A Powerful Corporate Culture Can Propel a Strategy Forward
A powerful corporate culture is difficult to build and even harder to replicate. If you want to boost business and people performance, shifting your culture may be just what you need to do.
Corporate culture has been misconstrued recently to mean everything from being a “happy” or “fun” work environment to a great place to work. We define a corporate culture differently.
A Powerful Corporate Culture Defined
We believe culture drives the majority of behavior at an organization. Your workplace culture symbolizes the heartbeat of your company. It represents the set of norms, values, underlying assumptions, and practices that guide workforce behavior. Culture is unique to every company.
More simply, culture is the way business truly gets done on a day-to-day basis.
A Powerful Corporate Culture Accounts for 40% of the Difference
Our organizational alignment research found that culture accounts for 40% of the difference between high and low performance in terms of revenues, profits, customers, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.
Can a Workplace Culture Be Too Powerful?
The short answer is Yes! The longer answer is it depends. We measure culture on three levels. For two of the three levels it is difficult to make the culture too powerful. For the other level, too strong of a workplace culture can spell disaster.
While it is difficult for an organization to be too healthy, a company must be healthy enough to set the stage for a strong corporate culture that drives high performance.
At this level of culture, it is certainly possible for the culture to be “too powerful.” In fact if you push for greater levels of performance without having commensurate levels of clarity, meaning, and accountability, your performance pressure will most likely create decreased performance.
A leader applying the wrong amount of pressure in the wrong ways can render an entire organization ineffective. Great leaders know when and where to apply performance pressure to get the most out of their people.
The Four Steps to Create a Powerful Corporate Culture that Is Aligned with Your Strategy
1. Define the Desired Culture
2. Assess the Current Culture
3. Create a Plan to Close the Key Culture Gaps
4. Close the Key Culture Gaps
If you want to learn more about the different levels of a powerful corporate culture, download 3 Research-Backed Levels of Culture that Leaders Must Pay Attention To
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