I’ve always been fascinated with what makes a great company. I’ve heard that corporate culture is what makes a great company, but how do you measure that? I always thought of business as a game about money (though not playful or childish), like sport is about championships; so if you make lots of money then wouldn’t it follow that you have a winning culture?
Let’s assume you have a winning culture, you’re making money, employing people, servicing customers and successfully playing the game of business, but what style of culture do you have? How do you win? How do you organize yourselves? What is the leadership like? If we use the sports analogy, there’s lots of different ways to structure a championship team (defense, offense, team, superstars, size, speed, etc).
What I’ve learned recently is that there is a way to measure corporate culture. There are key areas to look at with respect understanding the style of your winning culture. The eight key elements that we’ve been looking at with our business coach and his program are (in no particular order):
1. Decision Making
2. Conflict Resolution
3. Goals & Objectives
4. Authority
5. Advocacy
6. Coordination between groups/ teams
7. Critique
8. Accountability
These are the mechanisms operating quietly inside your culture and if you can distinguish the nature of these and how you and your team use each of these distinctions, then you will get a better sense of the issues that are holding you back, and at the same time see the strengths that are propelling you forward.
Warning: this is not for the faint of heart and not to be attempted on your own, you need outside facilitation.
This is also a process and requires a commitment of time from you and your team. Mostly what it requires is a strong leader and leadership with the resolve to build something extraordinary. Just to give you a glimpse of what we’ve encountered so far doing this work: I probably quit 5 times during a weekend workshop and got fired 10 times by my teammates for my emotional candour.
As a result we are a better, stronger, more cohesive as a team and playing for our next championship.
Stay tuned for more details on the 8 elements.
Adam Joyce
EVP & Partner
PODIUM Ventures
