S1: E33: How to Build an Amazing Culture
Originally Published on 8/30/2022
Building an amazing culture is a great investment. It is quickly becoming a competitive advantage for organizations in terms of productivity, the attraction of talent and retention of staff.
In this episode we take everything we’ve learned and apply it to building an amazing culture.
Culture is driven from the top down, so if you’re in charge, you have the ability and more importantly the responsibility for building your culture.
Describing culture is the first step, using descriptors to define what you want to see in your culture. Then, linking the behaviours and interactions to demonstrate how those attributes are expressed help everyone understands what the culture is, what it means and how to demonstrate (or “DO” the culture).
Just like you will need a strategic plan, you will need to build out a cultural plan.
I walk through some case studies and examples that show how others have built amazing cultures and how these accelerated and developed over time. Time is still a factor when we are building culture. This takes time.
When building a culture, it is important to describe what we want to be, and how that is demonstrated, rather than what we don’t want to be. When we define a culture as being different than a prevailing subculture, (as in what we are NOT going to be like) it is vulnerable to drift and extinction.
Reinforcement plays an important role in making sure your culture is building in alignment, both positive and negative reinforcement are required to align behaviours and culture.
Lastly, how do you know that your cultural building initiative is working? I talk through a few ways to measure cultural progress beyond the typical lagging measures of turnover, retention and staff attraction.
Fully captioned videos are available on YouTube
References:
This takes my description of the network chart to the next level