Creating Your Company Culture

Here are a couple of ideas on how you can create, and more importantly, manifest as well as reinforce your (company) culture (a topic we have been digging in for a while now):

• Tell (and retell) stories. Humans are hardwired to convey information through stories — going back all the way to us huddling around a fire. Interestingly we use stories in our outside communication (and call it marketing & PR) but often don’t use it all that much inside of our business. By retelling your founding or hero stories, emphasizing the behaviors you care about, you create cohesion and a shared memory across your company.
• Create rituals. Repetition creates muscle memory which becomes a shortcut for our behaviors particularly when we are under stress. It also reinforces the values and practices we want to see in our organizations. Rituals can be anything from ringing a bell when you made a sale to the way you run your weekly all-hands.
• Make artifacts. Physical objects (anything from a printed out customer email to a prototype we made in our design process) are a powerful way to express and reinforce what is important. Showcasing what is essential to you and your organization in places your people can see on a daily basis is a powerful reminder.

As simple as these three things sound, they are incredibly powerful creators and reinforcers of culture. Done purposefully they form the vessels through which you express your culture.

This post is part of the “The Heretic”, Pascal Finette’s insights into leadership in exponential times. For entrepreneurs, corporate irritants and change makers. Raw, unfiltered and opinionated — delivered straight to your inbox. You will like it. → https://theheretic.org