unending improvement, wowing customers, collaboration, candor and so on). Your organization’s culture
states its philosophy, its mythology, it’s religion. To me, culture is king.
One of your most sustainable
Competitive advantages will be developing what
I call a Culture of Leadership.
The five best ways to build culture are as follows:
Rituals: I like the “cult” in culture. The best companies, like Dell and Google and Southwest
Airlines and Apple and Wal – Mart, have something in common with cults. They have unique rituals like 7
a.m. team huddles or Friday afternoon pizza parties to promote team bonding. Rituals shape culture and
keep it special.
Celebration: John Abele, founder of the multi – billion – dollar Boston Scientific, once told me over
dinner that “you get what you celeb rate.” Powerful idea. When you see someone living the values your
culture stands for, make them a public hero. Behavior that gets rewarded is behavior that gets repeated.
Catch people doing good.
Conversation: Your people become what the leaders talk about; to get your vision and values into
your people’s hearts, you need to be talking about that stuff constantly – at employee gatherings, at your
weekly meetings, during your daily hurdles and at the water cooler. You need to evangelize what you stand
for constantly. In his excellent book Winning, Jack Welch said that he spent so much time evangelizing
GE’s mission that he could call his people at three in the morning and – half asleep – they could re-state it.
(He never did).
Training: A mission – critical focus to build culture is employee development. If you agree that
your organization’s number – one resource is your people, then it only makes sense to invest significantly
in developing your number – one resource. Hold seminars and have leadership workshops to instill the
values you seek to nurture and build a leadership culture into their hearts and minds. When your people
improve, your company will improve.
Storytelling: Great companies have cultures where great stories are told from generation to
generation. The story about how the company was found in a basement or the story about how a teammate
went the extra mile and delivered a customer’s baby or the story about how the organization fought back to
victory from the brink of disaster. Storytelling cements a company’s most closely cherished ideals into the
hearts of its people.
People want to go to work each day and feel they are a part of a community. One of the deepest
psychological needs of a human being is the need for belonging. We also want to work for an organization
that values us, that promotes our personal growth and that makes us feel that we are contributing to a
dream. Get these things right by creating a Culture of Leadership and you’ll keep your starts and attract
other ones. And wouldn’t that be perfect?