A company without a culture is like a team with members who are strange to one another. You want to achieve the same goal, but you don’t know the skills and competence of your colleagues. The end result is playing hard and not passing the ball.
Corporate culture is shaped by these things;
- Values
- Consistent practice of the values
- And behaviours of people
As a leader, your role is to define the values that act as a bond among teams. What are those 3-5 desired qualities (values) that guide your way of life in running the business?
Your chosen values or desired qualities should be aligned to your type of business. For example, legal firm values could be truth and justice. Reason, to attain and deliver long term sustainable value to all stakeholders, all staff in the firm should have lived the credo of truth and justice. All leaders need to do is to live truth and justice by example, and over communicate the same in deeds and words to all partners.
Also read: What is your country’s strategy?
When a person consistently practices and lives a value, it becomes clear to team members. To the person, that is their behavior. For, consistent application of the value by one person is their habit. They get known for it. If the company gets other staff to apply and live by the same value, it starts a movement. That movement becomes the face of the company. People start to identify the company staff by the behaviours of the majority of its people who work there.
If the same continues over a long period of time by serving regimes, and era’s, it becomes corporate culture.
Take a case of a country culture. It has been there for generations. You hear about the Kikuyu’s or Bagisu of Eastern Uganda, their culture of circumcision has survived generations. It is their culture. Their way of life
