How to build company culture

You’ve determined that a particular culture will allow you to execute your business strategy, but how do you build it? Angelo Kinicki has years of research and consulting experience in this area as the Weatherup/Overby Chair in Leadership at the W. P. Carey School. Listen as he describes actions you can take to build that culture. The Business to Go podcast series is brought to you by the W. P. Carey School of Business — knowledge and skills that you can put to work today in your business and career.

You’ve determined that a particular culture will allow you to execute your business strategy, but how do you build it? Angelo Kinicki has years of research and consulting experience in this area as the Weatherup/Overby Chair in Leadership at the W. P. Carey School.

Listen as he describes actions you can take to build that culture. The Business to Go podcast series is brought to you by the W. P. Carey School of Business — knowledge and skills that you can put to work today in your business and career.

Transcript:

Hello, this is Angelo Kinicki. I’m a professor in the Weatherup/Overby Chair of Leadership at the W. P. Carey School of Business, and I’m going to talk to you briefly about how to build a company’s culture. As you know, if you listened to the previous podcast, that’s very important because organization culture is related to a host of measures of organizational effectiveness.

How do you build culture? First off, to answer that question, you have to say: What is the strategy that my organization is pursing, because you want to make sure that the culture is consistent with the strategy. As many people have said, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

What that means is, you can have the best strategy but if you don’t have a culture that’s consistent with it, you have a very difficult time executing on the strategy. All right, how do you build culture? There’s a variety of ways. Let me give you some of the keys:

• Number one is the stated vision and values that you have in your organization.
• Two, design a physical space. For example, if you want to increase innovation and creativity, open up the walls. Make sure people have open spaces to talk and share and work together.
• Three, slogans. You might think they’re corny, but slogans are important. For example, at the W. P. Carey School of Business, one of our slogans is “The Top Mind Business School” and we want people to think of our school when they think of the great schools.

Another thing that you can do to embed culture is to tell stories. Southwest Airlines is noted for that. They tell stories about how Herb interacted with employees or customers. Telling stories is a good way to reinforce the underlying values which are part of organizational culture.

To all of you listening to this podcast: don’t ever forget that your behavior and your role modeling is a very key component of how you embed organizational culture. All the actions we exhibit at work are like painting the canvas of organizational culture. So if you want to model openness, be open in meetings.

If you want to model dictatorship, then don’t take anybody’s opinions. You get the point. It’s your behavior is a strong culture embedder. Reward is one of the most powerful [tools for building culture]. For example, Southwest Airlines uses profit sharing, which is a way to embed a culture of collaboration and cooperation.

General Electric does not use profit sharing because they want to have a culture of individual achievement and performance. Finally, be conscious of what you pay attention to as a manager. Employees will watch you, and if they see that you pay attention to customers, they’ll believe you have a customer-focused culture.

If they see you demonstrating that you care about employees by doing simple things like going to birthday parties, weddings, celebrating events, they’ll believe that you care about people. So the final answer is you build the culture by behaving in the way that’s consistent with how you want that culture to be.