The development of a business culture can best be accomplished and supported through a comprehensive leadership training program.
I am certainly a huge advocate because leadership training is absolutely, unequivocally the most overlooked—yet positively impactful—process a business can engage in. It ties so much into the success and failure of the business that overlooking it can spell business distress.
In fact, the difference between top-performers in almost every business space can be related to the level of leadership development the management team has received and how it trickles down to create the culture of the business.
Common Mistakes
There are two components that make up the mistakes I see employers make when developing their business culture:
- The steps the business takes/doesn’t take; following through is the key to success.
- The measurement of the return on investment (ROI) related to business culture-development projects and how it affects the culture.
In regards to the steps businesses take/don’t take, I often find that too many businesses end up writing a business plan and then they come up with this big passionate mission statement. The mission statement then gets posted on a wall in the employee lounge (or wherever employees spend most of their time) and employees are told this statement is the company’s culture.
The mistake companies commonly make, however, is they don’t go any further than posting the mission statement on the wall. After they develop and post it, the matters of day to day business generally become the distraction that keeps them from doing anything else to reinforce that mission, such as offering ongoing employee training or an employee orientation program that supports and builds upon the mission of the business.
Your culture is the differentiator of your business; it’s your opportunity to carve out your niche, not only with your products and services, but also with the type of employees that you attract to your company.
Another common mistake I see employers make is, from a leadership perspective, they don’t look at what the culture means—how the type of employees you attract, the products/services you provide and the type of customers you attract all tie together to reinforce your culture. Think of companies like Apple and or Google, where the employees, products, culture and leadership absolutely represent the business as a whole.
With regards to the mistakes made when measuring the return on investment, I find that many businesses avoid conducting leadership development because of the costs associated with it, and that kind of stagnates the opportunity to develop their long term business culture.
In many cases, leadership development does look like a heavy initial capital investment when you start to think about offering private executive coaching and a leadership development program that includes monthly sessions where the leaders are taken away from day-to-day business in order to attend training.
But when a business actually takes a step back and ties their culture and their leadership development to meeting the objectives of their business, that ROI looks a lot different.
So if, for example, the objective of the leadership team is to drive revenues by 10 percent this year, then meeting the objective requires the team to work together more closely than they did the previous year, where they only exceeded their goal by five percent.
Leadership development builds trust and builds communication within a company, which then builds the culture to help support meeting the company’s objectives.
In my next Insight, I’ll explain the steps employers can take if they want to effectively develop their business culture.