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Design Business Success with a Cultural Manifesto
By Jeremy Henderson | November 12th, 2011
There are a hundred ways to design, renew, or change a corporate culture. Every company has one and most employees and leaders alike believe it is their company’s secret sauce. However, very few companies invest real dollars and cents into up-leveling or even maintaining what is likely their biggest and most valuable asset.
A culture will attract the “right” type of employees and retain those who are personally in alignment with what the company is trying to achieve. Conversely, a strong culture can quickly weed out those employees who made it through the hiring process but really don’t fit the bill. But for a culture to truly play a significant role in the success of any given company, it has to be the lens through which all decisions are made.
The biggest issue with corporate cultures today is that leaders don’t really know what culture is and rarely dive deep into the understanding of what makes their culture great. Most often, especially in start ups and fast-growing companies, culture is a trickle down implementation of the CEO’s personality.
There are only ever three elements to any corporate culture anywhere in the world: language, actions and icons. Regardless of the cultural differences from one country to another, the corporate culture has to overcome these differences to ensure that all employees are working in the same company with the same set of stands, expectations and procedures.
Identify Your Culture
To fully understand your culture, you have first got to study it. Go deep. Get serious about knowing the “how” and the “why” behind the culture that exists in your company. Even if you are a start up with only a week under your proverbial belt, you’ve already got a culture that is developing whether you realize it or not.
Step One: Language
To get a good picture of you company’s culture, start by identifying the language that you use each and every day. Look at your marketing materials, call center scripts, recruiting campaigns, internal communications, contracts, etc. What pops up for you? Are you using language that is very visionary and innovative, but you are an accounting firm? Or, maybe you are a company that believes it to be the most innovative in the world, yet your written language looks like a text book from the 1980’s. Or, perhaps you are a graphic design firm that continually uses words rooted in sound. In any case, a review of all language that is used in your organization will give you a good starting point on your journey to finding your culture.
Step Two: Actions
Similar to the linguistic review that is described in Step One, honestly looking at how your company operates is significantly important. This is where massive gaps start to pop up for most companies, mostly because they are already attuned to the fact that their words don’t map to what they are trying to achieve. So, when the actions don’t match it words, and its words don’t support the vision it is trying to achieve, major opportunity for change tends to follow. Following on with the innovation example above, if yours is a company that claims to be massively innovative, yet is mired in burdensome red tape and overly engineered processes and procedures, then it is likely your culture is misaligned.
Step Three: Icons
Simply put, icons are images that represent something special about your company. Icons can be a specific sign, recognizable symbol, or even a person who serves as the face of the company—usually the CEO. Whatever the case, icons play an equally important role in your company. For example: Let’s say you own an advertising firm and your company is known for superior creativity; however, you insist that all of your employees show up in three piece suits. The disconnect between creativity and business suits is something that will baffle your employees and the suits will eventually become iconic, which will likely kill your brand image.
Publish a Cultural Manifesto
Once you have thoroughly analyzed your culture, it is likely that you will find specific parts that are perfectly aligned and other areas that need to be tweaked. You can then being the process of working on your culture so that you achieve the best business results possible. But, you can’t do it alone; and, you can’t be in every meeting making every decision to get your culture back on track. So, the best way to get everyone in your organization aligned behind your culture is to write a cultural manifesto.
The cultural manifesto is made up of four sections:
1. Our Culture Today: Clearly document where your culture is at today. Be clear about the language that is being used; be honest about the actions that are and are not working; and highlight those icons that do and don’t serve the needs of business. Also, be completely transparent about the fact that the culture is something that must be managed by everyone to ensure business success.
2. Our Culture Tomorrow: This is the highly creative part of the process. In this section of your cultural manifesto, describe the language, actions and icons that collectively will drive greater business success now and into the future. Your culture can be aspirational, but it must above all be achievable. If you design a culture to work toward that is impossible to actually implement, your employees will reject it and you will be in the same position that you are in today.
3. Our Cultural Transformation: In this section of your manifesto, articulate the differences between where your culture is today and where it will be tomorrow. Specify the actual language changes that need to occur; pinpoint the actions that are getting in the way of business success and how they will need to change; and finally, identify those icons that miss the mark and make a plan to change them.
4. Success Signs: The signs that your cultural is winning are clear. First, you’ll find people having fewer and fewer conflicts because they will be using an agreed upon business language. Second, your employees will be happier with the way the business is being run. Finally, you’ll see more and more people upholding the icons used by the business, and will eventually see more people in company-branded clothing.
While Jungle Red Communication offers you a high-level overview of how to create a cultural manifesto, the devil is in the details—naturally. However, regardless of how you get to the final answer for your business, be sure to not miss the always important step of getting employee input before you simply launch into a cultural change. Employees make or break your company, and if they reject the new culture, you could be in a world of hurt in just a short period of time. Employees want to help the culture succeed, so be sure that you let them do just that by offering up their ideas throughout the process and asking them to take the lead to implement the manifesto across the business.
Jeremy Henderson is founder and chief client partner at Jungle Red Communication, a corporate human relations consulting firm. He focuses on helping clients build happy, healthy, productive workplaces that deliver tangible business results through internal communication, leadership, decision making and corporate social structures. You can reach Jeremy at www.JungleRedCommunication.com.
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