4 steps to transform your corporate culture

How engaged your employees are goes beyond offering a great benefits package, competitive pay, flexible work schedules and challenging projects. Your company culture is truly your competitive advantage.

Most leaders want a collaborative and innovative workplace, but accomplishing this can be elusive. The following four steps are tried-and-true strategies to creating a great place to work.

1. Understand the organization is a “human” system, made up of many different people with different perspectives, beliefs and preferences. In a constructive corporate culture, the business as a whole empowers employees to fully participate with one another outside the limits of personal agendas and egos. It inspires people to collaborate and contribute to the group cause. When leaders better understand this human operating system, they can proactively intervene and create an experience for people to thrive.
2. Start the conversation. Reach out to your employees and let them know you want to have a conversation, or send them a survey asking about the culture of your workplace. Share the purpose behind your curiosity. Before you begin your inquiry process, ask yourself what you really want to learn and what you’ll do with the information. As you speak to people and review the results of the survey, embrace your most curious, non-judgmental, non-reactionary self. Staying in the neutral zone during your conversations allows you to sense patterns and discern systemic organizational themes.
3. Take a real look. The first step in any positive change effort is getting real — accepting what needs to change and what needs to happen for the change to last. Make a list of the areas uncovered in the data-collection process (interviews, focus groups, surveys). Prioritize the highest impact areas — those that, if improved, would give the highest return on time, money and effort. Next connect the underlying behaviors and organizational processes that constrain the overall performance, collaboration and innovation among your workforce. Once you have a handle on what is not working, allow the impact of this unworkability to move you into action.
4. Own the impact. The most senior executive is the ultimate guru as to how the organization operates. They decide what behavior is tolerated and how people treat each other. Introspection and self-awareness allow you to get real with yourself about what is really going on in the organization. If you are able to let go of self-judgment and defensiveness, you are much more able to see yourself as the source of the unworkability. It is not about accepting blame or feeling guilty; it is about seeing how you as the leader set the tone and create the space for constructive or destructive behavior in the workplace.

Magi Graziano is a speaker, author and chief evangelist for KeenAlignment, a global people optimization consultancy firm. See four more steps in this Round the Table article.