INNERGISE!

Last time, we shared five steps to establishing and maintain a compelling company culture:

• Vision – develop a compelling vision that engages people
• Values – create a framework for behaviours
• Managing management – start at the top and create role models for success
• Recruit and manage for attitude – be clear and be uncompromising
• Communicate and recognise – bring it to life

We looked at the power of having a clear direction and compelling vision. Once we know where we are going we need to share how we are going to get there.

How are we going to work together? What will it feel like as a business? How will we be described as by employees? What do we expect from new and existing employees? What type of team do we, as leaders, want to run?

If we can’t articulate this, we can’t expect to really manage the culture.

It is widely accepted that high performing managers excel at setting expectations and holding people accountable.  The creation and implementation of a set of values enables this. This is not for just for the corporate world as someone recently suggested to me – far from it. Small ambitious businesses looking to grow need it just as much. Why?

1. It creates a sense of belonging and engagement
2. It reduces conflict and creates a culture of trust
3. It provides a framework for all managers and employees
4. It makes it easy to see who should (and shouldn’t be part of the team) and what behaviours and actions are appropriate or not.
5. You can retain and attract top talent
6. Get the above right and you can focus on innovation, customers, and profit and performance improvement.

The sense of belonging and engagement remains a key strategy for building a successful culture.
But beware, in our experience, when it comes to creating expectations through values, more get it wrong than get it right, with leaders paying lipservice and not understanding the benefit, which doesn’t jump out of the monthly P&L. Often it serves only to undermine the employees’ and middle managers’ view of the leadership team and time, money and reputation would have been saved by not bothering.

Developing the values requires following a few key steps:

• Be  clear as a leader what values you want
• Have a session with anyone with management responsibility to get their buy in to the ‘values’ journey
• Get the team involved in determining those values – ask them, engage them
• Once they have had their input, refine to the final list (five is a good number, less is ok but be careful of having too many)
• Decide, and this is really important to bring the values to life, what behaviours reflect the various values (i.e. if openness and honesty is a value, a relevant behaviour might be: challenge ideas, constructively, and say what you think). Come up with three or four behaviours per values
• Align your recruitment, induction, performance reviews, promotion of individuals to the values – keep it on the agenda at every stage of the employee cycle
• Be uncompromising – if someone doesn’t buy in, they should find a business who has values they do believe in.

The next in our series of establishing company culture to retain your recruiters we will look at managing management and start at the top.