“Corporate culture” is a buzzword we see in nearly every people and organisational development handbook these days. The term itself is normally perceived by many executives and employees alike as soft, subjective and intangible.
Corporate culture is, in fact, the overall determinant and the backbone of an organisation’s success. To make it easier to comprehend, however, we can say that corporate culture is defined as “the ways we do things around here”.
It serves as a set of strong guiding principles on how employees interact with each other, how they communicate, how they should act in terms of making decisions or solving problems, how they thrive to get things done, how they believe their career advancement will be evaluated, and so on.
Although corporate culture may be seen as something too abstract or subtle to understand and communicate, it always nonetheless sends strong messages as well as directs employees’ behaviour on a daily basis.
In reality, there is one key determining factor that can either make or break corporate culture and that is the top executives of the company.
Even if you have already identified the desired corporate culture with a well-written description posted throughout the organisation from the entrance to the hallways and in every meeting room, you still cannot be certain that the employees will have a common understanding or belief. That will only happen if your leaders from the top level down to the frontline supervisor really behave and act as role models through their words and deeds in line with those statements of corporate culture on a daily basis.
In other words, corporate culture needs actions and it’s critical that all leaders and executives understand this, so that they can communicate the culture better when they lead by example.
Employees will believe and look up to their leaders when the latter are modelling the behaviours that support the intended culture. They expect their leaders to understand the rationale and the need for the company to identify the culture, clearly communicate and provide real-life examples of stories and actions of the desired culture in action. As well, they must consistently adopt the corporate culture as the guiding principle when interacting with employees and key stakeholders through the way they lead, guide, make decisions or solve problems on a daily basis.
To further cultivate corporate culture, there are many other dimensions that the company needs to take into account. These include a clear definition of the desired culture, a plan for communication and reinforcement, development programmes to assist employees at all levels to live the desired culture, integration of the culture into HR systems, and more.
In strong-culture companies, people work from a shared knowledge pool and mutual beliefs towards common goals. The employees face less ambiguity and uncertainty about the proper courses of action to take when dealing with unexpected situations. Consequently, their actions are not in any way in conflict with what is happening in other parts of the organisation because each person has received and understands the expectations clearly spelled out by the corporate culture in the first place.
Through this, the work of the staff can in turn help improve the company’s competitive advantage while enhancing the effectiveness of the overall operation.
If building and/or reinforcing a corporate culture is one of your company’s strategic initiatives, I strongly recommend starting with your leaders. Make sure they understand, buy in, are aligned in terms of their actions and lead by example, and then the rest will come more easily.
Simply put, you can invest a huge amount of time and money hiring consultants and marketing agencies to craft gripping statements describing the desired corporate culture and making those statements attractively and professionally visible. And you can put a lot of effort into communicating and reinforcing the corporate culture through a variety of activities, events and channels. But if the behaviour of leaders is against or misaligned with the statements, the investment of time, effort and money will surely be at risk of delivering no tangible return.
Arinya Talerngsri is Group Managing Director at APMGroup, Thailand's leading Organisation and People Development Consultancy. She can be reached by e-mail at arinya_t@apm.co.th or https://www.linkedin.com/pub/arinya-talerngsri/a/81a/53b
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