I was talking to the CEO of a bank with more than a dozen branches when he said, “We don’t have a culture at our bank. We have three cultures and which one you encounter depends on which branch you’re at.”
What’s more, the CEO said, “You can tell when you’re in a branch that doesn’t have a healthy culture. You can just feel it.”
This is more common than you might think. It’s easy to maintain a cohesive culture when you’re a small team at a single location. But growth can change all of that in a hurry, especially when growth leads to multiple locations.
That geographic distance doesn’t make it impossible to maintain a healthy culture – far from it. But it does make it more challenging.
There are three things that CEO could have done to create a consistent, healthy culture. You can do them to.
- Be really clear about what you want your culture to be. What are you trying to accomplish? What are the expected behaviors? What is out-of-bounds? Defining your culture is the first step.
- Have a consistent communication plan. The leader must talk about the culture until they’re sick of talking about it…and then talk about it some more. They must be what Pat Lencioni calls the CRO: Chief Reminding Officer.
- Get regular feedback from the front lines. Your communication on culture (or anything for that matter) can’t be one way.
Without taking these steps, you’re leaving the culture up to each individual manager of each individual location (or team, division, etc.) and multiple cultures is the inevitable outcome.
That’s one of the issues I help owner-operators solve in the first step of my 4D Transformation Method, Define the Culture. I explain it in this video:
Have you left your culture up to chance – or to each employee’s interpretation? Can you feel an unhealthy culture in part’s of your organization?
The first step for you might be just getting a handle on the state of your culture. Let me help you with our free assessment. Take a few minutes, answer a few questions and then jump on a call with me to strategize ways to improve your culture.
Do it before it doesn’t feel good walking into one of your offices.
Nathan Schock 