This week as we continue with our post-SIP brand series, we’re looking at the fifth of six steps – Reinforcing a Results Culture – to successfully navigate the hard turn brand pivot during challenging times.
Step 5. Reinforce a Results Culture
Culture is the tacit social order of an organization: It shapes attitudes and behaviors in wide-ranging and durable ways. Cultural norms define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group. When properly aligned with personal values, drives, and needs, culture can unleash tremendous amounts of creative energy toward a shared purpose and foster an organization’s capacity to not only survive, but thrive.
Organizational culture is a group phenomenon and resides in shared behaviors, values, and assumptions, and is most commonly experienced through the norms and expectations of a group via unwritten rules.
Culture is pervasive and permeates multiple levels, and applies very broadly in an organization. It is manifest outwardly in collective behaviors, physical environments, group rituals, visible symbols, stories, and legends. Other aspects of culture are inward and unseen, such as mindsets, biases, motivations, unspoken assumptions.
Organizational culture is enduring, directing the thoughts and actions of group members over the long term. It develops through critical events in the collective life and learning of a group. People are drawn to organizations with characteristics similar to their own; organizations are more likely to select individuals who seem to “fit in”; and over time those who don’t fit in tend to leave. Thus culture becomes a self-reinforcing social pattern that grows increasingly resistant to change and outside influences, becoming an “echo chamber” for the organization to pander to itself.
Some cultures emphasize stability – prioritizing consistency, predictability, and maintenance of the status quo. Those that favor stability tend to follow rules, use control structures such as seniority-based staffing, reinforce hierarchy, and strive for efficiency. Others emphasize flexibility, adaptability, and receptiveness to change. Those that favor flexibility tend to prioritize innovation, openness, diversity, and a longer-term orientation.
A results culture evaluates progress based on producing measurable results leading to high quality revenue growth and is an organic outgrowth of an organization that is flexible, creative, innovative and open, in and among itself, and with others. It presents a unified face to the world, owns up to its successes and admits its failings. The results culture rests not only on measurable milestones, rewarding people based on performance where progress is tracked, it is a culture whose people do the right thing … even when no one is watching.
What does your organizational culture say about your brand? Will it allow you to recover, to bounce back during times of stress and adversity? If it doesn’t, this is an opportune time to rework your organization’s culture to be a positive, productive force that can not only withstand the times, but stand the test of time.
Black Ink has developed organizational design for startups, micro and small-to-medium businesses, and Fortune 500 companies – including through acquisitions – across a wide range of industries in both regulated and non-regulated environments. What worked in the past may no longer work in your future; Black Ink can assist you in purposing culture as a fundamental management tool in your organization.