Workplace culture is too important to leave to chance
Posted On June 28, 2019
We all know – or we say we know – that workplace culture is important. Not only important, really, but critical to the success of a company or organization.
But how many CEOs or other company leaders are actually being proactive and deliberate about creating the culture within their organizations?
Our guest in this recent episode of “What’s Working with Cam Marston,” David Friedman of High Performing Culture LLC, says that number is surprisingly low.
“Every other aspect of our business that we would say is critical – our finances, our strategic planning, our operations, our sales – we’re really programmatic and really systematic about it,” Friedman says. “And then we’ve got this culture thing that we all say is critical to our bottom line, critical to our performance, critical to our competitive advantage, and most CEOs are just winging it, hoping it works out OK.”
Friedman, the former president of RSI, a prominent employee benefits consulting firm in New Jersey, formed High Performing Cultureto help CEOs understand the importance of a systematic approach to building culture, and to give them a blueprint on how to go about it.
Friedman shares the two most integral pieces of the eight-step framework he recommends for building a culture. One of them seems pretty obvious: Defining exactly what we want the culture to be. “As obvious as that may sound,” he says, “my experience is most organizations don’t do it very well.”
Friedman also shares why it’s important to focus on behaviors as opposed to values, how to reinforce positive behaviors until they become second nature, how small companies build culture almost by accident and why that may get lost as a company grows, ways in which to judge whether a potential employee will be a good fit for your company’s culture, and how to handle a current employee who is damaging to that culture.
Join us for an insightful discussion on a topic that’s too important to leave to chance.