Part I – Defining Culture
By Blake DuBose and Mike DuBose
An organization’s workplace environment has a significant impact on staff, customers, leaders, and vendors—not to mention the bottom line! Whether a business, house of worship, non-profit, school, or branch of government, no two organizations have the same culture.
According to Kate Klease of Vantage’s Business Strategy Blog, “Happy people are more productive and more willing to go the extra mile for your business.” When employees are engaged and satisfied, they are more productive than those who are not content with their jobs.
The word “culture” is thrown around frequently in business literature, but what does it really mean? Terrence Deal and Alan Kennedy, creators of one of the first organizational culture models, said that culture consists of key beliefs, concepts, and values shared amongst an organization’s employees. Edgar H. Schein defines an organization’s culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems.” Culture is essentially how employees and leaders behave toward one another, their customers, and their vendors. It is the DNA that fuels the business, defining what the people within value and promote. Our personal friend Dr. Gary Enfinger summed it up perfectly: “It is who we are!”
Culture is the glue that holds an organization together. Healthy cultures result in client and employee satisfaction, profit, and community awareness of the organization’s commitment to making the world a better place. Conversely, a toxic culture means a poisonous environment that leads to staff unhappiness, bickering and fighting, client dissatisfaction, low profits, poor quality work, and ultimately…failure! People who work in such environments seem like “the walking dead,” and they dread coming in each day.
If someone asked you to define the culture at your place of business, what would you say? I challenge you to pause for a moment and do just that. List its strengths, opportunities for improvement, and areas that fall in between the two. Finding it difficult? If you are a leader, it’s likely that your perceptions will not match your employees’ unless you have conducted confidential staff surveys (and made adjustments according to the resulting feedback). We recommend that leaders who truly want to understand what is going on within their organizations conduct such surveys periodically. Leaders often mistakenly focus on salaries, fringe benefits, leave, and physical work environment while neglecting the areas that really make employees feel good about their jobs, like genuine appreciation and recognition and contributing to society through work and volunteerism. To make things worse, some leaders surround themselves with people who think like they do or hire incompetent individuals who will not challenge the status quo and report only what leaders want to hear. This gives them a warped sense of how their organization is functioning.
This happened to us in 2007, when we were faced with the bleak reality that our companies had toxic cultures. We conducted a confidential online survey of staff and leaders and were stunned that 75% of employees said they would not be with our companies in five years. At first, we were bewildered at this level of unhappiness because our companies offered some of the best office environments, salaries, and benefit packages around. After reading the disturbing report two times, we were irritated, offended, and even angry at some of the things staff members said. We thought, “No, this cannot be!”
Fortunately, after checking our egos at the door, we were able to step back, pause, and really listen to what employees were saying. We eventually read the report ten times and came to the conclusion that our leadership was ineffective, the bureaucracy was stifling, and our method of doing things needed major changes. To make matters worse, our mission and purpose were “to make money,” and we did not care how as long as we made lots of cash! Greed and the love of money were the driving forces of our culture then.
Yes, we as leaders were out of touch with what was really going on, and as a result, our organizations were spiraling downward. Fortunately, we were able to look into the mirror and face “the brutal facts,” as Jim Collins suggests in his bestseller Good to Great. Then, with a goal of dissecting our problems to determine their causes (and applying this knowledge to make improvements), we created a plan of action.
We read Good to Great several times to learn more about the elements that make superior companies. After combining that with knowledge from Execution: Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan, we established the goal of creating great, humble companies filled with excellent staff. We also brought in an independent outside consultant who did not mind telling the Emperor he was not wearing any clothes!
Reversing the course of our companies was like turning an ocean tanker in the opposite direction. It took a lot of work, but now, in 2011, we can confidently say that all of our employees are happy, work quality has significantly improved, profits have risen, and client surveys report 100% satisfaction. We learned that every organization can become great if they choose, but it requires a major paradigm shift in the way leaders and employees think and act. The necessary changes may take years to implement successfully; however, building a great company is not something accomplished overnight. Leaders cannot simply say, “We are going to build a great company tomorrow.” The overhaul must be carefully planned, with a focus on quality, hiring the right people for the right jobs, making good, prompt decisions, putting staff first, building fun work environments, and executing, to name a few. This should all be done in a caring, strategic way. Before we talk about executing these changes, we’ll examine where your organization currently stands. Thus, you can assess the true causes of any dysfunction and design an accurate treatment plan for the future.
There are different degrees of toxicity within organizations. Some may be just beginning their decline, while others may be in a steep nosedive with major trouble ahead. We applaud those of you who have just started your companies and want to make things right from the beginning!
The bottom line: It is never too late to improve your organization’s culture. Our next article will help begin the process by identifying symptoms of a toxic workplace.
