Stop, don’t dismiss or shrug away that little nagging, semi-irritating feeling you get after an interaction with someone in your organization. Ask yourself, “is this a common occurrence?” If the answer is yes, it is time to look at your organization and its culture.

What, how and why your organization does the things it does and how it behaves is a reflection of your organization’s culture. It is all about how you as a collective see the world, interact with the world and what rules you instinctively follow.

Take a step back and think about your organization’s culture. You might use one or more of the following characteristics to define it. Note some are more positive than others.

• innovative and high risk tolerance
• good attention to details
• focuses on results
• values people and team work
• aggressive with take no prisoners attitude
• creative and out-of-the-box thinking
• tolerance for ambiguity
• entrepreneurship focused
• customer centric
• collaborative, open and values trust
• empowered, self-managed, adaptive and agile
• quality work is a given and not an after thought
• need to know basis only; i.e. limited knowledge sharing
• does enough, but reluctant to go further
• ownership and accountability
• not invented here
• penny wise, pound foolish or otherwise known as frugal
• do first, think later or otherwise known as just do it
• …

Yes, the list can go on and on and on… And here is why should you care.

• Your organizational culture is linked to your firms success: Various studies and surveys indicating the link between organizational culture and firm’s success. Denison Consulting’ 2006 study links high performance in key areas of the organizational culture (adaptability, consistency, mission and involvement) to long-term financial performance and short-term sales growth.

  What do you think? Can you establish cause-and-effect links between your culture and other performance indicators such as your current customer satisfaction or employee motivation scores?

• Your culture can attract and retain talent: Individuals differ in what motivates them, what degree of social and community connections they need at work, amount of pay and benefits, as well as level of innovation, entrepreneurship, empowerment and risk taking in the company. Great companies not only create excitement and camaraderie for their purpose, but also build a culture that attracts the type of individuals that they need.

  Think about it… Are you attracting the type of talent you need to be successful in your business? What is preventing you from creating a company culture where you attract best of the best?

• Your strategy and culture are joined at the hip: Lets face it, your culture has a big influence on how your company does things. This influence certainly extends to your strategy. Just think about different generic strategies: cost leadership, differentiation, fast follower, … Each of these require a different set of cultural characteristics to be successful. Along the same lines, for any change in your strategy, you will need to identify the cultural behaviors that need to be changed and managed.
• Your culture can deliver 1+1=3: When you have a high performing organization, you can truly achieve 1+1=3! By focusing on ownership, accountability, action and results you improve your product and services using the same or fewer resources. By relying on their values and leaders, successful companies can decentralize authority to succeed in times where there is a high degree of ambiguity.

  As leaders, our every action sends a message to our people: dusty action item lists, reoccurring discussions with no specific decisions or owners, late start to meetings, runaway meetings, … Just a reminder, the buck stops with us.

• Your culture defines your ethical behavior: The world is transparent and becoming more transparent everyday. Honesty, integrity and ethical behavior is no longer a nice to have, but a must to demonstrate. Sure, you can put in place as many controls, checkpoints and policies as you want to ensure ethical behavior. But, to be successful, this ethics DNA must be embedded into your culture.

  The real test comes when doing the right thing is extremely hard: schedule slippage, customers’ personal data is compromised, lower than expected revenue results, … When that happens, and they will, how do you work as an organization: conduct open, yet difficult communications, take ownership for the responsibility, ensure joint accountability, …?

Finally, here are some of the signs that hints your culture needs work:

• second guessing/revising of decisions;
• execution issues and problems achieving results;
• inability to deal with or tolerate ambiguity;
• excessive workforce turnover;
• living in the past rather than facing to the present;
• loss of confidence in the leadership, direction and purpose;
• excessive politics and bureaucracy;
• firefighting mentality that rewards heroics;
• inability to innovate and risk adverse behavior;
• difficulty attracting and retaining talent;
• lack of respect;

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