Culture

It has been a while since the last episode, not sure what happened to the time! In this episode, we discuss organisational culture. A good episode to listen to before you listen to this episode is Episode 3, of May 2019, in which we talked about personal values. We define culture as those values and behaviours that are important to a team, group, company or country. What is important to us who work and/or live here? Culture happens anyway, whether you are aware of it or not. We talk about the importance of leadership, and the relation between leadership and culture, and the importance of walking the talk. We also touch on the importance of the company founder(s) in culture, especially when they are still around in executive roles, and for senior leaders to explicitly work with culture. Next is the importance of culture in international expansion, and how for example a European country’s corporate culture might meet US corporate culture and how to get the best out of both. We discuss the importance of authenticity and being able to ‘bring your personal values and strengths to work’, which means there will be alignments between your personal values and the culture of your company, which will result in being happier and more engaged at work. We talk about the type of work we do with our clients to help them have more meaningful dialogues about culture at work, how we measure culture through culture audits and we briefly discuss the relationship between strategy and culture. Our assertion is that if we as leaders don’t work explicitly with culture in organisations, there is a very good chance we will not achieve our strategic objectives and priorities.