sessions by first taking on leadership development. We work with senior leaders from the inside out developing their own personal power and then build upon that self-knowledge in order to manifest their values into a unique corporate culture. Simply put, a corporate dogma program in your company should be based on your own values system, one that stems from a positive, powerful way of being. This process, which we call the CEO brain spa, is leadership development in the purest sense.
If you want a remojofication program in your organization, your keys to success include establishing a baseline of communication that ensures all issues are resolved, all ideas are noteworthy, and all community feedback is accepted. This starts and stops with your ability to be a strong listener. Much like DeHart and Sim, you should be prepared to listen and listen and listen. Then, build a culture based on strong values that you can personally live by.
Who knows, your team members and community may thank you.