Culture is defined as the beliefs, values, and behaviors that determine how an organization’s people interact and behave both inside and outside the organization. It’s not something an organization says or tries to be. It is something an organization does. Culture has a huge impact on organizational performance, innovation, agility, engagement, and competitiveness. Research shows that a toxic culture decreases productivity by 40%, while an effective culture increases productivity by 20%. It’s clear that having a great culture gives you and your team a competitive advantage.

Great companies, especially gritty companies, have a strong culture. Several companies I am currently working with focus an extreme amount of energy on building and maintaining an exceptional culture. You can see the culture at work in their stores and in their bottom line. The US Army units I have been part of — 3rd Battalion, 187 Infantry and the Airborne and Ranger Training Brigade possessed extremely strong cultures. But all of those organizations’ culture didn’t happen organically — they required a lot of work and effort to build and maintain. I have talked extensively about developing your team’s culture in post #107, post #65, post #50, and post #48 (the second most popular post on the blog!) A lot of my ideas on culture stem from Dan Coyle’s The Culture Code. If you haven’t read it, it is well worth your time.

How do you strengthen your company’s culture? Where do you start? Here are eight ideas from my work and Dan Coyle’s to help you build your culture.

Eight Steps to a Stronger Corporate Culture

Here are eight things you can do to strengthen your culture now and on into 2022:

• Purpose — Define or refine your company’s purpose. Purpose is “the why for your company or your organization.” It takes tough, intellectual work to get a purpose statement that captures your company’s motivation, is memorable, and resonates with the majority of the group. An exercise to develop your purpose statement is in post #104 and in my book.

• Name and rank your priorities — Most people can only remember and take meaningful strides to achieve 3 to 5 priorities. Writing and ranking your team’s top 3 to 5 priorities is the first step in aligning and focusing your team on actually accomplishing them.

• Over-communicate your priorities — Ask your team what the top three priorities are. I am willing to wager that less than 50 percent can name two of them correctly. You may think you are communicating the priorities as a leader but it takes a lot of work and a lot of repetition. Over-communicate, over-communicate, and over-communicate the priorities to your direct reports and to the direct reports of your direct reports.

• For the repeatable elements of your business, it is helpful to think about three techniques to help build a strong culture:

  • Provide your team models of excellence. Show them what right looks like.

  • Conduct high rep, high feedback training. Think of ways to break some of your complex processes down into some of their most important elements. Then enable the team to conduct numerous repetitions of the process while providing feedback. Think about pilots and their annual requirements to spend time in the simulator replicating mock emergencies. The time in the simulator enables pilots to make the right decisions when real events occur.

  • Create rules of thumb to help the team — Think of this as “if X happens, then we do Y.” These rules of thumb help the team, especially if you are in organization that has high turn over, remember how to deal with difficult customers, make a sale, or deal with a tough situation

• For the creative parts of your business, it is helpful to use three tools to strengthen the culture:

  • Ensure that it is a safe environment to fail and give feedback on the failure. I believe the Army’s After Action Review (see Post #41 for more on the AAR) is a great technique to use to provide feedback after successful and unsuccessful events.

  • Celebrate people taking initiative — To empower others to take initiative it is important to celebrate (try a hand written note as a start point) people who demonstrate initiative that both succeeds and fails.

  • Work diligently to protect the team’s creative autonomy — Ensure the team has the space to work creatively and that bureaucratic requirements are not stifling it.

• Use catch phrases to help the team stay focused on building your culture. C Company, 3rd Battalion, 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment wanted to get better at doing the drill “enter and clear room.” Synchronizing the efforts of four people to go into a room and shoot the right target is difficult. The adrenaline is high and it is sweaty, noisy, and dusty as the teams do repetition after repetition. To help the teams do better we used the catch phrase “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” This idea that doing things smoothly sped things up. This catch phrase helped the team manage their adrenaline and exercise the patience needed to do the high pressure task properly.

• Measure what matters — make sure that the metrics you are using to measure performance are also helping to develop the culture you want. If your company is focused on providing outstanding service, measuring how many calls a person handles at a call center per hour sends the message that quantity over quality service is the priority. Get your metrics in line with your culture.

• Use artifacts — Finally, organizations with great cultures tend to use the history of the company or unit as a way to help convey aspects of the culture. Think about your company’s history. Where did someone do something that epitomized the culture? Then use that story to help reinforce the current culture you are trying to build or maintain. For example, 3rd Battalion, 187 Infantry used artifacts from past battlefields, like Hamburger Hill in Vietnam, to convey the message to the current generation that “Iron Rakkasans” are always ready to persevere and overcome overwhelming odd to win the fight.

Conclusion

Go on the offense and use one or all eight of these ideas to strengthen your company’s culture now and during 2022.