The right cures for company culture

At the heart of every organization lies one common thread that can catapult a company to success or bring it to pure heartache — company culture. Yes, every company has its own unique culture, whether it is clearly defined with its vision, mission, core values, success behaviors and expected results, or with some organizations that have no real definition of the aforementioned.

Every company has a culture

Clearly, the healthier the culture, the healthier the organization will become. Virtually all studies of organizational success show by far and away healthy companies outperform unhealthy companies.

The core of healthy companies

Culture can be described in many ways including: personality, “ethos” or character, the vibe, the heart, the spirit and the soul to name just a few.

At the core of a company culture lives the core values and success behaviors that an organization has defined and embraced at every level from top to bottom. Certainly, the needed skills to perform our jobs are important and achieving the right results certainly play a major part of every company’s success, but success will be unsustainable if people are not working in tandem with the centerpiece of core values and success behaviors being consistently practiced.

How many of you have experienced having a team member who had the skills and delivered on the results, but had some bad behaviors and didn’t give a hoot about core values? Warning: keeping these folks on board without being corrected can pollute and even destroy an organization.

Healthy organizations demonstrate some key requirements including minimal internal politics, minimal confusion, high morale, strong productivity, low employee turnover and high customer retention.

The basic components of healthy organizations are leadership, teamwork, culture, strategy and effective meetings.

Here are five key areas that will help with building a healthy, vibrant and successful organization

Start with core values and success behaviors that are clearly defined. These should be included in your onboarding, training and performance review processes. These should also serve as your organization’s compass for how people behave and treat each other and their customers. Team members that either can’t or won’t abide by these should no longer be part of your team.

Leaders, remember this: “People hear your words, but they believe your behaviors.” – Mark Sanborn

Leadership teams must be behaviorally unified and in alignment with achieving the organization’s common objectives. The leadership team should be between three and 10 people. Their goals are collective and shared when managing the top priorities of the organization. A good portion of their rewards and compensation should be based on achievement of the common objectives. This will require trust, respect, admiration, vulnerability and understanding. There certainly will be times of “spirited interaction” or disagreements and even flat-out conflict, but unification will be even stronger if practiced correctly.

Everyone starting with the leaders (and with every position) need to know what is expected of them and how they will be measured. These expectations should be objective and clearly spelled out, understood and embraced. This should be repeated regularly.

Individuals and even teams should be held accountable for achieving their mutually agreed upon goals. Goals need to be clearly defined and agreed upon, and companies need to make pertinent resources readily available. Create regular “touch bases” (I like at least quarterly) to reinforce the clarity of the expectations and make any adjustments and provide any assistance needed.

The final, most important area for a company to become a truly healthy organization is with the organizations’ ability to find, attract, onboard, keep and grow the right people. Having the right people in the right spot, doing the right things right (along with the right core values and success behaviors) will help the organization achieve the right results. Not to mention being a truly healthy organization means you will outperform the vast majority of your competition.

So here you have five fundamental areas to focus on to become a very healthy and successful organization. Now go out there and get healthy.