5 ways to renovate your culture
Culture is the foundation of a company’s success. It’s how you attract and retain talent. It’s how you live up to your members’/customers’ expectations. It thrives when leaders embody its characteristics and lead by example. If you have a poor work environment, your bottom line will feel its impact.
There are many components that ultimately feed into your culture, which can make addressing bad culture and habits difficult. In these situations, it might seem easier to throw out the entire playbook and start from scratch. However, author Kevin Oakes – who specializes in practices to promote high performance – argues that companies should instead “renovate” their cultures by identifying values and traits that work, and move forward from there.
Here are five key ways Oakes outlines to renovate your culture:
- Develop and deploy a comprehensive listening strategy. Our organizations are made up of diverse people – from skills, to experiences, to goals, and the list goes on. Great leaders recognize that they don’t know everything when it comes to a roles and responsibilities standpoint, so why would you attempt to change your culture on your own? My organization has made a dedicated commitment to improving our culture in recent years: We sent out a staff survey that sought to better understand what our employees want to see from us, and then we formed a Culture Committee that’s made up of individuals from different departments. The Culture Committee speaks to their peers, seeks feedback on initiatives, and makes recommendations to our exec team to implement change. These are some of the things Oakes recommends to ensure you get a full picture from your team.
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