You hear the term bandied about everywhere.   What’s the corporate culture?  How can we change the corporate culture.  But, do you really know what they mean?

Most of us don’t recall the definition we learned about culture back in fourth or fifth grade when we studied the culture of nations and peoples.  In a company, the concept of culture is how we answer the phones, how we handle customer concerns, and how fast we respond to our client’s needs or wants.

You see, –  The problem is that too many of us make rules to set behaviors. Or, various writing and speeches that we provide (our formal communications) to our stakeholders.

But, that’s not the best way to educate our folks- and more importantly, to influence their behaviors- to match what we expect to be the norms.   It’s the reward system (and compensation) that we institute and maintain.  Those stories we tell about what happened, how we reacted to events, etc.- they make the ideas more concrete.  And, let’s not forget the examples set by our corporate executives and our peers.

That’s also why it’s tough to change corporate culture.  Because we can’t just send a memo around to everyone and expect the changes to be instantly manifested.  But, more importantly, unless we have just one office (and one department), we will see that culture is really a local phenomenon.

In our company, there is a “national culture”.   But, just like in the US, where there are Southern customs, different speech patterns, different local foods- our offices on the West Coast, our offices in the Southeast have their own local flavors.

Many of our clients have departmental cultures.  Some of those cultures are exactly their problems, too.  Because while the company may want to exude an informality, a distributed chain of command- their human resources department is replete with rules, red tape, and the like.  Completely different that what obtains in the rest of the company.

It’s why we need to engage (or eradicate) the local leaders, the department heads, the team leaders to insure that the behaviors we want permeate every level of our organization.  To provide a uniform practice to all those who operate under our banner, so the public perceives the culture we want to project.

That’s the function of the leader.  To some degree, that leader has to be the rabbi, the priest, the imam that insures the culture is manifest in everything the company does.

Share this: