How to create and maintain company's culture
Tags: management, culture, leadership
Published: 2022-12-14 12:35:23

Quite recently I had a conversation regarding creating company's culture; contributing to company's culture and individual skills that exactly help to create cultures as such.

It has intrigued me as the topic may easily become very tricky. 

As a former technology evangelist (MSFT) I was positioned very well in my past to create cultures among software developers and software development communities of various types. Such job could be also described as a culture creator toward external audiences.

When we speak about internal teams and organizations, then creating and contributing to the company's culture is a completely different thing. In communities, you are bound together by the same topic, as mutually shared point of interest. At work, by professional/business goals successfully or unsuccessfully cascaded down the ladder, through delegation.

In the first scenario, the only thing that naturally distinguish individuals is the level of experience. Experience  impacts heavily a proficiency to communicate properly in the hermetic language of that particular community. Finally, lack of the ability to communicate properly may create isolation and drive to leave. If communities become competitive then the entry point and stay-drive are not for every body and create elitism. Quite common challenges when you think about the culture in the context of communities. Individual experience and ability to gain more of it is the key here.

At companies, again, situation is completely different.  IT/Software professionals sometimes blend their community/passion driven self-confidence and respect level with professional/business expectations defined by the company goals. That is a trap that can very quickly create great cliques but not helpful as a contribution to the company's culture. It most likely won't makes such teams successful at the end. That can also help to fail individually. Officially interpersonal skills to be blamed, officially not belonging to the company's culture, defined by values.

But this is not values that can help define company's culture well, but mutual understanding and respecting the professional and business goals shared across the organization.

I've mentioned a conversation regarding creating such a culture successfully as a trigger for this post. Obviously this topic was triggered by HR-orientated individuals. If that's the case then this is already a missed opportunity. 

If you need HR to create company's culture in your organization, then I'm brutally honest, this is already lost case, very difficult to recover.

Company or organizational culture naturally develops when individuals and their leaders are bound by the same goal and there is no conflict at both individual and collective level. 

Perhaps it sounds abstract but this is exactly how start-ups are born. Magic of the company culture in startups is exactly defined by above principle. Not the individual skills of the contributors, but collective agreement over mutually respected expectations and goals ignites them. Then the way these goals are achieved is a secondary thought. Company values, processes and bureaucracy comes later, when the company leaves the startup mode while growing.

Important thought then that individual skills do not matter that much in the context of the collective experience of the company. They can contribute to that collective experience only if individual experiences are mutually aligned with company's goals. Also you as an individual can be as experienced as you wish to describe yourself, this is not automatically company's experience unless you find a way how to align this individual experience with company's goals and thus making it successful contribution to company's organizational growth.

If that stops being the case, no company meeting, team building nor funny anecdotes on calls or flexible approach to benefits and different acrobatics can repair the root cause. If the whole organization or substantial part of it, impacted by the cultural loss cannot bring back the mutually accepted goal(s) that everybody can pursue equally within their roles, the culture is gone, the team is gone and at the end the company may be gone very quickly as well. 

That's what I call lack of proper leadership.

One individual who does not share the goal may demolish the culture of the company. If that's the case, it's sometimes easier to let the individual go and reassess, but this is not true leadership as well. This is only reassuring individual leader's position for authority. It rarely helps, as company's cultural loss is like cancer that spreads out quickly and the only true treatment is hard work to convince once again each and every contributor to share the same goals. If people see it and do not want to rejoin the tribe, then so be it, but at least it's been tried.

I personally feel disappointed when I hear or am enforced to talk about values, if there is no mutually agreed expectations related to goals. You can talk about values endlessly. You can pitch how you value people in your organization loud and clear. It will just sound as nonsense, if listeners don't share company's goals and worst, find their goals being better addressed outside the organization or anyhow differently. 

Don't be surprised that performance and productivity drops when you deal with such situations as well.

Think about it when you think about creating and maintaining positive and constructive culture at your company that is focused on growth. 

It's easy to replace right approach with false attempts to relax peoples individual ambitions and goals and the outcome is just the contrary.