Are your managers ruining your company culture?

As your business grows, it becomes increasingly necessary to relinquish control of your operations to managers and their teams. When you’ve worked hard building your business and establishing a culture you are proud of, this can be terribly uncomfortable.

Organizational growth and team expansion is a sure sign of your thriving enterprise. When the distance between you and your employees grows, as it needs to, you are faced with having to place more trust in your managers to do the right things and nurture your company culture the way you have in your start-up years.

But, what happens when you’re not in the room? Are your managers ruining the company culture you worked so hard to create?

3 Ways to Ensure Your Culture is Thriving

You can’t be everywhere all the time. So, to help you alleviate the worry and boost trust in your organization, here are three ways you can establish consistent culture-aligned behaviours in your business.

Values-based decision making

First, create a decision making framework that ensures all decisions are made through the lens of your company values. Your values inform the words and actions in an organization, and are important to demonstrate how your culture is activated throughout the business. Adding a step in decision making processes, be they hiring new employees or where to spend and save money, with careful consideration of your company values, can help to reduce the chance that decisions made by your team won’t result in actions that contradict your values and erode your culture.

Accountability

Put processes in place to hold managers accountable to lead by example, demonstrating company values and culture-based activities in all the things they say and do. Similarly, employees can be held accountable. Be clear about the expectations, then make room in performance coaching and competency assessment practices to provide feedback. If someone behaves or says something that doesn’t line up, then it needs to be addressed immediately. When your employees see that others are getting away with ‘bad’ behaviour, then they will stop believing in the values, or worse, they will start behaving badly, too. 

Recognition

For many people, it’s easier to notice when things go wrong rather than when they go right. When everyone in the company is encouraged to notice the right things as they happen, and to recognize the people around them when they do the right things, then the whole team will be motivated by it. It’s the old positive reinforcement psychological tactic. But, it works. Positive words and actions tend to breed more positive words and actions. Build accountability systems that recognize, and so encourage, the right things.

Culture will be personified by all of the people in your business, from the Board of Directors down to your newest recruit. As you refocus your energy away from supervising the team to continuing to grow and expand your business, you can unlock the potential in your team to elevate your company culture with a few simple interventions, implemented at the outset. 

If you want to know more about how everyone in your business has a role to play in your company culture, and ways to influence the right things in your organization, here’s a terrific read from Harvard Business Review. 

https://hbr.org/2021/02/company-culture-is-everyones-responsibility 

If you need some help in developing your company’s people and culture strategies, or simply some advice about how to lead within your company culture, Kris Tierney Consulting can help. Contact us today, or explore our website for more information about what we do. We’re passionate about cultivating outstanding workplaces where people and culture take centre stage. So, we made it our Mission.