|
Often the biggest selling point a growing company has is its culture. We need to go out of our way to make sure our company is a fun, rewarding and inspirational place to work. This requires corporate governance. Corporate governance is about how the organization achieves its purpose. It involves the meaning of organizations and how organizations fulfill their purpose. It has elements of leadership, stewardship, ethics, security, vision, direction, influence, and values. Corporate governance is about protecting stakeholder interests in the organization. Corporate governance can also be loosely referred to as corporate culture
Your company has developed a culture whether you were trying to or not. Just seeing the reality of our culture now and as it unfolds for what it truly is can give us a real business advantage and save us huge amounts of time and money. Not trying to understanding it or deal with it can be fatal. This is especially true as we try to establish new values or change existing company values or procedures, deal with and judging the individual/organization fit of new executives or the realignment of your company¡¯s culture with its strategic goals.
Culture or lack of it will continue to drive your company and its employees. It is the operating system of the organization. It effects how employees think, act and feel. A corporate culture lives at different levels in an organization, from highly visible to deeply buried.
Visible Culture
Our visible culture deals with the way we look, things like our offices, the furniture and decorations, the way our people dress, our organizational processes and structures, how we present ourselves to everyone, Your company products to the outside world, including things like our logos, brochures, company slogans, advertising and press releases. It also includes such things as the cars we drive, titles, value statements and priorities. The problem comes from the fact that many of these visible cultural indicators become part of the background, are taken too lightly or ignored by leadership and management.
Unconscious Corporate Culture
Even tougher to deal with are the intangible and unconscious corporate culture indicators that get buried deep, such as the way we treat each other, respond to each others needs, unconsciously position people and events within and without of your company, communicate or don¡¯t communicate the avoidance of conflict, political jockeying and the formation of cliques.
- It starts with profound sensitivity.
The first thing to do is find out who we really are as well as who we want to be. The culture of an organization operates at both a conscious and unconscious level. People see our culture more clearly from the outside than from within such as new employees, consultants or vendors.
The behavior that is evidenced by the leader and the management team of your company profoundly shapes the culture and practices of our organization. What they say and do has both a real and implied meaning to everyone. People read a great deal of meaning into what is said and not said, done and not done, not necessarily every word or dead, but the cumulative effect on perceptions and actions. What and who are emphasized, paid attention to, rewarded or denounced tells everyone what is really important. The behavior of your senior management team, their reactions in a crisis, who they talk to and don¡¯t talk to, what they communicate and keep to themselves, all set the tone of your company¡¯s unconscious culture.
We¡¯re in a high tech industry, where the speed of change is rapid. Only organizations that can adapt to this fast changing environment will survive. Your company needs to develop the fundamentals of the adaptability of our behavior, structure and other cultural indicators to change. This will be one of the secrets to our success, the ability to maintain a balance between and manage consistency and change. And it¡¯s very hard to do without confusing everyone.
- Strive to research and develop new products and services that enrich people's lives.
- Be alert to the information identified through research to develop profitable new areas of business
- Create innovative ways to market new or existing product lines.
- Involve Our Customers and Partners
Our best customer is our existing customer. We need to make sure our strategic business partners and customers are involved in the thinking process, because the best strategies are always develops out of a sense of partnership and of sharing a common destiny.
|
