Culture is a Business Priority

Culture must be leader-led and leader-lived. Culture is not the responsibility of HR or People & Culture (despite the name). While everyone contributes to the culture in what behaviour is acted or accepted, the founder’s role is to make the ultimate decisions about culture.

Company culture sets expectations for your business. Without a defined culture as an anchor, there is nothing to use as a reference for behaviour and supporting attraction, engagement and retention strategies.

In an HBR article, Organisational Psychologist, Dr. Rebecca Newton wrote that (culture) ‘shapes the way people make decisions, get their work done, what they prioritize, and how they interact with colleagues, clients, and customers. It is really only successful and powerful when business leaders see it as their responsibility and see HR as a resource for helping them achieve it.’

People must align with your company’s culture and the standard of acceptable behaviours that you set.

Culture is Not a Policy

In their book, Rework (a must-read for any legendary leader), Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of Basecamp, reason that we don’t create culture, it develops over time. ‘Culture is the by-product of behaviour. If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in.’

I had a client who wanted help establishing a culture framework for her startup. We came up with some early concepts, and she said, ‘Let’s make that protocol. I need to develop a policy for that.’

If you have a policy for your culture, you will have a policy culture. Just no!

If you’re ready to build a culture that will help your business to scale successfully, I’d love to chat and see how I can help.

Mary Butler is a People Strategy Expert, Author, Coach and Facilitator. She gets what traditional HR doesn’t.

Mary has 25+ years of talent management experience, from global corporates to scaleups in every sector, across Europe, the US, Asia and Australia in industries from aviation to tech and FMCG. That’s deep expertise, across a broad range of leadership topics, that we can leverage in your business.

While she has a BSc and an MBA, it’s Mary’s ability to identify and address those often buried challenges that makes her different. She has an ability to cut through to noise to help you make the tough calls. And she doesn’t offer an off-the-shelf solution because you don’t have off-the-shelf challenges.

If you’d like to learn more, here are four ways you can explore how Mary can help:

Download Mary’s whitepaper??Founder as Leader. Are you ready to lead?

Read Mary’s Musings on her blog.

Pre-order her new book, Legendary Leadership?in Scaleups,?or buy one of her previous books.

Make a time to chat?about how Mary supports founders and scaleups like yours.

[i] Newton Ph.D., Rebecca. 2016, November 2. HR Can’t Change Company Culture by Itself. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/11/hr-cant-change-company-culture-by-itself

[ii] Fried, Jason and Heinemeier Hansson, David. 2010. Rework. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.