YOU are Your Culture!
One comment that I constantly heard from business leaders is that:
Well, we only need to invest in culture-building when we have over 100 employees!
Hmmm, good luck with that!
If you consider culture-building as activities like putting the slogans on the wall, running expensive team building activities, or generously offering gifts on birthdays/anniversaries ... you miss the point completely.
"Culture" doesn't happen out of the blue when you hit a mark of 100 employees, it breeds itself from day 1 and gets reinforced daily, most of the time, unconsciously.
Yes, it is true that every employee impacts a company's culture, but the leaders on the top have by far the largest and most direct effect on company culture. When you employ less than 100 employees, YOU, the founder/CEO of the business, is actually the culture of the company!
A recent international study conducted by Glassdoor (a free company reviews for 1750000+ companies. All posted anonymously by employees.) reported that:
77% of adults polled would consider a company's culture before applying for a job there.
73% of respondents from all countries said they "would not apply to a company unless its values align with my own personal values."
It's not only about who can organize the best happy hour or how many Ping-Pong tables you can fit into an open concept office – a positive company culture comes from the top and is enforced at all levels of the organization.
When it comes to attracting new blood to your business, your company's culture is just as important as the salary you offer, if not more so these days. Have you ever asked yourself, WHY you cannot find the right people for the business?
What is "company culture" exactly?
Well, company culture expresses itself via "the unwritten, unspoken norms that drive the behaviour of how people interact, collaborate, coexist together and get things done."
As the founder/CEO of the business, your core values, belief system, and behaviour patterns, aka your leadership style, set up the group norm's tone.
Two leadership styles to watch out for when you only have less than 50 -100 employee:
are you perceived as a 'Dictator", put your heart and soul into the business, big vision and high standard, yet when employees didn't perform as you wanted, you would fire them immediately and maybe publically.
Are you perceived as a 'Controller"', who has a hand in every major decision, you do ask employees for their ideas, but you are the one who always has the final say regardless.
If you started a business from scratch, very likely, you need to be hands-on and involve in every single bit of the business process, qualities like decisive, firm, perfection... are the must-have to build a business from 0 to 1.
However, excessive 'decisiveness and perfection' leads to 'Dictation and Control", then autocratic leadership styles formed.
The autocratic leadership style only works until it doesn't work.
Autocratic CEOs often become the bottlenecks in decision making because everything has to be approved by them, which cause employees to stop thinking or seeking or taking risks because they become fearful of making the wrong decisions.
Without conscious intervention, autocratic CEOs start believing their own press and lose touch with what made them successful in the first place. If you look at any list of defunct companies that were household names, you will find misguided autocrats at their helm.
Are you the only one in the company who has great ideas?
