jen briggs

The word is out about how important a great company culture is to drive productivity, value and brand strength. Building these amazing cultures takes time, attention and discipline every day by everyone. Culture is the pattern of attitudes and actions within a given community and the combination of collective mindset and system design are primary drivers to build a great one. They lead the way and create a flow that helps others to easily pursue the vision.

Cultures can also be negative or a superficial façade bought with perks. Clarity and diligence on the rights and responsibilities of every person in the system to take the high road even when it is lonely is of utmost importance.

Here are 10  things to focus on and watch out for when leading and designing your optimal business culture.

1. Always know where your ego is.

We know leaders have egos. This is an important trait that gives a person the energy to lead others. However, an ego left unchecked is a risk. Good ego in service of others is a servant leader trait. High self-worth promotes high self-worth in others vs. controlling and superficial personalities. Ego that drives a selfish feeling that you are entitled to something from others is a victim trait. There are also great leaders who feel uncomfortable with ego and fail to see the positive influence that people need from them. Oftentimes, I think these reluctant leaders are some of the best. The reality is – you have to embrace a healthy ego and find a group of people you trust who will tell you if your ego is becoming one of conceit rather than capability. This becomes even more important as a company sees success. You want to leverage pride and motivation but you want to avoid attribution bias and maintain a strong sense of humility.

As a group leader, the minute you say … “they seem entitled to …” or “they should be grateful for…” you need to look at your own thinking. I’ve seen leaders become frustrated with people because they should just be grateful for their job and/or what has been given to them. This is not high-road thinking. If you find someone who is frustrated or feeling entitled, there is something behind their feelings. Talk to them. Lead the group to gratitude. Negative feelings are often contagious, and it takes a very strong person to stay on the outside of groupthink. Lead the way, bring understanding, help coach people to solve issues, and build perspective.

A bloated sense of ego is crippling to a healthy company.

2. Don’t delegate leadership.

This is counterintuitive, I know. In democratic, shared, or distributed leadership cultures we want to grow leadership capabilities throughout the company. This also means that you can never walk away from yours. Great leaders are exceptional coaches, mentors, and models and always set the tone and mindset for the company. Great leaders know when to become followers. They are always unifying. Simply because you have an amazing team does not mean that you can step away unless of course stepping away is part of your plan. Even then as an alumni leader you continue to be an asset.  How you handle passing on the baton of leadership is one of the most important things any leader does. Transitions handled well are the epitome of great leadership. The best leaders not only know when to lean in; they know when to lean out.

3. Don’t let a subculture develop.

As your company grows, it is inevitable that you cannot, and should not, be everywhere at once. This places more importance on the mindset and leadership styles of other managers in your company. The first step is to hire well. Make sure your interview process includes some diagnosis of a person’s mindset and his or her desire to connect to your aspirational culture. This method requires that your aspirational culture design is productive and not malevolent.

A manager may galvanize her or his team around their goals, their values, their efficiencies, their scorecard, and their team. This is wrong. The manager serves as a leader who connects, aligns, and unifies their team to the company scorecard, the company goals, and the company style and values. Negative pluralistic cultures will develop from this segmented thinking. If you spend a lot of time in meetings explaining or aligning – you probably have developed unaligned subcultures.

Once you get new people through the organizational and job learning phase, meetings should not be cumbersome. People should walk in unified, informed, and ready to go. It is an executional essence to stay focused on company goals; coping with the effects of negative pluralism will only serve to take people’s eyes off of the prize. This depends on defining what your aspirational culture is and what it isn’t. Again, clarity, understanding, and the collective will to make it all happen is the key.

4. Keep your org structure and systems purpose-driven and stay away from functional silos.

Number 3 is about a mindset. This is about the structure. Certainly, businesses need experts and specialists, and as the business grows, it makes sense to hire for this. However, your taxonomy may create an othering effect if not managed well. The effect of Dunbar’s number can be real but doesn’t have to be. Designing ways to connect people and build trust regularly is important – even if only developing your own internal social media. If you see othering or finger-pointing by category, it is a red flag. Finance pointing fingers at IT. IT pointing fingers at HR. HR pointing fingers at operations and operations at sales. This is not a team. This is a set of people thinking about the functional interests above the greater interests of the company. When time and/or money get tight, and at least one of them usually is, your managers must be able to discern their priorities from where the company most needs the time, energy, and dollars.

Be very cautious of compensation incentives. Most comp consultants will advise you to incent people based on what they can directly control. There is a fine line to incentivizing people so much in their universe that they put blinders on to the greater organizational ecosystem.

Help keep everyone’s eye on the prize. Your company exists for and becuase of your customers. Everyone in the company must have an acute understanding of this, and open book management is a great tactic to do this. What are the top 5 things the company needs to get done now and in the future? How do you make money now, and how do you plan to make money in the future? Make sure your people, systems, and capital are all working together to get them done. Do not let a function start its own efficiency scorecard that makes a function up or downstream less efficient. The objective is to have an effective company that is successful now and in the future with a distinctive brand and devoted customers.

5. Proximity to people is critical.

Trust is built one interaction at a time. Companies that have high trust and low fear are more productive. They don’t have to deal with as much internal political strife.  If you don’t want the perspective of an ivory leadership tower to develop, don’t build one. Literally and figuratively. Don’t put all of the chiefs and directors in the same area in a building. Develop communal kitchens and gathering places where people experience positive, serendipitous connections. Lead by walking around or riding with remote staff. Prioritize time in your calendar to walk around. This is critical for all leaders and specialists. The emotional bank account is a real thing. We must all build them with positive balances. There will be a day when a conflict is necessary, and you take a deduction. It will pay to have sound, trusting relationships to make the conflict a strength. Tension handled well builds organizational muscles. Tension handled poorly creates organizational injury. How many deposits have you made into the emotional bank accounts of your people?

Leadership teams also need to develop high trust and intense unity. Companies are more often a matrix with many great people doing valuable work regardless of what any org chart says. Proximity should happen in all directions. Teams should feel comfortable inviting others to their area. For example, a group of operators may want to invite an innovation team to help explain why they are needing to follow a new process. Even with remote staff – use video meetings, and create humanized technology interfaces and communication communities. Business culture can learn a lot from social media.  Leadership peers should keep tightly networked. When you see these things happening naturally, you know you have a committed, open, unified community.

6. Develop organizational layers as a last resort.

Highly related to proximity, do whatever it takes to resist organizational layers. Get your best leaders in place and make leading a priority. Have them delegate project management or other tactical specialty areas before delegating leadership. Resist the supervisor role. Require an adult mindset of self-leadership and self-responsibility for all and relish your unification and alignment responsibilities to keep everyone on goal and focused on the purpose. Love it. Seriously, love it.

Make leadership an organizational occupation. As teams become larger, support managers to ensure they spend more time in the leadership role. Do not add layers until they are at 100% leadership time capacity or consider an alternative. You can develop rotating project teams focused on product development.  You can give your best leaders more breadth. Include people based on their capacity to contribute not their trained skillset. Develop sub-businesses vs. creating a large organizational bureaucracy. However, do not over-include. Never invite people to meetings unless you need their contributions. Meetings should be about getting things done and building relationships. Informing can be done using other mechanisms (newsletters, blogs, organizational podcasts, etc.). Our in-person time (including video meetings) is precious. People should read information prior to meetings and come prepared to participate, question, and contribute. The more layers, the more cumbersome communication becomes, and the risk of diluting the organizational culture grows.

7. Stop brainstorming. It is not collaboration or coordination.

Brainstorming has its place. But, it has become a too-frequent tactic to bring people and ideas together. Brainstorming should be used as a surgical tool for a specific purpose with an excellent facilitator. There’s a lot of research on the potential we lose in our introverts and the dominance of groupthink with the brainstorming method. There is much to be learned from the project management community on agile and scrum methods that can be incorporated into people leadership. Teach managers to be agile change leaders. 

As Maslow said, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”. If you put people in a position of leading people, they must know how to use the group’s wisdom. They must learn a useful set of tools to bring in all of the smart thinking you have in your company. They must be influencers and sherpas for the business plan. Most change management experts will tell you that people are more adaptable toward a change when they have an opportunity to contribute. Develop systems and processes to have meaningful collaboration, useful problem-solving, and value-added innovation. Create a path where people can help diagnose issues, envision opportunities, solve problems, truly participate in planning and see the fruits of their collective ideas coming together.

People have the capacity for so much wisdom. Why risk leaving valuable business intelligence on the table?

8. Fight bureaucracy all of the time.

Everything in the business should be designed with intention. Watch your budget, purchasing, HR, and IT processes and policies. Are they sensible or cumbersome? Do they create their own firewalls that take time away from service quality or product production? Read your employee handbook – what does it say about the company? Does it focus on restrictive, bureaucratic rules, or does it encourage value-driving action? A certain amount of structure is good, as chaos has its own crippling effect. For example – if every group in the company is wanting its own software – this will make your IT department swell or drown due to support needs. Hire your administrative managers well and make sure they get the low-bureaucracy mindset, can be both inclusive and decisive and do not want to build a kingdom around what they need vs. serving the needs of the company.

9. Don’t be afraid to require things.

No, don’t build a bureaucracy with a handbook of corporate requirements. On the opposite end of the spectrum, don’t become so open that anything and everything is okay. Don’t become so tolerant that you allow norms to develop that are counterproductive to your aspirational culture. Rules are easy and don’t drive human performance.  Know the difference between an accountability culture and a compliance culture. Design your expectations around the 90% of things that will probably happen and deal with the 10% of anomalies like they are anomalies. But, don’t ignore them. No tacit approval. Your business’s health needs you to pay attention to its vitals, diagnose, and treat matters appropriately. You should be prepared to role model, coach, teach, or direct and then deliver consequences if requirements are not met.

Businesses are created to accomplish something.  Be vigilant in requiring that people live norms that express the company’s values that support your business model. Work on what values lived looks like. Require a community of role models. Don’t ever accept someone who gets results but leaves a trail of mistrust and burnout behind them. Similarly, don’t retain good people if they cannot contribute. Build talent that can do both. Require people to go to the proper training, but don’t rely only on the training. Require people to put their new thinking and skills into play. Require constant learning and don’t accept laisse faire management.

10. Be disciplined, intentional, focused, and diligent.

Work on bringing your current culture (the patterns of attitudes and actions) closer to your aspirational culture – your vision – daily. Ensure your benefits, pay structures, organizational symbols, gatherings, system interfaces, and processes are designed with intention and reflect your company personality and values. Being disciplined is a controlled form of behavior that has origins in disciplina – instruction and knowledge.  Rigid is not disciplined, and I believe it is an opposing concept. There is always a culture or cultures, but if you don’t design and orchestrate it, you will see dilution from your intention, sway from your ideals, and worse – – – it may potentially become a source of conflict for progress.