Business Culture Myths Every Leader Should Know
For businesses of all sizes, nurturing a business culture is imperative to success. Creating a business culture before an organization matures and grows will help prevent growing pains and mistakes that negatively impact your bottom line, but mature businesses also benefit from creating a business culture if they don’t have one already or employees aren’t responding to their current internal climate. Unfortunately, many would-be successful businesses fall victim to misinformation and myths lead them astray. If you’re unsure about developing a culture to help nurture your employees, make sure you avoid the following myths and pitfalls.
If It Can’t Be Measured, It Can’t Be Managed or Controlled
Many business people are highly critical thinkers who tend to be left-brained, and they respond to quantifiable numbers better than those of us who are right-brained. As such, they have a hard time digesting the idea of an organizational culture instead of interpreting it as a buzzword. But the truth is that organizational culture can have a heavy bearing on employees’ subconscious thoughts and conscious decisions. Your employees spend the majority of their week in a work environment that you control, and knitting the work environment together with an organizational culture can impact their productivity, motivation, efficiency, the quality of their work, their mood, any many, many other factors that influence your bottom line.
Genuine Change Takes Years to Accept
A lot of people have the misconception that it will be impossible to change the current organizational culture and that their employees won’t be able to learn and adapt to changes. While it is true that most people are resistant to change, at least at first, you would be surprised how quickly things can turn around when you work with a professional. Instead of doing things a certain way simply because that’s how they have always been done, an organizational consultant will be able to help you identify areas of weakness and inefficiency and change them rapidly. No, Rome wasn’t built in a day, but it doesn’t have to take years and years to change your organizational culture.
Culture Development Should Be Handled Internally
Another mistake that organizations frequently make is thinking that they should do all of the development of their culture internally. But this is a mistake because members of an organization may not be able to see everything that’s going on. Interactions between various coworkers and organizational units is taken for granted and not properly analyzed. Instead, you need an objective outsider to assess and develop your culture, because they will be able to see things that you take for granted. Too often people go through the motions of their day-to-day tasks and fail to see opportunities for improvement.
Seeking Assistance
Fostering a business culture from scratch or trying to move your organizational culture in a new direction is extremely difficult if you try to do it alone. Fortunately, you can contact me today to start moving your organization in the right direction.