If there’s one principle I believe in, it’s that organizational culture produces results. Culture is the reason why some companies outperform, delight their customers, and energize their employees, while others do not. Culture is a big differentiator for an organization. Leaders who want exceptional companies get it through culture.
I have witnessed the great influence of culture firsthand. Beginning auditing businesses as a CPA in South Florida, his decades-long career included meetings with leaders around the world and included numerous corporate acquisitions. I learned that every company has a culture, and whether intentional or not, that culture has a huge impact on organizational performance.
Culture is an important part of Correct Craft’s success. At nearly every industry conference I attend, someone tells me about a great experience they had with our team. This is no coincidence. We have high intentions regarding our culture and it shows. Our Collect Craft family includes multiple companies, and we see a direct correlation between each organization’s results and their degree of acceptance of our culture.
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Culture is a very important driver of our results and we want to share with others how culture can help us. Our company vision has four pillars. One is to model the merits of our culture in ways that encourage others to copy our work. We did our best to evangelize the benefits of effective culture and held two of his cultural summits for industry, involving hundreds of people, including those competing with each other. We love to do this because we know that a great culture not only makes an organization perform better, it makes people’s lives better.
I am often asked how we managed to develop such an amazing culture at Correct Craft. For many leaders, it seems like a mystery or just luck. It’s not a mystery or luck. It contains many intentions. The good news is that any leader can create a culture that delivers results within their organization and makes the lives of their people better. Here’s how to develop a culture of excellence in your organization.
- Identify what is important to your organization. A key role of all leaders is to create clarity. This is especially important in relation to organizational values. This may seem obvious, but few leaders do it.
At Correct Craft, we cherish the mission given to us by our founder nearly 100 years ago: to build ships for the glory of God. After our mission, we are very clear about our organization’s ‘why’: to ‘make lives better’. By being clear about our mission and why, we ensure that everyone, and most importantly our team, is there for more than just building our products and making money. As part of identifying what matters, our values fall into three categories: People, Performance and Philanthropy. We’ve also worked hard to make sure everyone knows what’s in these categories.
- Once you’ve identified what’s important to you, develop tools to communicate what’s important so it’s easy to understand. Over a decade ago, our team realized we had many key values, but we didn’t communicate them systematically and concisely. We decided to fix that by creating what we call the “Cultural Pyramid” (shown on the previous page). Cultural pyramids capture what is important to us in an easy-to-understand way.
Our team uses Pyramid every day to stay on track. It often comes up when trying to set a direction in a meeting. We use it on outsiders to help them understand our worth. When we talk to potential sellers about Correct Craft buying a company, we want to make sure they understand us, so at one of our first meetings, we always look at the cultural pyramid. We have no tool more powerful than the Cultural Pyramid.
- Once you’ve identified your organization’s values and created the tools to share them, you need to keep repeating those values. Please share them again and again. Keep sharing your values until you get tired of talking about them and your team gets tired of hearing them. seriously. Great leaders work hard to instill the right values in their organizations. If you don’t intentionally share the values you think are important, other values will develop and probably won’t be what you want.
- Finally, leaders should model the values they identify as important. Employees always trust what their leaders do more than what they say. For example, one of our core values is “very assertive and very cooperative”, which we sometimes call “shut up and don’t lie”. We expect everyone to speak up and share their opinions at meetings, even if they differ from the CEO. As a CEO, I know that if I don’t listen carefully to those who disagree with me and respect my outspoken team members, they and the rest of the meeting will be the last to speak up. That doesn’t exempt you from your values. You must submit to them more than anyone else.
Culture determines results. The steps outlined here help leaders build a great organizational culture.
Bill Yeargin is the President and CEO of Correct Craft and the author of five bestselling books. CEO education.
This article was originally published in the September 2022 issue.
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