How Systematic Is Your Approach to Company Culture?

Based on your assessment, it appears you need the most help defining the employee behaviors that drive your success. Chapter 5 of Culture by Design will be of particular importance to you at this stage in your culture’s development.

I often say that driving culture throughout an organization is mostly a teaching function. It’s not simply posting the vision and mission; it’s about what you and your leadership team are teaching your people day after day after day. And if you don’t know what you’re teaching, because you’ve never defined it clearly enough, you’re likely not able to do it very effectively, and certainly not very consistently.

One thing that I find most helpful in defining culture is to reframe the way we think about core values. I call them “behaviors,” and I promise I’m not just splitting hairs on verbiage here. A “value,” in the context of culture, is a principle that governs our actions. Examples of values are words like “quality,” “commitment,” and “integrity.” These are ideas or notions that we may subscribe to. A “behavior,” on the other hand, is an action. It’s something that I can literally see someone doing. Examples of behaviors are, “Practice blameless problem solving” and “Honor commitments..”

Do you see the difference? Values are concepts, while behaviors are actions. And whereas values are conceptual and can mean many different things to many different people, behaviors are action-oriented and are therefore clearer, with much less room for confusion.

There’s a great exercise on how to define these behaviors in Chapter 5 of Culture by Design. You can take a free peek inside the book here. You can also purchase your copy today on Amazon.

If you’d like to explore how my team can be of further help, reach out today.