322 | How do you improve your culture?
One of the most powerful factors to attracting the right people to your business is Culture. Culture is more powerful than strategy and culture is what shapes your business. As a student of leadership, you have likely read about culture and studied it. Culture is simply the collection of beliefs on which people build their behavior. This is a good definition, but I like to say that culture is the PERSONALITY of the organization (the written and unwritten rules). I recently developed a culture scorecard that will help you see where you stand with your culture. There are eight objectives in the Growth Culture Scorecard. What is your score for your culture?
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Improve Your Culture: The Transcript
One of the most important factors to the growth of your company is the culture. Culture is the driving force of your business. It’s more important than strategy, and it is what shapes the work that gets done and how everyone feels about what’s going on inside the company.
Hi, my name’s Gene Hammett. I work with hypergrowth companies or those that want to understand hypergrowth from the Inc. 5000 research I’ve done over the years. I work with these companies to understand their leadership and the sales and marketing that really activates hypergrowth. And a big part of that is culture.
So let’s talk about culture. You’re in leadership and you’ve probably studied culture, you’ve read books about it, you’ve done everything you can think of to really understand how to impact your culture. And the reality of this is culture is not the easiest thing in the world to impact because it is ingrained inside of who we are.
So what is culture? Well at one level, culture is really about the written and unwritten rules of how we operate inside the company.
Now that’s a pretty good definition of it, but I really like culture is the personality of the company. If you think about personality of how you guys approach the work that you do and how you work together and collaborate, that is really your culture.
So if you wanna understand where you are right now with your culture or what I call the growth culture scorecard, you can measure yourself on eight different objectives and those objectives will tell you where to focus your attention so that you can really impact your culture in the next phase of growth. So let’s look at this from one perspective. One of those objectives is mission. So I’m gonna read off a few of these, and I want you to think about where you stand right now as it relates to the mission of the company.
So the first is A, you thought about this in the beginning and put more focus on your strategy. B, you used to have mission, but now, we’re just going so fast it is hard to see it. C, you have a clear mission and it helps you lead a purpose-driven company. D, you see how mission unifies the team and guides you to your moonshot.
Now which one are you best with, A, B, C, or D? Think about it.
Pause if you need to, go back, and really think about how this one question relates to your culture inside your business. Now this is just one slice of it. If you wanna see where you stand in all eight objectives, then just go to genehammett.com/culture. Absolutely free, you just go in there and start answering questions and it will give you a score. Now how do you create impact with your culture?
If you’re thinking about how do you really make a move here, I want you to think about this in three simple steps. The first one is, get your score. Just go to genehammett.com/culture and find out what your score is. Secondly, share the culture scorecard with others in your team. Have two, three, four of you do the same test and see what their score is.
The real challenge here is is there a gap between the way they see the culture and the way you see the culture. And do those separately and bring them together. The third piece is discuss it together. Really figure out where there are some gaps and then decide together which one of those areas is most important for you to focus to have the biggest impact on your business. All eight objectives are really important if you wanna have a growth culture, but you can do it just by taking the test. So just go to genehammett.com/culture.
All right, that’s my piece today. If you wanna improve your culture, get your score, and if you want to understand how hypergrowth companies are growing in this day and age, make sure you check out all the resources I have and other episodes here at hypergrowth.tips. And love to talk to you, and as always lead with courage and I’ll see you next time.
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