Culture Matters: Business Is Social

photo by jronaldlee

Company culture matters to your business.  That’s not a terribly bold statement.  But why?

Culture matters because business is social.

These days most of us work interdependently.  Your success is likely predicated upon exchanging ideas with your peers and receiving intellectual inputs from several different departments.  True individual contributors are few and far between in a knowledge-based organization.

A crude example is the evolution from waterfall to agile technology development.   Ideas and new products are created in highly interconnected and iterative processes rather than via assembly lines.  Which gets us back to culture.

We need to know how to exchange information with one another.

Culture sets those norms.  It establishes how we interact, how we make decisions and what’s deemed worthy of reward.

When employees’ value systems are aligned then so too is the company culture.  It becomes a self-reinforcing cycle because everyone interacts and rewards according to their own value system (no matter what the annual performance evaluation sheet says).

A well-aligned culture allows people to communicate freely because the norms are well understood. The ground rules are implicitly agreed upon by everyone who has elected to work there and they are reinforced with every interaction.

When values systems are out of line, cultures ‘go bad.’  Rewards seem arbitrary, nascent ideas are used against their authors or credit is co-opted.

Culture fosters trust (even in cultures that are aggressive and competitive).  In a game of repeated interactions it doesn’t take too many bad experiences to not want to work with a peer again.  Or to withhold your best when dealing with them.  Self-preservation will almost always win out over doing what is best for the business.

The better we all communicate the greater the likelihood of achieving success.  And since we’ve already optimized processes, slashed workforces and off-shored as much as we can there aren’t too many places left to squeeze out more profits.  Optimizing communication and aligning culture isn’t easy, but it’s the next frontier in driving business success.

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