Who is responsible for the culture in your business?

The recent Australian Cricket controversy may have been about ball tampering and alleged cheating, however what came into focus very quickly was an aspect that effects business at every level, and that is culture.

In a business context, culture is the unwritten way your team go about their day to day responsibilities. It is reflective of the behaviours, beliefs and communication styles of the people in your organisation.

Through clarity of your vision, values and the people you hire into your team, you can be more deliberate in what your culture looks like and create a standard for how everyone in the business acts with customers, the community and each other.

What appeared to be lacking with the Australian Cricket team were those clear guidelines on how the team were expected to act, their core values if you will, which would act as their guiding principles to whatever situation may have arose.

Those in power, from the CEO to the coach, were responsible for establishing this through their leadership, however the culture existing appeared to be more reactive and based on winning, than the continuation of a more proactive, deliberate approach to the behaviour they expected of the team.

Who is responsible for leading the culture in your business?

Have you made a deliberate choice as to what you want the culture to look like, and are you setting expectations and hiring accordingly within your team to match that. If not, you are running your business through rules not principles, and although you may get compliance, a strong culture empowers your team to respond to any situation from those principles, regardless whether its covered in the rule book. For the Australian cricket team, this would have prevented any suggestion of sandpaper to be used on a cricket ball from ever leaving the dressing shed.

This article was featured in the Hunter Business Review’s May edition.