WhyManageCulture - Aletheian Advisors

Why You Should Actively Manage Your Company's Culture

Every company has regular ways of doing things. This doesn’t just include a habitual way of doing routine tasks but also a certain way of thinking, a certain way of making decisions, a certain way of seeing the world and a certain way of viewing and treating customers and employees.

This is culture, and most companies just allow it to develop organically. They do little to manage it. Rather than the company controlling its culture, the culture ends up controlling the company – and determining the results it achieves.

If you want to maximise the results that your company achieves, you have to manage the culture – because culture drives how people do their jobs, and how people do their jobs drives results.

If you do that effectively, you end up with a company where people are engaged, effective and naturally synchronised with each other. A company where everyone pulls in the same direction to achieve great results. A company that deals with crises and challenges with confidence. A company that is authentic and true to its purpose, which in turn makes it attractive to customers and a great place to work.

If you want a little more background on any of those points, look at the drop down boxes below. When you are ready, go to the “How to Manage Culture” page via the menu above (or by clicking here) to read in more detail about how to change culture and how to get started today.

How Does Culture Work? Why Is It So Powerful?

Group culture is powerful because it taps into our most basic human instincts.

Humans are social primates. Early man lived and hunted in groups. Your survival was completely dependent on being a member of a group that could provide food, shelter and safety. You would almost certainly die if you were expelled from the group, and you would be expelled if you annoyed others or didn’t fit into the social structure of the group. Our ancestors therefore became highly attuned to the rules and social signals that told them how to comply with the social norms of the group.

We retain those instincts today. Any time a group of people gets together – even a group as informal as a few parents at the school gates or a circle of people at a party – we immediately want to know how that group operates. What are the rules of that group? What is the hierarchy of the group? How should I behave to avoid being ostracised? Social exclusion is no longer a matter of life and death, but our instincts still tell us to be very afraid of it.

All of this applies within a company – which is, after all, simply a group of people who come together for a particular purpose. There are specific rules and there is a clear hierarchy. This is the basis of company culture.

If we want to change the company culture, we can do this by tapping into the instincts that we inherited from our ancestors – particularly our sensitivity to subtle social cues. We are completely unaware of most of these, but we respond strongly to them. For example, we are hard wired to imitate the behaviour of others, although we tend to do so unconsciously. Many of the techniques we use at Aletheian are based around changing social cues in order to change attitudes and behaviours.

What Is the Best Culture for Your Business? Why Should You Align Your Culture with Your Corporate Strategy?

You won’t achieve your best results if your people are just left to do their own thing in their own way. They won’t be working in a coordinated way and are unlikely to be acting in a way that is fully aligned with your corporate strategy and priorities. If you are to achieve those strategic objectives you need people to think and act in particular ways that support those objectives. But how do you do that? It’s hard to control how people do their work.

The key to that is culture. If the culture calls for people to perform routine tasks in a particular way, or to have certain priorities, or to have certain attitudes (such as putting the team first) then that is what people will do. Actively managing your culture is critical. If your strategy for managing your culture is aligned with your corporate strategy then you will turbocharge the results that you get. Aligning culture and corporate strategy is at the heart of Aletheian’s process.

So far, so good. It’s easy to say that the optimal culture for your company is the culture that best supports your corporate strategy – but what does that actually look like in practice?

That is perhaps best explained via an example. Picture the staff of a successful, Michelin-starred restaurant. They do things in a very precise, very exacting way – and everything they do is designed to achieve excellence and to give guests a superb dining experience. Their culture and their way of working is fully aligned with the objectives of the restaurant and they achieve great results.

Now imagine that you transplant those same people and put them in charge of a fast food outlet. If they maintain all the behaviours and processes that drove the success of the high-end restaurant, everything they did would be disastrously wrong in the fast food place – wrong focus on quality rather than speed, wrong way to organise the kitchen, wrong approach to customer service, wrong priorities, etc. There would be huge queues as people waited for a burger cooked to haute cuisine levels of perfection, and there would be mounting losses. The culture of the organisation (a culture that was perfectly aligned with the objectives of the high-end restaurant) would be completely mismatched with what they were trying to achieve in fast food. Culture and corporate strategy need to be aligned to achieve your strategic objectives, and the culture that is perfect for one company can be completely wrong for another.

It is so much easier to achieve your company’s goals if your decision making, your organisational structure and all other elements of the way the company operates are aligned with those goals and with that strategy. It makes it even easier if that alignment is instinctive, because it is just part of the company’s DNA to do things in that way. That is the power of culture and that is what Aletheian aims to achieve for you.

How Can Culture Support Your Strategy?

It’s easy to say that your culture should support your strategy, but what does that actually look like? Below are a number of areas of culture, together with a brief description of how they can support (or undermine) a company’s strategy.

Identity	Identity is essentially about how the company views itself – its image, its perceived purpose and what employees believe about it and about its place in the world. If employees see the company as slow and bureaucratic then they will behave as if that is true (whether it is or not). They will be discouraged from trying to do anything new or innovative, particularly if that requires the company to be nimble. Conversely, if a company that sees itself as highly commercial and competitive then staff will not shy away from competing with other companies and the company will do well in highly competitive sectors.
Values	Values (the real values that the company actually lives by, day-to-day) tell people what attitudes and behaviours are encouraged and which are discouraged. Those values in turn encourage certain ways of doing things that may or may not be helpful in advancing the company’s strategy. For example, a company ethos of putting customers first is very helpful for a company trying to build a brand based on customer service, but may be less helpful for a company that operates in a very transactional field such as real estate. Values also operate internally and determine how employees interact and treat each other. This in turn can have a huge impact on the atmosphere at work and thus a big impact on results.
Action Habits	Action habits are the way that people habitually carry out their day-to-day activities. It is obviously helpful if the way that people go about their daily tasks is aligned with your strategy. For example, if your company does critical medical testing then it is clearly a good thing if your culture encourages staff to prioritise accuracy over speed. You will not need to impose this discipline because it is what people naturally do. That is the power of culture. On the other hand, prioritising accuracy at the expense of speed would not be a good thing for a delivery company. It needs people to work as quickly as possible, even if that means making the occasional mistake.
Mental Habits	Mental habits include ingrained ways of making decisions, ingrained attitudes and ingrained beliefs about customers, the market, etc. Poor attitudes can clearly damage a business, and poor decision making obviously has a negative impact on results. This can be a result of a limited or inaccurate view of customers and the market, failure to look at all the alternatives or failure to evaluate them properly. This is not just true of the big decisions taken by management. It is also true of the small decisions that people make dozens of times a day. A poor understanding of the environment you operate in leads to poor decisions and poor results.
Priorities	Leaders are called on to deal with so many important aspects of business these days, and it is easy to over-emphasise some of them. For example, a culture that places too much emphasis on compliance or internal bureaucracy and not enough emphasis on delivery can damage a business by encouraging people to spend too much time on non-productive activities. That is obvious when you point it out, but is far harder to get the balance right when you are too close to it and you have different people arguing for you to prioritise different areas.
Organisation & Structures	People in any organisation will naturally interact and organise themselves in a particular way. It is very helpful if this reflects the structures required to meet your corporate goals. For example, a culture that strongly encourages teamwork is clearly an advantage when effective, multi-skilled teams are required to deliver a product or service. A culture that is based on a strong hierarchy can be useful when centralised coordination is important, but less helpful when individual initiative is key to success.
Power & Influence	Some people in an organisation will always have more power than others. A good culture will balance put that power in the right hands. For example, you cannot build a great customer-centric company if the people who are speaking directly to customers have little power to make things happen on behalf of customers. Nor can you provide a great product if those responsible for its development and delivery cannot get the resources or support that they need to deliver that product because their voices are not heard. As with Priorities, this is a matter of balancing many different competing interests within the company – a critical leadership challenge. Leaders must also carefully consider how much power they retain centrally and how much power the devolve.
People	Many companies attract and hire a particular type of person. If one particular personality type dominates, then this will impact how the company thinks and operates – for better or worse. A company staffed mainly by friendly extroverts is likely to excel at sales, but may be less good at analysis – whereas a company that attracts and hires alpha personalities will be highly focused on results, but will do less well when it comes to building relationships.

Other Benefits of a Great Culture – Improved Employee and Customer Experience and Greater Resilience

When the company has a strong culture that is aligned with its goals, the company’s behaviour becomes much more authentic – when you say something you mean it and your actions match your words. No more empty slogans, hollow promises or meaningless policies.

This authenticity is very attractive to customers. You say what you mean with confidence and conviction. Whether your focus is on customer service or on value for money or on the quality of your product, they will see that you are genuinely dedicated to delivering that. When something goes wrong you put it right without excuses or drama.

This is equally attractive to employees. These days people are increasingly looking to find meaning in their work and an employer who is truly authentic goes a long way towards providing that. That in turn translates into greater employee engagement, greater efficiency and higher retention rates.

Building the company’s culture around goals and strategy also makes the company more “mission focused” and better at problem solving. When things get busy, as they inevitably will, the organisation does not fall apart. Everyone knows what is important and what they need to focus on and they just get on with it. When you tell people “drop everything because we have to get this done”, everyone knows what their role is, everyone knows exactly what needs to be done and nobody panics. Everyone works to the same priorities. All of this makes for a far more efficient machine in those crisis moments, and it means that when the crisis is over the company can just quietly return to normal rather than feeling stressed and exhausted.

Our Approach

Some people will tell you that the secret of success is to implement the culture of the US Navy Seals or Google.

Others recommend a “top down” approach to establishing and managing culture. They advise senior management to tell people how to behave, or they introduce lists of values that the company is supposed to follow.

Our approach is different. We believe that the essence of culture is found in the small things – such as the day-to-day interactions between colleagues, the things that get approval (or disapproval) and the attitudes that people have to their work, to colleagues and to the company.

We believe that those are the things that you have to change if you want to change the culture. We therefore adopt a “bottom up” approach that seeks to influence the mindset and the behaviours that individuals bring to their daily tasks and interactions. We know from our training in counselling and clinical hypnotherapy that a small change in perspective can have a big impact on how people think about and do their jobs – and that it often only takes a small insight to bring about a major change in perspective.

So our process is built around making small changes that have a big impact. Small changes that are as simple as, say, circulating the P/L to everyone if you want people to focus more on profitability, or changing seating plans to change how people interact, or changing the mix of things you talk about in your weekly email to staff to send a message about what is most important. You might not think that people would respond to such minor things, but they do. It works because as primates we are hard-wired to copy what other people do, particularly high status individuals. Failing to fit in with the group could mean exile and death for our ancestors, so we developed the ability to observe what others do very carefully and to copy what they do. We often do this without being aware of it.

The advantage of using small changes is that they are easy to implement, they aren’t scary and they can easily be reversed if they don’t work. Many are things that people may not even notice consciously, but they will still respond to. So why not try some small changes today?

Why You Should Actively Manage Your Company's Culture

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