Creating a Corporate Culture You Are Proud of
By: Roberto Bandeira De Mello
Tags: Culture, Corporate Culture, Leadership, Values

It’s 3 pm, and you can’t help but stare at your clock. The last place you want to be in is that office, you’re just counting the minutes for 5 pm to ring and you’re ready to go. But you also wish you had more time. If you don’t finish that project by tomorrow morning, you know your boss will probably scold you publicly. And to make it even worse, a group of colleagues just walked behind you, and you could clearly hear they were gossiping about a friend of yours.

We’ve all been there: working in companies where the cultures have deteriorated — or never actually purposefully created to start with. Employee morale is low, turnover is high, at this point, it’s probably even affecting the company’s financial results. If you’re one of the managers in that company, you know you have to do something, but you have no idea where to start. When you bring the subject to the extremely busy CEO, he dismisses it and suggests you call the “consultants.” What should you do?

What even is Corporate Culture?

This week in the renowned Reputation Management class at Stanford GSB, we received Bob Marcus as a guest speaker. Bob is a process consultant — although he doesn’t like to use that term — that helps other companies ask the right questions regarding culture. He argues that most organizations already have the solutions to their problems; they are just not asking the right questions nor making the space to listen. You don’t need to bring the “consultants” in; you just need to tap into the expertise inside the organization to fix your culture. But what is culture?

Put simply, culture is like a tree: you can see it above the surface — the day-to-day behaviors and actions that employees are taking throughout the corporation, and that can easily be observed by anyone. But there is also the part you can’t see: the beliefs and values — be they explicitly defined or not. In big organizations with multiple business units or departments, you can think of it as more of a forest than a tree, numerous cultures interconnected by a root system — you don’t want your sales team to have the same culture as the finance team. But how do you create your culture to start with?

Creating a Culture

Bob suggests a small framework of how you should think about culture — you want to optimize for collaboration as a result of community factors and human factors. For the community side, he encourages you to think through three questions:

· What is our common purpose? → Are we tied together? Are we playing the same game? Are we here for the same reasons?

· What is our common understanding? → What is our context? What about strategy? Roles? Beliefs and behaviors?

· What is our common cause? → Your success is my success, your failure is my failure.

For the human factors, he suggests leaders need to create trust by creating shared experiences. The right question to ask yourself is: how do you create the conditions for human collaboration to happen? One great way is to get the team to tell their stories, which will build empathy and create a shared experience. “If I don’t know how you’ve struggled, how can I possibly connect to you?”

For those corporations that are at the very start of their journey, it’s important to be proactive about what culture you will create. If you don’t do so, it will be created whether you like it or not, and you will most likely lose control of it. From early on, make sure to be explicit about who you are as a human being, what values you want to create, and what behaviors you want to inspire.

During my undergrad, I had the honor of being president of the engineering student association for one year. As a first-time leader, I made many, many mistakes. But the worst was not setting from the start what kind of culture we wanted to foster. I didn’t walk the walk; I never modeled the behaviors I expected my team to show. A different culture was created, and things naturally went south.

Even more, whether at the start or wanting to change your culture, architect your acts and rituals that support the institutionalization of the traits you want. You can’t just say the things you want to see; you need to model them and create the opportunity for others to do so. Choose a set of actions and institutionalize them.

Finally, create a feedback loop to understand if the culture you intended is the reality being created. Instead of getting consultants, get your best people to go out in the organization and determine what is going on while collecting that feedback.