Define your culture? We toss the word culture around when we talk about how our team or our company is performing, or where we’ve been, or where we’re headed.
What are we talking about?
Like a twice baked potato, the word culture can be fully loaded. There is so much implied about this word. So much assumed about our shared understanding in its meaning. As my daughter likes to tell me: “Dad, you know what you do when you assume? You make an assumption!”
If I ask you how hot your coffee is, you’ll give me a different answer depending on the moment I ask the question. So it is with your culture. It lives on a continuum of change.
Related: Shackleton Leadership for Navigating Change
I’ve worked for multiple organizations and I spent 20 years with a single organization. Each had distinctive cultures. My last organization had a constantly evolving culture over the 20 years I spent there. The culture at the end of my tenure was far different from the culture when I started. That’s not good or bad. It simply is.
There are 3 things I want you to think about when you ponder the question: “What is our culture?”
First, your culture represents a snapshot of who you are as an entity at a moment in time. You can think of it as a selfie of your organization. You take the snapshot of your people, your processes and your performance. You hold it up, take a step back and gaze upon it. You consider all the values, core principles, virtues and foibles that are imbedded in that picture. You know that in addition to those things that are explicit about who you are as an organization, there are implicit elements as well. Elements that don’t leap off the photo paper. Things like tribal knowledge about how people get things done. Beliefs about your organization’s role in the world and your abilities or inabilities to influence that. Foregone conclusions about your growth prospects, and acceptance of your self-perceived limitations to reach new heights.
Related: When You Ask For Feedback, Do You Really Want It?
Take that selfie again tomorrow, and some of these elements will have changed. Factors large and small, from a big sales win or major production interruption to a planning conversation among employees or a missed appointment, affect your culture. Like a ship that is influenced by subtle changes in the wake of the sea, every one of these factors goes into the culture creation stew. Recognizing that culture isn’t a static state that is revised once per year by your management team is critical for you as leader. Getting your team members, colleagues and fellow leaders to internalize this concept determines whether you are in the culture driving seat or simply a passenger along for the ride. Encourage everyone around you to take and ponder the organizational selfie each day.
Second, your culture is defined by small actions taken by individuals. It doesn’t flow from high level declaration of principles. Organizations pour time and energy into authoring guiding principles designed to anchor behaviors to a desired culture. These principles are printed on glossy brochures and annual reports. They are trumpeted at sales conferences and team meetings. They may even show up in sales presentations. In most organizations though, they remain largely aspirational. They serve as bullet point reminders of what we wish our culture to be. Often though, they are not real time indicators of what our culture actually is in that selfie. Each employee acts in response to the problems of the day. Like a player on the field, she doesn’t always have the luxury of consulting the game plan in that moment. The best she can hope for is to reflect on her decision and action after the fact and compare it to the overall plan. Was it consistent with the plan? Was it contradictory? Did it align with the company’s previously drafted aspirations and values?
I’ve been around plenty of salespeople who spend time in their customer presentations touting the company’s mission and values. This self-talk portion of their pitch takes away from important listening time. It offers the customer validation criteria so they can hold the salesperson to their stated principles. Are they walking the walk, or simply talking the talk? My experience is that customers are rarely interested in your core principles unless they directly impact their own success. Every virtue you espouse must represent value creation for your customer. The next time you feel the need to take a customer through your company’s guiding principles, make sure you accompany each with a factual example of how you and your team has put them to work in support of their tangible business success. If you can’t do that, its probably because you are not living up to your cultural aspirations. You better get to work on doing that first.
Third, you and your team are in daily command of the culture you want to create. Culture doesn’t just happen to an organization, unless you let it. Much of what happens in the course of selling is reactive. A competitor springs a new deal on your best customer. You experience a setback in fulfillment or product quality that adversely affects your customer. A cost fluctuation triggers a sudden price increase that you must deliver. Your primary customer contact is retiring, being promoted, or has been fired. Unforeseen developments cause you or your salesperson to react on your feet. Quickly. You probably don’t have time to consult your company’s guiding principle slides to decide how to react to these situations. These events and your response to them define your culture daily.
Related: Companies Need A Mission Statement…What About You?
You can still be intentional about most of what you do to lead your team to success. Living your culture each day, and coaching your people to do the same, means you are striving for transparency in all of your interactions with customers and colleagues. Sales leaders tend to coach their salespeople by carefully laying out what they want to achieve with their customers. How much product can we sell? How much share can we gain? How can we accelerate orders and keep the competition at bay? But what about those scenarios that pull you off track? You should be devoting the same amount of energy to planning for contingencies as you do laying out your sales objectives. Talk with your team about how you’ll handle those scenarios when they occur. Don’t just wait for them to knock you off balance and then try to survive them.
Then go a step further. Guide your salespeople to talk transparently with your customers about how your company will behave when these situations occur. Explain how your customer can expect you to communicate with them and support them in tough times. As leader, develop multiple levels of relationships with your customer, so no single buyer holds disproportionate power over your business with them. Then turn to your organization. Educate your colleagues and functional leaders about your customers and your selling strategy. Agree on communication plans so you are not caught off guard by production interruptions or supply chain irregularities. Get as much advance notice as feasible for any factors that affect your customer relationships. Chances are that if you strive for transparency upstream and downstream from you and your team, you’ll maintain consistency with your organization’s intended cultural principles.
Keep these 3 ideas in mind the next time you are talking about your culture at a cocktail party or in a boardroom or at the coffee shop. Avoid asking or answering the question: “So can you define your culture?” Instead make it a 3-part question:
What is your culture…today?
What observable individual actions are driving change into your culture? And in what directions?
What are you doing to coach your fellow employees on being intentional about taking daily actions that support and advance your company’s culture?
Define your culture by understanding what it was yesterday, what it is today, and what you choose for it to be tomorrow. In fact, answer this 3-part question each day, and walk yourself, your team and your organization in the direction of the culture you want to create.
There are no innocent bystanders when it comes to culture. Culture doesn’t just happen.
Culture is a choice. Your choice.
Lead well.
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