Question of the Day - How’s Your Business Culture Affecting Your Business?
Question - Once established, organizational cultures often perpetuate themselves in several ways. Cultures can be very stable over time, but they are never static. Crises sometimes force a group to reevaluate some values or sets of practices that define the culture. The critical issue about culture, according to most business gurus, is that it affects how people feel about their job commitment.
Does our business culture support what we want? Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage a small percentage of people who tend to need a lot of guidance. Unfortunately, this often freaks out the really motivated, responsible people who are truly focused on getting the job done. The people we want “on the bus” are the ones who are responsible, mature, results-oriented and don’t need a lot of rules to keep them on track. We are talking about people who are “self-disciplined to create results.” To build a high-performance culture, we need to build a culture of people who take disciplined action to achieve results.
Author Jim Collins describes the process in his book “Good to Great”:
Build a culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework.
Fill the culture with self-disciplined people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to fulfill their responsibilities.
Don’t confuse a culture of discipline with a tyrannical disciplinarian.
Adhere with great consistency to a) focusing on the “greatest” outcomes, and b) stop doing the things that get in the way of the “greatest” outcomes.
Assessing Your Culture
An important part of cultural development is an assessment. A cultural assessment is a process of looking in; looking in at the kind of culture that currently exists. It can reveal some rather startling conclusions. Many conditions discovered during the assessment are the consequences of in-action or of not having made decisions regarding the desired outcomes. Nevertheless, results were created. There are numerous effects from passive decision-making. Your opportunity is to find as many "causes" as possible and evaluate how the effects can create improved results.
Here are a few questions that the team should consider in the assessment process:
· Where are you right now in your cultural development? What direction are you heading?
· What does a profile of your cultural values look like?
· How does senior management reinforce these values?
· What values does the culture support and foster? How?
· What messages are being sent to your colleagues and associates, informally as well as formally?
· How are employees recognized for longevity? For performance? For ingenuity?
· What does your employee turnover tell you? Is it creating problems?
· Do your compensation and benefits plans match your belief system?
· What is your budget for training and development?
· Would your employees describe the company as a good place to work? What are exit interviews telling you?
· Are there discrepancies between your policies, your actions, and your espoused belief system?
There are some sensitive questions here that could result in finger pointing. However, that would prove counterproductive. The objective is not to find blame. Rather, the objective is to identify improvement opportunities, which is best done in a positive, encouraging atmosphere. The CEO can set the tone by reinforcing the good will and harmony of the process. The answers to these and other questions developed by the team should identify where to start working to improve the cultural elements that drive the business and the attitudes of those who create the business performance.
The Academy of Family Business has the knowledge, curriculum, and coaches to help you better understand the opportunities available in develop a high-performance culture. To learn more about developing best practices and their application, please visit info@myAFB.org