The Launch of a Blog on Corporate Culture

Corporate Culture. Isn’t it amazing how something so elusive and seemingly intangible can have such a huge impact on an organization’s ability to succeed?  But the truth is a corporate culture is what makes the difference between a team of employees that want to get up and go to work every day and a team that secretly dreads it. I’ve lived it both ways – and over the course of almost 20 years in corporate America, I’ve seen very few companies that really have a clue about the impact culture has on their organization’s success.

As a communications liasion between management and the employee base for several hypergrowth companies, I’ve had a front row seat – and often been charged with helping shift or build culture.  It’s easy when you have 5 or even 30 employees.  But beyond that, things quickly spin out of your control.  Many companies think they can just continue doing things like they have always done – and remain clueless that there are networks forming deep inside the organization that are about to take on a life and political stance of their own. 

In other cases the CEO thinks he or she can just wave a magic wand to shift the culture how they want it.  For example, one time I had a new and increasingly unpopular CEO tell me to hang a giant sign at the entrance touting that, “Customer Services is our #1 Priority,” mistakenly thinking that if he just said it, it would be. I hung it late at night – long after everyone who could see me do it had left.  That company filed bankruptcy two years later.

Then there was the “de-motivational speech” another CEO gave employees the first day after we moved into a new building, scolding us like children, chastising everyone for not being in on the weekend to move the common areas.  All of this was said despite the fact that we’d all spent the last week packing in preparation for the movers and had no clue there had been a need for weekend help.  I suppose in the end the CEO achieved his goals because now everyone in the organization certainly knew their place if nothing else.

Then there is the mistake of yet another CEO trying to be “one with his peeps” but not doing what it took to make the encounter comfortable for them. On a corporate ski trip the CEO and his closest confidants sat at the front of the bus whilst the hourly paid tech support crew huddled in the back.  The CEO thought this trip had potential to show his ability to hang with the employees but he never made a single move to even say hello to the folks in the back.  The techies were petrified to make a first move, having never had any chance to talk with him before.  Over the course of the two hour ride the opportunity evaporated and left some perceiving the CEO as aloof. Later the CEO made a comment to me about how he thought it strange the tech support folks didn’t come up to talk with him.  He didn’t understand that it was his job to make the first move.

These are just a few of examples of how senior leaders can be clueless about the impact their actions or even their presence has on corporate culture.  This fascinating interplay between employees and leadership is one of the things I spend a lot of time thinking about. 

And here on this blog its what I’ll find ways to share these thoughts with the blogsphere to make some sense of the corporate world we all live in every day.