Corporate culture is created by the collective experiences, beliefs, and actions of employees. It can either help or hinder an organization's success and ability to consistently create greater value than competitors. A company's culture is reflected in its products, services, employees' attitudes, leadership, and customer relationships. While a strong culture can provide a competitive advantage, a weak culture can significantly impair business results by driving behaviors that cause the organization to fail. Leaders must examine how their existing culture accelerates or creates barriers to organizational progress.

1. IS YOUR CORPORATE CULTURE AN
ACCELERATOR, OR A BARRIER TO
PROGRESS?
The
corporate culture is the product of
peoples’ experience, beliefs, and
actions (behaviours). It’s the people
in an organization that collectively
through their experience, beliefs and
actions create value -results. Culture
is of critical importance because a
firm’s success in the
marketplace depends on winning the
competition for results (strategic,
financial and job performance). A
firm’s capacity to consistently create
greater value than the competition is
what set companies apart in the
marketplace.

2. Culture is like a design template and
everything tangible in the
organization is built off that template
including products or service quality,
delivery systems, employees’
attitude, leadership style,
management practices, quality of
relationship with customers and other
stakeholders. At best, culture can be
a competitive advantage; at worst, it
can be a significant drag on business
results. Both way, an organization’s
culture drives people behaviours and
the behaviours determine whether
the organization succeeds or not.

3. For instance, one company’s value
statement reads” we treat people like
family,” yet the place was notorious
for delays in service delivery, buck
passing, and employees with an
attitude of ‘we know what is good for
our customer.’ There was simply no
alignment between the firm’s
espoused value and people
behaviours.
On a personal level, how would you
describe your company’s culture?
Better still, how would an outsider
describe it? Like the captain of a
ship, a leader’s job is to constantly
examine how existing culture

4. accelerates or hinders progress in
the workplace.
According to Edgar Schein,”if you
have been trying to make changes in
how your organization works, you
need to find out how the existing
culture aids or hinders you.”
So, is your corporate culture an
accelerator, or a barrier to progress?