Your organizational culture can make or break your company. After all, strategy and culture shape the workplace environment, and leaders who strive for efficiency and teamwork must address both to stay viable in the long term.
Organizational culture is a compilation of your company’s mission, expectations, and practices that guide your team through its day-to-day operations and foster a sense of community among your customer base. The stronger and clearer a company’s values, the more efficiently teams can work together to drive and maintain its success.
Here’s what to know about cultivating your company’s organizational culture for long-term success.
Your Organizational Culture Defines Your Values
Any successful company must have a concrete set of values to define its culture. After all, your organizational culture shapes your workplace environment and thus the atmosphere that greets your employees (and depending on your industry, your customers) each time they enter.
Intentional processes can be created to define corporate values and beliefs. At CrossGroup, we use a process that goes beyond simply asking leaders to write out abstract ideal values and instead paints a picture of exactly what their values look like in practice. Ask yourself the following questions.
- What are our assumptions and beliefs associated with a particular value?
- How do our values become the framework to support our purpose and mission?
- What behaviors and actions will we encourage among all our people?
- What behaviors and actions will we not tolerate?
If you’re struggling to define your values, start by finding your why — that is, the reason your company does what it does. From there, your values should flow naturally.
Your Culture Is Unique
In their book “Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture,” authors Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn describe their competing values framework with four competing values: stability and control versus flexibility and discretion, and internal focus versus external focus.
In combination, this quadrant analysis gives meaning and description in defining your prioritized values. As your company’s leader, it’s your job to determine the specific cultural types you want your organization to embody.
There’s no right or wrong answer, but having a clear-cut idea of your company’s cultural type will help you more accurately shape your unique organizational culture and implement the values you’ve chosen to model through your business.
A Strong Organizational Culture Welcomes Feedback
Intentional, meaningful dialogue between leaders and their teams can help merge your company’s purpose with values. Welcoming feedback from your employees and customers allows you to zero in on your core values and strengthen your overall culture.
While there is no “good” or “bad” organizational culture, there is strong and weak. A strong culture is all about alignment: Leaders must be aligned in their behavior and mutually accountable within their teams, while simultaneously empowering employees to speak up and share feedback.
In a strong culture, teams can set strategies and achieve goals more efficiently, businesses become more defined in their respective industries, and in the face of a crisis, leaders can make decisions more effectively. Over time, the culture will solidify and become a force that defines your organization.
Organizational Culture Can Make or Break You
Culture is behavioral — and it’s all around us. Organizational culture is the social norms of every company we support, and it becomes the sum total of a society’s values and beliefs.
A strong culture guides activity through shared assumptions and group norms. Once formed, it controls the behaviors we encourage and tolerate among our employees. The benefits of cultivating a strong organizational culture extend beyond simply creating a strong, memorable brand and into the attitudes and loyalty of our teams.
What are you doing to foster conversations about organizational culture at your firm? Let us know in the comments!
