Your company’s culture is who you hire, fire and promote.
This is not about some cheesy words that you preach every annual gathering or print in bold at your lobby
Every organization has a culture.
- it may be a culture of “not talking to each other and awkwardly waiting for situations to sort itself out”
- it may be a culture of “not sharing information and holding-on to power”
- it may be a culture of “expecting cooperation while using paradigms of competition”
- it may be a culture of “lack of shared top level culture and breeds disparate subcultures”
The point is that every organization has one.
However, some organizations have these cultures instead
- some have a culture of “innovation and and continuous learning”
- some have culture of “teamwork”
Now which kind of culture do you prefer?
Positive Winning Cultures do not just happen, they are built. (or else you are entrusting your organizations’s success to luck) Culture begins from hiring, continues during training/development and is reinforced during day to day activities. If you aim to have a culture of cooperation. they you should hire people who talk, people who genuinely like to cooperate and provide venues for them to openly share ideas. You cannot just hire random people because you think they are smart and expect them to magically cooperate.
If you aim to have a culture of continuous learning then hire people who hunger for growth,(G of ERG of Alderfer’s revised hierarchy of human needs). Provide them resources and opportunities to grow themselves and others. You cannot hire people who are just longing for existence (E of ERG) and expect them to be the innovative employee that you are dreaming of.
culture eats strategy for breakfast – originated from Peter Drucker (management theorist) and made famous by Mark Fields (President, Ford Motors)
have you ever had a problem and tried to introduce a new tool hoping that it would magically fix your problems and then it failed due to resistance of members against the new tool? it is because the tool does not match your culture!
Other Things i recommend for reading related to this
- “Be our guest“:Perfecting the Art of Customer Service
- Netflix Culture
- How to truly establish a continuous learnign culture
- https://www.slideshare.net/KarenMartinGroup/how-to-truly-establish-a-ci-culture
- Spotify Engineering Culture part 1
- Spotify Engineering Culture part 2
if you are a software developer who is interested in microservices you might already know that spotify and netflix has implemented them with huge success. That success is because their choice of technology(tool) matches their existing culture(process)
To do: Insert toyota way here To do: copy other examples from drafts and post here