When we talk about company culture, we often describe it with intangible characteristics. We use words that convey a feeling or atmosphere to sum up the character and personality of a firm. Sometimes the words are positive, and sometimes negative, but in most cases the description is subjective and something we assume happens organically as long as we have good people who are doing good work.
The truth is, building a strong internal culture requires a tremendous amount of vigilance and nurturing and cannot be accomplished without intent. This starts with aligning the leadership team around shared goals AND getting a strong level of commitment and action. This alignment shouldn’t stop in the board room once everyone agrees that they want to create a strong culture, each member of leadership needs to have a contributing role. They need to show up, philosophically and physically, to demonstrate the behaviors that foster positive culture building while also growing those behaviors in others.
The next step is to recruit the best employees. This goes beyond hiring individuals with the strongest technical prowess — it includes assessing the individual’s ability to impact the culture. In this stage, it’s important to be aspirational about the direction of your internal culture. A common trap is that people often want to maintain the status quo and are tempted to hire carbon copies of the team members they already have, especially if they feel the company culture is already strong. This can lead to a lack of innovation and cultural growth, and before long, you will find your firm falling behind, failing to respond to changes in employee needs and preferences. Instead, look for new hires who can augment your culture and support the next evolution.
Once you have the right people on board, the focus moves to retention and reconsideration. The goal should never be to retain at all costs. There will always be those individuals who just don’t align with the business, whether they are not performing at a technical level or perhaps they consistently bring a negative perspective. If these behaviors are ongoing and cannot be corrected, it’s time for reconsideration. Retaining culture-killing employees has a tremendous impact on culture and will undo all the work that’s being done by your cultural ambassadors, which results in a zero-sum game, or worse, taking you into the negative.
When it comes to retention, it’s all about listening to your team and acting on your commitments. Listening to your team when it comes to poor performers, listening to your team about their needs, and listening to your team about opportunities for improvement are all critical components to retention. To foster retention, it’s important to recognize and embrace differences in demographics and lifestyles, treating everyone with equal respect. Respect is the result of understanding, so it’s important to prioritize different perspectives. At the end of the day, it’s about being kind, a principle we all learn as toddlers but often forget when we’re under the pressure of office politics and relentless deadlines. So, when you see yourself getting frustrated because you feel like someone isn’t understanding you or vice versa, step back and see how you might be able to shift your approach to foster a mutual understanding.
There are many culture killers, but at the top of the list is gossip. It’s important to recognize the difference between sharing an issue to get a perspective that aids in the resolution of the issue, and sharing an issue repeatedly, getting suggestions and feedback and failing to take any action on the issue. Infighting weakens internal culture and diminishes the credibility of an entire group.
The benefits of building a strong culture are numerous. It generates high-performing teams, makes leaderships and everyone else’s job easier, helps with recruiting, reduces attrition, and creates an environment where people want to come to work. Building a strong culture doesn’t happen overnight and you are never done building. There are key questions that should perpetually be asked: are we providing clear opportunities for growth, are we taking the time to get to know people, and are we accurately assessing performance? These are all important steps in the process of intentional culture building. Building a strong internal culture in this way is a continuous process that requires effort and attention at every level from the entire organization.
