Uncovering Your Company's True Culture

"Invest in individual mastery and market value . . . culture is to attracting high impact talent as a great product is to attracting good customers."

Good Morning Folks,

As you know I am a firm believer in continuing education by asking my team to read business books. Tom Peters is one of my favorites.

But now, thanks to the Internet, there are much shorter reads with just as powerful takeaways.

Here are a few I found in my library to share with the leaders among us this morning:

Jack Welch: Star Wars: When to Let a Top Performer Walk

How to Get Employees to Embrace Social Media

How To Uncover Your Company's True Culture

The Most Powerful Habit You Can Imagine

The Future of Work

Some thoughts on the culture article: Give me a team I can bring together in person now and then and watch the synergy pay off. 

As an people / talent professional, I have been astounded by how often senior leaders don’t “get” that culture is a living thing, unique to a company or organization. I once heard a fairly new leader describe the corporate culture of our organization to candidates but what he described was the culture of his previous company. He truly thought that if he said it, it would be so. As hard as I tried, I could not convince him that one organization’s culture could not simply be grafted onto a new organization and its employees.

The article linked above proffers that "... many companies have tried to adopt, say, the Zappos culture or the Google culture… but in most cases those attempts fail because culture is something that can be mimicked but almost never successfully copied."  

Within every organization, decision making drives performance. Every employee comes to work every day and makes decisions that impact performance.   The workplace has many temptations that employees must resist, from the petty impulse to claim credit for someone else's work, to the unscrupulous lapse of lying in a negotiation, to the criminal act of misrepresenting financial numbers.   

These decisions, at every level of the organization, define the corporate culture and drive performance.   

In 2008, Harvard Business School Professor Robert S. Kaplan and his Palladium Group colleague David P. Norton wrote The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage.   There are ten (10) steps to define the corporate culture and drive performance, including:  

Step 1: Visualize the strategy.   

Step 2: Communicate the strategy. 

Step 3: Identify strategic projects.   

Step 4: Align projects with strategy.   

Step 5: Align individual roles and provide incentives.  

Step 6: Manage projects.   

Step 7: Make decisions aligned with strategy.   

Step 8: Measure the strategy.   

Step 9: Report progress.  

Step 10: Reward performance.  

To make change, leaders must identify behaviors that are in line with the desired culture and find ways to reward or reinforce them

I will like to say these idea is common among young growing companies regardless of years in existence, they are still learning, but when they get to certain points in their growth, they begin to value employees much as the value the customer, quite really, they realize that the employees also make the hearth of the company much as the customer do, it's a matter of time, if the company as a future or big dreams.

Industry training, incentives, rewards, recognition and a TRUE career path sit at the heart of a successful company culture centered on service. At FSO, our Future Leaders Program (FLP) identifies and develops business leaders across the FSO enterprise and ensures a strong bench to fill our national expansion

Have a GREAT day. Love LIFE!

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

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“Never, never, never give up.” – Winston Churchill
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