Three Ingredients of a Healthy Company Culture
Clearly expressed values, boundaries, core practices
What is a company culture? For starters, let’s make a distinction between the company identity or brand and the company culture. There are many ingredients of a company identity such as, mission, vision, motto, etc. The difference between a company identity and a company culture goes to norms, beliefs, and common practices that are shared by all. The culture shapes the identity and ultimately can make the brand more vibrant and authentic, but it is separate from the brand.
Company culture is also not an ideology or anything that can be scripted. For the sake of this article I will define it very simply as the shared understanding of “this is how we do things in our community.” Every company has a culture by default but if we’re talking about an intentional culture, this “way of doing things” must be articulated with clearly expressed values that continually develop and evolve. The leader’s job is to continually teach those values. Often this teaching takes the form of reminding everyone of the values in connection to the purpose of the company, but ideally the company because a self-correcting organism. People teach each other how the values look in practice if there is a shared understanding of “this is how we do things.”
People teach each other how the values look in practice if there is a shared understanding of “this is how we do things.”
In a healthy company culture on of the leader’s jobs is to be the boundary keeper — the one who ultimately defines the limits of the community — the consequences. It needs to be a fair company for people to be happy to work there. There also needs to be clear boundaries around unacceptable behavior so that all the behavior in between is fair game for discussion and working out disagreements.
The clearer a leader is about what he/she/they will not accept, the easier it is to create a space for difficult (but often necessary) conversations. Ultimately, someone may be asked to leave. In my experience, this is a rarity, however. If the whole community understands clearly that person crossed a very clearly understood line. For example, if someone puts down a person or a group in a hateful way they will clearly have crossed the line and feel peer pressure to change their behavior. Also, a person who confronts them about it will get the support of the group. The goal is for them to change their behavior, to get kicked out but that consequence needs to be understood. Without it, people often remain silent about hate speech and toxicity festers.
Let’s look at practices that come out of a shared understanding of “this is how we do things.” These practices should start from a small number of core practices that connect to the ground rules or expectations for community behavior. For example, giving quality feedback is a core practice at Archipelago Rising. Practices that ground people in the community’s core values and help them grow are the glue that holds the community together and makes it a learning space. These core practices should be the types of practices that are life-long pursuits, that require self-discipline and are never quite perfected.
Core practices bolster the value of learning by both promoting it and demanding it. Part of becoming skilled in giving quality feedback is learning to receive it and learn from it. We believe that people generally want meaningful lives and that requires some basic reflection on one’s self as a human being.
The value of learning is core at Archipelago Rising. Living that value is the key to our integrity because that’s what we advise on. Aligning words and actions also make it a more vibrant company culture. If you are clearly articulating your actions with your values and openly discussing the “why” of what you are doing, it opens up a space for questioning how things are being done and making corrections or improvements.
A healthy culture is also a learning culture. The key indicator of a learning culture which is what I call “buzz.” meaning people are talking to each other about what they’re learning together or separately working on for their own self-growth. A vibrant culture feels safe and you’ll see people “talking things out.” People feel safe enough to share their struggles or to “call people in” when they observe problematic actions (this goes to the boundaries mentioned above). My ears are also constantly perked up when a buzz seems to be happening — or a silence, which can be an equally important indicator of learning.
Final thoughts. These three things are merely reflections of what a healthy adult does to thrive in the world — a healthy adult parents their inner child by expressing care and concern about the child but also by saying “no” to bad behaviors and teaching new ones. Make your company culture physically, emotionally, and intellectually healthy with this approach.
