Harvard Working Knowledge offers ten reasons to build a better corporate culture that you can read in two to three minutes max. Then you’ll need to think about them off and on for the next month, for there’s some deep advice here from Jim Heskitt, Earl Sasser, and Joe Wheeler.
Leadership is critical in codifying and maintaining an organizational purpose, values, and vision. Leaders must set the example by living the elements of culture: values, behaviors, measures, and actions. Values are meaningless without the other elements.
Employees at all levels in an organization notice and validate the elements of culture. As owners, they judge every management decision to hire, reward, promote, and fire colleagues. Their reactions often come through in comments about subjects such as the “fairness of my boss.” The underlying theme in such conversations, though, is the strength and appropriateness of the organization’s culture.
Organizations with clearly codified and enforced cultures enjoy great employee and customer loyalty, in large part because they are effective in either altering ineffective behaviors or disengaging from values-challenged employees in a timely manner.
An operating strategy based on a strong, effective culture is selective of prospective customers. It also requires the periodic “firing” of customers, as pointed out in our examples of companies like ING Direct, where thousands are fired every month. This strategy is especially important when customers “abuse” employees or make unreasonable demands on them.
The result of all this is “the best serving the best,” or as Ritz-Carlton’s mission states, “Ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.”
Jim and Earl were teaching at HBS when I was a student there, and I’m glad to see they’re still going strong.
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