Building an Intentional Culture
I have just read, People: Dare to build an Intentional Culture which is part of the EOS Master Series. I really recommend it.
If you were to ask your team to describe your businesses culture in five words, would their lists be consistent? It’s an exercise worth trying, and if your business is typical, then the results will likely be very varied.
In businesses where corporate “values” are merely words on the website, the “culture” tends to be experienced differently, depending on the role and level of the person. Because if your people can’t name the values that drive the culture, how can they collectively live them?
Businesses that invest time and energy into establishing clarity around this subject create an ‘intentional culture’. An intentional culture continuously aligns and regulates an organisation’s values, beliefs and behaviours in support of the business strategy. Businesses that are purposeful about their culture routinely outperform their competition that lack focus in this area.
Often, people think of culture as something that is intangible and impossible to define. The leaders of an organisation may see the culture through a completely different lens than the employees.
Yogi Berra once said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up someplace else.” This piece of wisdom is a good starting point in a conversation about business culture because it spotlights what makes it so valuable: Culture tells your team where you’re going.
A cohesive businesses culture provides a clear vision and direction, making it easier for everyone to work together toward a common goal and to weather hardship and change when it happens. It also tends to make work a more fun place to be.
Furthermore, an intentional culture is incredibly important for companies, because once established, it will also help attract and retain amazing talent and create an environment for increased employee engagement and high morale.
As Peter Drucker once said, “culture—no matter how defined—is singularly persistent.” This has been simplified over the years to read ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’.
It is an interesting exercise to explore your organisational truths. How do your colleagues treat one another, formally or informally? Through ad-hoc communication or structured meetings?
The book explains the four company cultures which covers off most businesses. We were a ‘happy accident’. This worked very well in the early years of the business but as we have grown we knew our culture had to evolve to support a bigger enterprise.
So take a few minutes to consider where your business sits.
Command And Control:
This is a culture that favours and rewards blindly following orders from the top. Command and control is the type of culture you might find in a Charles Dickens novel, where workers are treated as cogs in a machine rather than as valuable team members. It’s undoubtedly an intentional choice, but far from a healthy one.
The Happy Accident:
This is the opposite of command and control. It’s what can happen when a business is built with no organising principle beyond hiring people the founders like. On a small scale, this can end up working great and bring a personal touch to work. However, if you plan to grow your businesses over time, then you need something more structured and intentional.
Chaotic:
If you fail to have any type of intentional cultural vision by the time you move past the point of hiring only family and friends, you’re going to end up with dysfunction. Factions will form and office politics will become more important than productivity.
Intentional:
This is a culture that is built from the bottom up around core values that act as a strong foundation for everything else. That includes hiring, firing and everything in between. With this organic approach, you can create a workplace built around love and a shared vision rather than one based on scarcity or fear.
We are taking the steps we need to in order to get from ‘Happy Accident’ to ‘Intentional’.
We started with a Vision. A vision of what our business will look like in one, three and ten years time. Our vision includes financial goals, what our team will look like and the tools we need to deliver on the vision.
We have created a set of five Core Values that act as the pillars of our vision. We made the core values authentic, practical beliefs that drive our businesses. They are not a motivational poster. They are much more considered than that and probably unique to your business. We only share our core values with our team. They are not used in our marketing or promotional material. But our clients should ‘feel them’ when working with us.
It is fundamental requirement of our hiring process that candidates reflect our core values. We do not share them in advance. You cannot prep for this if you are a candidate. People either exhibit them or they don’t.
I know from talking to my EOS implementer (coach) Dave Feidner that building a healthy culture won’t always be a frictionless process.
But we are reminded that the goal is to create a culture which delivers growth, less friction, higher energy and happier clients. We want our culture to help the businesses become a better version of itself.
This article was written by Abi Greenhough, Managing Director of Lily Head Dental Practice Sales . It was first published in the Mayb 2024 edition of The Probe.
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