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Suppose you own a small retail store and you’ve decided to add e-commerce. You work long and hard with the best consultants around and roll out a brilliant online strategy that you’re sure will bring in stacks of digital dollars — if your team is on board with the innovative, highly responsive approach you need for online sales and customer service.
If they’re still stuck in “the way we’ve always done it” and cling to their 9-to-5-and-home attitude, your forward-looking strategy is doomed to fail.
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Company culture eats strategy for lunch every day and every time. Strategies are important but most of them change with the economy, finances, world events and other temporary circumstances. Culture is a consistent, steady force that powers you through the challenges and makes it possible to handle them. If you have the right culture, you can get over anything that comes your way.
Culture kept my company going through the 2008-09 recession that hit hard at so many businesses. We not only had layoffs but also asked our top executives to take less, and they did so without hesitation. We made it through the COVID pandemic by asking our teams to step up to help franchise owners. It’s because of the behaviors and norms we’ve cultivated that we’ve been able to pull together and create success in precarious circumstances.
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Cultivating the culture
There are many kinds of culture, from casual and family-like to formal and hierarchical — the kind you encourage depends on the results you want to achieve. And you won’t necessarily have a single type of culture but may combine elements from more than one.
For instance, my company thrives on a family culture where everyone knows and likes each other, and we have a lot of social events to help people get to know one another. But we’re also focused on results, so we like to set up friendly but serious competitions and make a big deal out of recognizing top producers. You may be in a creative business or a startup where disruptive, “out of the box” thinking is encouraged, but you’re still managed with a stratified structure, so your creativity doesn’t go off the rails.
Think of it like a garden. Your culture has to be carefully cultivated to produce the results you want. Choose the wrong “seeds” — the people you hire and promote — and you could get teams who don’t align with each other’s work styles or understand your company’s values. They may even work against it. An employee who doesn’t fit with the culture may become an unhappy employee, and an unhappy employee is a less productive employee.
That’s not to say everyone has to be exactly alike and march in lockstep with each other. Someone who’s a little different can make interesting contributions the rest of the team might never have thought of. I’ve seen employees who don’t quite mesh with the team but are highly effective — they put their heads down and work harder than others. Maybe they won’t be a manager or leader, but they can still produce at a high level.
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How do you know your culture is working? It’s not as easy as testing a new machine or software. The signs are more subtle, but if you see these positive signs you’ll know you’re on the right track:
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Employees are coming in early and staying late. This tells you they care about your company and the work they do for you. It should go without saying, but this dedication must come at their own decision. Otherwise, they’re just following your orders.
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They help each other hit goals. This suggests they want to help the team succeed and, by extension, the company.
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Growing your culture and keeping it healthy
It’s crucial that hiring managers take culture fit into account when interviewing candidates and take it as seriously as they do skills and experience. Bringing together the right people should be one of the most important things managers do, because they protect the culture that matters so much in the company’s success. Compatibility should be the first item on your interview checklist.
Keep your garden healthy by weeding out negative employees from your teams — better yet never hire them. As they say, attitude is everything, so the minute you see an issue, you cannot ignore it. Address it and squash it. The “I told you so” people will also negatively affect you, as they were never 100% on board.
It’s hard enough to run a successful business. The last thing you need are negative people who keep your garden from flourishing. As an owner, president or CEO, your number one priority is to build and sustain your company culture. As you grow the business it becomes harder and harder to keep the culture, but you must work at it every day. Constantly fight the fight, and don’t let it slip, or you might wake up to a different company—one you don’t recognize.
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