Culture & Values:
Why You Also Need Guiding Principles

Cultivate A Company Culture That Follows Your Values & Guiding Principles 

When it comes to culture, your ‘why’ is the recognition that culture is the lifeblood of your company. It’s the collective mindset and attitudes that dictate how you operate, how you treat each other, and how you approach your work. It’s the invisible force that can either drive you towards your vision or pull you away from it.

Edgar Schein, a leading authority on company culture, tells us that culture is not something we have; it is something we are. It’s not an external entity that we can manipulate at will; it’s the shared experiences and values that bind us together. So, when we invest in culture, we invest in our people and our future.

How Do You Create This Culture?

Firstly, you need to acknowledge and understand the existing culture. This involves looking at your shared assumptions, beliefs, and values – your ‘way of doing things.’

Next, you need to clarify your vision and values – your ‘why’ and ‘how.’ These form the bedrock of your desired culture. They provide the direction and the guidelines for behavior.

Then, we need to align your guiding principles with your vision and values. This is where leadership plays a vital role. Leaders need to ‘walk the talk,’ demonstrating the behaviors that reflect your values and drive you towards your vision.

Lastly, you need to reinforce the desired culture through consistent messaging, education, rewards, and recognition. This helps to embed the desired behaviors and attitudes in your daily routines.

What Happens When You Invest In Creating  A Culture With Values & Guiding Principles?

You build an company that is more than just a workplace. You create communities that are driven by a shared purpose and values. You foster an environment where people feel valued, motivated, and aligned with your companies vision. This not only improves performance and productivity, it also enhances employee satisfaction and retention.

Investing in culture is not a luxury; it’s a necessity. It’s the foundation that determines whether you merely survive or truly thrive. So let’s heed Edgar Schein’s wisdom and invest in creating a culture that drives us towards a ‘why.’

Symptoms Of A Potential Company Culture Issue

Let’s start by looking at how you might be able to spot that you might have a culture issue. Common symptoms are:

• Missed KPIs and Objectives and Key Results, and projects are not getting delivered

• Business in not growing

• Talent is leaving

• Lots of finger pointing and blame going on

• When people say they’re going to do something they often don’t follow through

Of course you can also look at how high performing teams work and see which aspects you think are present in your teams as well. Or use specialist tools like ZOKRI to track your culture and spot issues as they arise at the team or company level.

Do All High Performing Teams Have A Similar Culture?

After four-years visiting and researching successful groups Daniel Coyle found that there are three skills that groups need to acquire in order to perform at their full potential.

1. Build Safety – Belonging & Identity
2. Share Vulnerability – Mutual Risk, Trust & Cooperation
3. Establish Purpose – Shared Goals & Values

But before you can develop these you need leaders that are motivated to want to be the change in order to be the best you can be, to want to learn because you won’t have the answers, and willing to do the work to change – change is hard.

Building A Psychologically Safe Culture

Teams no longer exist in clearly-bounded groups, they are more dynamic with cross functional teams and collaboration being normal. Companies need to be able to communicate and coordinate across differences like expertise, status and geography.

Amy Edmondson’s work on Psychological Safety and shared in her great book The Fearless Organization has found that teams also need to be able to work without interpersonal fear. Team members can be themselves, participate fully, display candor, and don’t hold back from sharing ideas and opinions. The working environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

What’s more, high levels of Psychological Safety have been able to explain the differences in performance between different workplaces with the key benefits being:

• Mistakes are reported quickly and quick corrective action is taken

• Big ideas are shared and genuine innovation is commonplace

• Staff feel safe, heard and valued which improves productivity and is a big reason to stay with a company

In her book, Amy Edmondson describes how people constantly calculate the risk of speaking-up, both consciously as well as subconsciously. The result of feeling that there is a risk involved in admitting a mistake, pointing out an issue, or even sharing an idea, is the team and organization’s performance suffers and eventually we also become dissatisfied.

In his book Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek points out similar issues people face when people don’t feel safe, and advantages teams have when they do.

“Without a Circle of Safety, people are forced to spend too much time and energy protecting themselves from each other. It’s the company we keep, the people around us, who will determine where we invest our energy. The more we trust that the people to the left of us and the people to the right of us have our backs, the better equipped we are to face the constant threats from the outside together. Only when we feel we are in a Circle of Safety we pull together as a unified team.” Simon Sinek

Really Value What You Are Told

If ideas and innovation is the lifeblood of a company it follows we want and need employees to share their knowledge and ideas freely. If there is a reluctance or a perceived risk associated with communications then you’re not getting to hear everything on offer, and the chances are some of what you’ve missed would have been game-changing.

Now think about how people are asked to share what they are thinking, the systems, processes for capturing, debating and considering what is being offered, and the level of follow-up and feedback offered.

Is there a chance that opinions and ideas are quickly shut down, not really considered and quickly forgotten, no matter how good they were? Now imagine how that feels and how you might quickly become more reluctant in the future to share?

Now imagine that feedback and new ideas are treated as assets with material value. Gold amongst the bedrock of the day-to-day. What would that signal and how would people behave as a result?

Once an idea is shared for example, perhaps the person sharing is given time to write a short and well structured proposal on the idea for consideration in the next meeting, like Amazon does with their famous 6-pager, and McKinsey do with their Minto Pyramid Principle.

Help Teams Become Really Good At Providing Constructive Feedback

If you want a company full of high performing teams you need to make the provision of constructive candid feedback normal positive working practice.

It has been observed in Pixar’s Braintrust that when people are safe enough to “contribute insight, opinions and suggestions, the knowledge in the room increases exponentially”. You literally “think smarter”.

If this is a behavior you want to adopt you could codify it as part of your culture in ZOKRI and colleagues could recognize each other for “useful, constructive feedback”.

Make Failure A Much Safer Experience

Rather than accept failure, Psychologically Safe teams seek to understand failure and learn from it. Failing rather than causing fear has to trigger a learning process like a retrospective, and be a positive experience.

The fact that when teams or individuals are brave enough to set the bar high, work really hard before working out that the initiative was not going to work and stop (failing fast), nobody is going to lose their job if you fail needs to be clear.

If this is a behavior you want to adopt you could codify it as part of your culture in ZOKRI and colleagues could recognize each other for “trying hard, failing fast and sharing learnings”. Others might then applaud this, the opposite of what one might think would or should happen.

Listen Carefully, Be Humble

In her book, Amy Edmondson tells the story of Eileen Fisher, a lady that created a $500m + revenue company from not knowing, listening, learning fast and not being afraid to be vulnerable.

It turns out that these traits are also present in Psychologically Safe teams. You want your people to all contribute, carefully listen to each other, and when someone does not know or understand something, say so so that they might learn.

If this is a behavior you want to adopt you could codify it as part of your culture in ZOKRI and colleagues could recognize each other for “taking the time to teach me today”.

If you would like to see how ZOKRI’s suite of features could help you create your own high performing culture, book a demo and take a trial.

• Building a thriving company culture is how you ensure your organization thrives, without a strong culture the risk of failure in the long-term is incredibly high.
• The importance of purpose, safety, clarity, transparency and personal development and self-actualization are consistent themes and where high performing teams appear to excel.
• Culture management is a process by which leaders codify, systemize and operationalize a thriving culture using a variety of tools like presentation decks, handbooks and software like ZOKRI.