What’s Ya Culcha?

That’s a horrible title for SEO purposes, I know, since I’ve misspelled “Culture” which is today’s topic.  Not high-brow entertainment or the ones found in yogurt.  Nope.  Today we talk about the culture that surrounds us at work.  That term – corporate culture – and what it represents is not an object of focus often enough, in my opinion.  It’s often an after-thought;  something that evolves on its own because no one is really paying attention.  Sort of like mold.  And that’s a big mistake.

I’ve interviewed hundred of job candidates over the years and I was only asked about the corporate culture a couple of times (I hired both of those folks almost immediately).  Sometimes I’d get asked “what’s it like to work here” but that’s not a specific enough dive into the nuances of a place.  The funny thing is, most of the time when I was interviewing I was focusing specifically on how the candidate would do within the corporate culture and less so on specific skills.  That’s because I’ve seen some very skilled folks wash out of companies because they were incompatible culturally.

A good manager will decide on a culture and foster it.  The CEO is the one who should set the tone throughout the organization but in a loose enough way that each department head has the room to put their own stamp on it.  The flip side of this is that if you come into an organization at a fairly high level, you need to do NOTHING about culture until you understand what’s already in place.  I’ve been in places where there have been management changes and the new folks demanded the culture  change as well.  Frankly, this was kind of upsetting to the organization, even if it was warranted.

If you’re managing an organization, big or small, how clued in are you to the culture?  Does what you think it is match how your employees view it?  Have you asked?  What do outsiders think?  Until you have those answers, you have a big vulnerability.  After all, no one wants to be accused of not having any culcha!