Leaders embody their core values

Leaders pay careful attention to develop their company culture.

What constitutes a company’s culture? Anderson proposes five pillars of a company culture:

  1. Core Values
  2. Mission
  3. Performance Standards
  4. Core Competencies
  5. People (pg. 156)

This list calls out many facets of a company’s culture, but in reality they’re all subsets of the first, core values. The mission is no better than a vision statement to drive company culture. A mission guides decisions across the organization, but it will not shape culture. Performance standards will make productivity measurable and make refinements easier, but they don’t create culture. The chosen measurements may reflect and protect culture. Core competencies are barely different than core values, listing the common skills of the organization rather than its values. And people embody the core values, but they ought to be chosen for their representation of the core values, not the other way around. In the end, there is one pillar to the culture - core values.

Leaders can’t afford to let their company’s culture degrade. Any business that’s become profitable has done so by the measure of their product/market fit and the unique culture of their people. Just as no business stops improving their product once it turns a profit, so leaders never stop developing and shaping their culture. The market will pass over a product if it doesn’t change to meet the market’s needs, and the business' productivity will stagnate if the culture is not carefully tended.

To shepherd the organization’s culture, leaders must embody the core values. The core values must be clearly present in the behaviors of people of influence, and protected through the wise use of performance standards and selective hiring practices. Were the core values to lose the power of example, the culture will devolve into whatever character traits are prevalent in the organization’s leaders. With time this can dilute an organization’s productivity and cripple it as surely as the loss of a key product.

At my work there is an undercurrent of fear that our company culture will be diluted as we rapidly grow this year. Despite the best efforts of our recruiting department to find interested candidates who exhibit our core values and the presence of a solid group of long-time employees who embody the core values, there is a strain on every team to shape their new team mates and still benefit from their diverse skills and experiences. Our team alone has hired five candidates, with interviews booked out for the next two weeks to select an additional three. This nearly doubles the size of our team and has our leaders concerned about the effect if will have on our team’s culture. Though I’m often at odds with the emphases my managers take, in the importance of team culture we are united. It may be that the most important goal this year is to preserve the best of our team’s culture and allow the best qualities of our new employees to reshape the culture to be even more productive.

References