What culture does your company reflect?

Culture is essential to strategy: it creates a competitive advantage and ensures exceptional client & employee experiences. Everyone on the team needs to live it, breathe it, and love it.

Defining a company’s culture will always start from the top-down, so it’s critical for all leaders to demonstrate positive behavior, lead by example, and interact with people both inside and outside the company.

Five principals highlighted to help build an inclusive and successful company culture:

Increase leadership capability at all levels of the company — it’s the leaders that set the cultural climate and establish behavioral and performance norms.

Empowerment and authority — develop alignment with individual and corporate values, with a shared purpose and people’s roles, responsibilities, and capabilities.

Effective communication and collaboration — encourage participation and ownership, using appropriate and effective communication to build organizational empathy and momentum.

Develop an effective performance management process — recognize how individuals are motivated and align performance management with them.

A learning and development ethos — acknowledge that continuously-improving staff will deliver more effectively and become more motivated to do a great job.

A customer-centric strategy — everything we do should have a direct line-of-sight to client benefits.

The right culture is the key to a company's long-term success and a cohesive team. Culture can engender personal commitment, and commitment drives employee engagement. The right culture endears employees as it provides them a sense of meaning when they can fully express their creativity, connect with others to make a difference, and make a lasting contribution to a shared purpose.