I was recently listening to season three of the Startup podcast which featured its founding company’s CEO Alex Blumberg working with an executive coach. The entire episode focused on Alex’s role in creating culture at Gimlet Media, the company responsible for the Startup podcast. This reminded me of a big question among those that study corporate culture. Does the CEO set the culture or is it created by the collection of individuals that belong to the organization?
There are obvious great examples of CEO’s that have left an indelible mark on their company’s culture. Typically these have been founder CEOs or successful bosses that have had extremely long tenures at their respective businesses. People like Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs come immediately to mind.
But ultimately who has the greater impact and if you want to truly impact culture do you start at the top or the bottom? According to Harvard Business Review article entitled “You Can’t Dictate Culture – But You Can Influence It”, it is a little of both but ultimately it is the people that create culture.
Even after thousands of years of civilization, leaders still have trouble getting everyone to follow any basic precepts of behavior (think the Ten Commandments). In other words, culture is not a “goal” to be mandated, but the outcome of a collective set of behaviors.
This shouldn’t ignore the role of culture influencers but each individual that comes into an organization has an opportunity to shift and shape the organizational culture – for better or worse.
At Cloverleaf our hypothesis is that culture isn’t created at the top – rather can be dictated by the aggregation of individual cultural preferences of the people that work everyday in your culture.
So what if you could measure the influence of each individual in your organization, define your cultural objectives and put people together in teams that create the clear culture you hope to reinforce?
Now you can. It actually costs you nothing to get started – just invite your team to create a Cloverleaf account and provide a few pieces of data. We aggregate their data on proficiency, personality and preferences and give you a clear view of your existing culture and with our visualizations the way forward is clear.
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- What Automated Coaching™ is and how it works.
“Employee brand” and “recruitment brand” are major buzzwords these past few years. Which means a lot of new technologies have popped up to create beautiful websites selling your internal brand to potential employees.
And that’s the problem. These websites exist to SELL workplace brands — touting all of the best things and none of the real day-to-day things. Workers today, especially millennials and GenXers, crave authenticity. We can smell a sales pitch a mile away.
We were trained this way. Our schools now spend weeks teaching students how to see through marketing and sales pitches in order to pursue the truth. So of course workers are skeptical when presented with marketing or sales pitches — they want to know what the workplace is REALLY like.
Is the manager a jerk? How flexible will my hours really be? Will I be guilted into working over the weekend if I ever have a prayer of advancing in this organization? These are the questions we want answers to and no amount of happy videos and beautiful pictures of break rooms and ping pong tables are ever going to give us those answers.
In fact, these are factors that aren’t easily quantified. The schedule flexibility that you crave may not be the environment that I want. The culture in IT is different than the culture in the call center – which makes a one size fits all approach challenging. So what is an employer to do?
Why not start with measuring your culture? Sure, this is no new suggestion. Internal culture surveys have been used widely — but after the results are generated, are they actually useful long term? We hear they often collect dust on the shelf.
This is why we built Cloverleaf — to help you measure your culture in an actionable way. As in, you can use the results to communicate your day-to-day culture in your employee brand, and visualize how new hires will fit in the team.
We believe culture is created by the collection of individuals that make up a team. And a company is then a collection of these different teams. So it might help to start small – perhaps with that difficult department that has high turnover or is constantly looking for that difficult technical skill set that is impossible to recruit for.
Then you can aggregate to entire divisions or Fortune 100 companies. Along the way you have the power to create teams and gain a better understanding of the unique cultures represented by these teams. And the best part as a talent acquisition specialist is that you can use that team to build the basis for your recruiting efforts. Attach the job listing to the team dashboard and see how the applicants fit in.
