And the Winner Is......Culture!

The Harvard Management Update (1/2008) published a review of Bain & Company'ssurvey of 1900 global executives. The article, Creating and Sustaining a Winning Culture, focused on the relevance of a (strong) business culture to success.

I love finding information that supports what I believe.

Here are some excerpts. I invite you to download the report at my website.

• 91% of the 1,200 senior executives at global companies surveyed agreed that “culture is as important as strategy for business success.”

• In another recent Bain survey, 81% of executives agreed that a company without a winning culture was “doomed to mediocrity.”

• Companies with winning cultures are better able to execute on strategy; their employees maintain a healthy external focus on customers and competitors rather than on internal politics or turf. Employees think and act like owners—they take personal responsibility for overall business performance, not just their slice of it. They also exhibit a clear bias for action, with little patience for bureaucratic debate.

• Instilling a winning culture can be a tough challenge, as it requires changing how people think about the company and altering habitual behaviors. Crises that threaten a company’s very survival can be potent catalysts for cultural change. But any kind of marketplace threat—new competitors, new technologies, new regulations—can present an opportunity to break down old, unproductive habits and instill the elements of a high-performance culture.

I suggest that implicit to any "winning culture" are

1. Values and behaviors with which employees can readily identify,


2. Attitude and work environment that stimulate employees to engage in "living" the culture,


3. Continuous attention to the culture's validity and vitality to the business's current situation.

Feel free to visit Wright Results and download this informative document.

Comments

[Scot Herrick]

How would you suggest employees or the management team change a culture?

[Tim Wright]

Scot,
My belief is that effective culture is defined and implemented by the top of an organization. Open forum discussion (ie, a leadership retreat) among the business's leaders can set the scope and structure of the culture.

The next step--equally critical--is communication of the culture to the management team. That communication must be both broad and specific. It must contain the culture's purpose, the values on which the culture will be based, and the attitudes/behaviors that will manifest those values.

Third, managers adapt their management skills/styles (if necessary) to insure they are "managing to the culture." For example, if the culture is based on commitment to customer loyalty, managers should not manage with expense reduction as their #1 priority.

This is just a short-hand version of a shortened look at how culture comes to be and makes a difference regarding a business's success.

Thanks for asking.

Tim