What is Organizational Culture?
“Our culture is friendly and intense. But if push comes to shove we’ll settle for intense.” — Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Forbes. April 23, 2012
What is company culture? How do you define corporate culture as a business concept? Would it be as simple as saying that it’s the personality of a particular business?
The definition of corporate culture goes far beyond a personality or a company’s brand. It’s the collective ways in which 10’s, 100’s or 1000’s of employees interact to make the day-to-day decisions (both large and small) that execute organizational vision and strategy.
Great company culture is the alchemy of both the spirit and practices that make a business greater than the sum of its parts, able to grow and win in their market beyond their competitors.
This short video with Lisa Jackson, Principal of Corporate Culture Pros, answers 3 questions about corporate culture:
1) Why company culture is so important, now more than ever,
2) What is a practical working definition of corporate culture,
3) How leaders can impact theirs starting now – 3 actionable tips.
If vision is the destination and strategy is the engine of the business, company culture is the oil, the fuel, and the tires. When built well, an engine provides the power for a business to advance to its destination (vision). However, if the oil, fuel, and tires are poor quality or not suited for the car the car doesn’t run well. It gets in accidents or simply stops.
Today, the most effective company management teams see their job as providing alignment and clarity between where they’re headed (vision), how they’ll get there (strategy) and how they will work together to make decisions, collaborate on goals, and serve customers better (corporate culture).
In this high-octane age of greater competition across every industry, total alignment and clarity is the only way to win.
Company culture definition.
We define corporate culture as the best practices an organization deploys to:
- Create energy, excitement, and alignment behind the company’s mission and vision.
- Bring an organization closer to its customer.
- Foster faster, better decisions involving people close to the customer.
- Break down silos and create true collaboration across functions, geographies, and hierarchies.
- Facilitate honest conversations between all levels of leadership and employees.
- Ensure feedback is used for learning and politics are minimized.
- Build a meeting and email culture than enables people to do better work, versus wasting time and energy on bloated communications.
- Bring core values to life, to ensure people feel they are doing purposeful work and working with purpose and meaning.