Cultivating Culture, Part 1: What is it? And how strong is yours?

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Imagine a girlfriend tells you she’s been to New York for a weeks holiday and didn’t enjoy it. She found it tedious and uninspiring: the food was crap, the people were dull, and she prefers the Riff Westfield to Madison Avenue.

You’re thinking, ‘Are we talking about the same New York?’

Or even, ‘Why am I friends with this moose if she can’t even have fun in NYC?’

Because even if you have never been to New York, it has such a strong culture that you already believe it’s a vibrant, dynamic and interesting place. To the extent that you would question someone’s opinion if they said otherwise. That’s impressive. Wouldn’t you love it if your business had such a strong, positive culture that people who weren’t even customers thought a bad review of you was probably more of a reflection on that person than your enterprise?

And yet it’s such a hard thing to pin down.

Culture tends to be one of those gut feel things. It can be described as a set of values that people use to govern their interactions, but if you’ve ever been part of a strong culture, you know it feels deeper than that: it can incorporate a sense of humour, a dress style, mannerisms, standards, you name it.

If you are thinking that your business or workplace doesn’t have a culture, I can tell you unequivocally without even visiting, that you are wrong. It may not be strong, it may not be inspiring or engaging, but it does exist.  

So there’re two things to work out from here: firstly, do you have a strong culture and secondly, is it the culture you want?

In order to answer these questions you need to come up with a few scenarios that might occur in your business, but aren’t either very common or very rare. For example, 

• You own a printing business and a customer received half of their leaflets with some copy chopped off, 

• You own a café and one of your casual Saturday wait staff has her birthday,

• You manage a small team and there’s a staff member who comes into work thirty minutes late at least twice a week,

• You own a small gift store and a local charity asks you to donate products to their raffle.

Try to make them varied to include scenarios involving a variety of clients, staff, suppliers, etc and a variety of positive and negative issues.

Now take that handful of examples to your team and ask them to answer how they would handle the situation. Make it clear that there’s no right or wrong answer, it’s just to gauge whether your work place has an existing strong culture.

And when you get those answers back, you’ll have a pretty good idea whether you do or not, and whether it’s the culture you envisaged your business/team to have.

Surprise, surprise, next weeks’ post is going to be the first step in building the culture you want. 

* For more of these posters, click here to download the free zip folder.