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Your Company Culture is Who You Hire, Fire, and Promote
Use the Performance-Values Matrix to build an Outstanding Culture
The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.
Every time I walk into a new company I’m advising, I invariably encounter a set of noble values prominently displayed on the walls. The first thing I’ve trained myself to do is to not take them as gospel, and instead carefully observe how people really behave, which will tell me the actual values I need to know.
It’s not that most companies are disingenuous about the values they espouse. One of Enron’s “aspirational values” was integrity, which may have genuinely expressed who they wanted to be at the beginning. But over time, this proclaimed value didn’t reflect their “practiced values” which were revealed when they committed fraud.
The gap between aspirational and practiced values is diagnostic of how much your company’s culture needs to improve. The actions you take to bridge the…
