Common Sense Approach to Culture

The Power of Company Culture : How any business can build a culture that improves productivity, performance and profits – Chris Dyer (Kogan Page)

All too often there seems to be the mindset that for something to be truly innovative business idea you have to develop some new, groundbreaking approach or plan. Every once in a while someone come along and drops a simple reminder of common sense things that you can apply to your business that can deliver an impactful, positive change.

One such great reminder comes in the form of PeopleG2 founder and CEO Chris Dyer’s new book The Power of Company Culture, which spells out tactical steps that you can take to drive your company culture and deliver bottom line success.

Dyer builds his approach on seven pillars, cornerstones of company culture that are pretty straight forward.

The Pillars

·       Transparency – What is one of the fastest and easiest ways to increase buy in? Keep your people in the loop and on task working for the common goal.

·       Positivity – By turning the focus to what is working well without focusing on the negative you can smoothly shift your team to fixing problems.

·       Measurement – This one is often over looked, but a true necessity; if you’re not holding your team and for that matter yourself up to a yardstick how can you ever hope to succeed. Keep and share a score card.

·       Acknowledgement – You literally cannot succeed without celebration; this one has been a touchstone for world class leaders. If you are concerned about the cost, just imagine what the cost of not celebrating would be.

·       Uniqueness – This one is different for culture, but every marketer knows well that unique value propositions can drive growth; so look for ways that you can transfer that mindset to company culture.

·       Listening – This is hands down one of the most important skills that leaders need to develop, because you really can’t have all of the answers. Encourage your team to listen as well, because your customers will often reveal opportunity that they have to be tuned into, which makes for low hanging opportunities for growth.

·       Mistakes – Everyone has heard the cliché about learning from your mistakes; I recently heard a multinational, Fortune 500 CEO make the comment “ learn for your mistakes, but don’t live with them.” Great advice.

Dyer gives you easily implementable action steps that you can put into play immediately and begin to impact your culture and your business.