After “How do I make more money?” and “What can I do to free up more of my time?” one of the questions I’m asked most often in my coaching practice is “How do I create a great culture?” My simple answer to my clients, and to you, is that you can’t. You can’t make culture happen, it just happens. Culture is like a chain reaction. It’s the manifestation of what YOU, as the leader, hold to be true, valuable, and rewarded. It’s your leadership values externalized.

Put another way, culture is a result. It happens whether you want it to or not.

Having said that, with clear intention and the right actions, you do have the ability to strongly influence the culture of your organization. Culture is nothing more than a byproduct of consistent action that people believe in, that the organization has adopted as desired behavior. I call this, “hearts, habits, and how things are done here.”

HEARTS – KNOW, LIKE, AND TRUST

First of all, the culture of your organization is built and owned by the people that work in your organization. If you’re a very small business, that might mean it’s just you and maybe an assistant. As you get bigger and add more employees, there are more and more influences on your company culture, and it becomes more and more important for you as the leader to have an influence on those people if you want to have any chance to shape the culture of your company. This means that they must know you, they must like you, and they must trust you. It is impossible to influence people if these conditions don’t exist. The best way to get people to know you, like you, and trust you is to speak directly to their hearts. And in order to do that, you need to know what drives them, what inspires them, and what makes them happy.

And stop assuming you know what makes them happy.

I had a client that considered himself a fantastic leader, even comparing himself to Bill Belichick, the legendary Head Coach and General Manager of the New England Patriots. Much of the time, my client was an inconsistent, bombastic jerk when dealing with his people, and his high turnover rates and lack of performance proved that his people hated him.

When I asked him what he admired about Bill Belichick he told me that he loved that the coach was a “hard-ass” who “held his people accountable” and “ruled with an iron fist.” He loved the idea of the hard-driving, take-no-sh*t, burn-the-boats approach that he thought Belichick personified, and he did everything in his power to “act like” Belichick. Imagine the look on his face when I shared with him that, while the coach was undoubtedly a strong leader who probably did do all of those things, what really made his people perform well – what made them HAPPY – was the fact that he was consistent. His players may not have always liked his decisions, but they always liked HIM. They KNEW who the coach was because he was always the same person. He didn’t change the rules or let up on his principles because he didn’t feel like it. He was consistent. They LIKED him because he wasn’t wishy-washy; he was relentlessly and obsessively focused on the tasks at hand. They TRUSTED him because he always did what he said that he would do, and expected the same from his people. This is what made them happy and this is what spoke to their hearts.

HABITS – WE ARE WHAT WE DO

Please put away the mission statements and the guiding principles unless you’re ready – REALLY READY – to abide by them. If they are nothing more than platitudes, your people will never adopt them. “We are what we consistently do,” is a quote commonly attributed to Aristotle that perfectly defines culture to me. Your culture is a collection and a personification of the habits that your organization adopts. If you consistently treat customers as if they are nothing more than numbers, then your organization is not “customer focused.” If you pay the lowest wages possible for your people, or don’t provide a great work environment for your employees, then “People are our greatest asset” isn’t a maxim that you live by. If you artificially inflate the prices of your products because “our customers won’t know any better,” then you don’t have “integrity.”

As a leader, you can consider yourself both the creator and the keeper of the habits in your organization. If you are inconsistent, then your organization will be inconsistent. Conversely, if you are relentlessly focused on doing a small number of things over and over again – if you are focused on being CONSISTENT – your organization will also become consistent.

Behaviors form habits. Habits drive culture.

The easiest way to incorporate habits into your organization is to introduce new behaviors one or two at a time, and then focus single-mindedly on expressing and reinforcing each behavior on a daily basis, until it becomes something that the team simply embodies. It is now a habit. Then pick a new behavior or two and do the same thing with these behaviors, while regularly checking in on the original set of new habits. Do this consistently over a year and you can successfully implement dozens of desired habits each year in your organization. These new habits will become your new culture.

HOW THINGS ARE DONE HERE – TRAINING FOR RESULTS

If you don’t know exactly how you want your organization to behave, then your people have no chance of helping you achieve your goals. This is where documented systems and procedures come into play; and where a strong training program is paramount to success.
I’m not talking about an “employee handbook” that you send home with a new hire on their first day of employment and require them to sign on day two. I’m talking about real-life, practical standard operating procedures that are posted for all to see, regularly referenced, and that your staff are regularly trained and evaluated on.

Many small business owners have created SOPs for their organizations and pride themselves on having robust operating manuals. They require their people to read the procedures, and some even teach them how do perform them, but few, if any, actually regularly train and test their people until they are experts on the procedures. This is the difference between telling, teaching and training your people.

TELLING is literally that; talking at your people about what they should do.

TEACHING is the act of showing someone what to do, and in some cases watching that they do it right once or twice.

TRAINING is where the rubber meets the road. It’s the process of consistently teaching and evaluating your employee’s performance over time to ensure that the process or system is not only understood, but also acculturated. It has become a habit.

You can’t create culture, but by using some of these techniques you may be able to strongly influence the way that your company operates.