Ingredients of Corporate Culture

Culture is invisible, but the culture system is a powerful pillar to run a digital organization

"Culture is a collective mindset, attitude, and habits that could be considered part of the people skills/competencies component to model a business capability. Strategically, your culture guides and informs “how you do what you do and should point you to why you do it.” A high performance culture enables an average strategy, but a negative culture perhaps sinks a good strategy. Culture is soft but there are multiple hard ingredients in it. It’s a tough element to lift your organization up to the next level of digital maturity. Technically, corporate culture is created out of the systems, processes, human capital, organizational hierarchy, business development, and strategy design of the organization.

Communication effectiveness sets culture tones: In many traditional organizations, the audience is often the homogeneous group who gets used to hierarchical style of communication with an oxymoron tone. So silo or bureaucracy turns to be part of cultural tone. In a dynamic business environment, open communication generates a digital vibe to inspire change, engage the variety of audience and streamline strategy management. It sets an open and progressive culture tone. Strategic communication embraces creativity, context, cascade, to enforce trust and accountability, streamline knowledge flow, so it sets the culture tone of high performance. Creative communication style is more open and interactive to bridge gaps and connect the minds and hearts, thus, it sets the tone for shaping a culture of innovation.

With hyper-connectivity and hyper-diversity today, digital leaders and professionals can sense, feel, read, imagine and intuit possibilities, they need to be creative and persuasive in order to get their ideas sponsored and implemented. They can shape a culture of entrepreneurship. Communication sets culture tones and culture influences communication styles. A high performing culture is based on shared responsibility, mutual accountability, effective communication and collaboration. These are essential in any successful hierarchy.

Corporate Performance Management is part of the business culture: Too many organizations don't receive the true return on their business investment because they cannot or will not create a culture of high performance. Though top management sponsorship is crucial, Performance Management should not be confined at the top but to all levels, In fact, It takes discipline at all levels of the organization to work cohesively for driving high performance. All companies and industries must have a vision, strategy, and tactic for performance management. It is part of the development of a business culture.

Performance Management, when employed as a way of maximizing results through competence, using cooperative effort in an open atmosphere of communication among people including staff with managers, can have a deeper and longer impact on organizational culture. How to manage performance indicators and how to set Key Performance Indicators is part of cultural effort, as it directly or indirectly influences people’s attitudes and behavior. Effective performance management inspires positive mentality, encourages good behavior, drives better performance both individually and collectively, as well as holding people accountable for their performance. And it's part of corporate culture.

Talent Development Plan needs to be a positive part of the company's culture: In the dynamic digital new normal, talent development is an iterative learning doing continuum, an important ingredient of people management, and a positive part of the company’s culture. In the business scope, the challenge is to move from the individual to system level, make an objective assessment of their organization’s talent development plan, and nurture a culture of learning and knowledge sharing.

Statistically. so many performance evaluations, while scientifically weighted and honed in terms of measurable behaviors, statistically don’t improve long-term worker performance. There is a huge difference between a “performance evaluation” and a “developmental opportunity.” Effective performance management and talent development are integrated approaches to build digital capabilities for the current and next generation of digital leaders and professionals. The strong talent management will further enforce the high-performing culture to synchronize talent’s mind, heart, and hands and find the meaning of work or mastery of work etc, encourages autonomy, discovery, and continuous improvement to unleash the full potential of the business.

Culture is invisible, but the culture system is a powerful pillar to run a digital organization. In order to move up to the next level of organizational maturity, the culture needs to be changed to adapt to the emerging digital trends and pull strategy execution towards the right decision. Being digital-ready is an overarching approach via building a set of “digital-flavored” cultures and taking a series of stepwise practices. Cultural change and maintenance take time, investment and concerted, courageous, dedicated effort by leaders at all levels to convey the vision and lead the transformation smoothly.

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