Corporate Culture’s ABCDs

Shawnee Love   •  
October 27, 2016

Last week, we blogged about culture assessments and hopefully got you thinking about whether your culture is helping your business or hindering it.  Your strategy should go hand in glove with your culture, because as noted last week, your culture is how everything geColroful Glovests done.

That being the case, business leaders would do well to understand that their organization’s culture is build or eroded everyday with the:

  • Decisions made,
  • Attitudes, behaviors and communications rewarded, recognized and condoned, and
  • People hired and exited.

Just as you monitor decisions and activities for alignment with strategy, you also want to monitor attitudes, behaviours, communications and decisions (the ABCD’s) for culture fit.  And you want to hire and fire accordingly.

In the best case, your culture is the glove within which your strategy (hand) fits perfectly.  To ensure that occurs, leaders need to be intentional not only about where there business is going but how they want it to get there (aka culture).

However, when I ask about the culture of companies, more often than not, leaders have no idea how to describe let alone define their company’s culture.  I suspect that is a big part of why intentional culture building is still unusual.

Happily, interpreting the current culture and building the culture needed to achieve a strategic plan is implicit in what good HR can offer organizations and it is probably one of the things I love most about my job.

If you want to get more intentional about culture building and don’t have access to good HR, start with evaluating your organization’s ABCDs.

A: Attitudes

B: Behaviours

C: Communications

D: Decisions