Diagnosing Your Corporate Culture

The best way for a leadership team to learn what is going on in their company is to have informal conversations with a wide range of employees. To accurately take the pulse of the organization, these conversations need to be structured around some fundamental questions. Below are ten questions to start the conversations.

[Unfortunately, if the corporate culture prohibits honest answers, especially to the CEO or leadership team, this exercise could lead to misperceptions. In that case, it is particularly useful to employ a facilitator, executive coach or business anthropologist to lead the conversations.]

Ten Fundamental Questions

1. Is your work meaningful?

People need meaning and purpose in order to live their lives fully and be productive corporate citizens. Healthy cultures provide people with shared meaning and connection to a purpose higher than their individual pursuits. Using stock options and other monetary incentives to hold onto people is a short-term band-aid if there is a crisis of meaninglessness in the company.

Lack of share meaning leads to:

Unmotivated, unproductive people who are not working to their full potential
People reserving energy and creativity for activities outside of work
Decisions made at cross-purposes with the vision and mission

2. What is the company's purpose?

Employees should have a quick and simple answer to this question. They need to embody the purpose of the organization for the company to thrive. This is not a matter of reading the Vision and Mission from a wall plaque, but internalizing the purpose and aligning it with personal vision and mission.

Confusion about the company's purpose leads to:

Unclear about what we are trying to accomplish
Energy of organization continually declining
Inefficient work processes

3. Are you empowered to make decisions and move into action quickly?

A healthy, thriving culture supplants the need to "control" people. The traditional method for building a company uses a hierarchical, command-and-control structure. This is at cross-purposes to succeeding in today's business environment. The speed of today's economy requires flexibility, quick decision making, and cooperation with customers and partners.

Lack of empowerment leads to a "bunker mentality" and:

No personal accountability or responsibility
Slow time to market with new products
Lack of innovation

4. Would you leave this company for the opportunity to start at the ground floor of another company?

A culture needs to sustain its entrepreneurial zest. When companies grow beyond the point where the leaders know everyone by their first name, the natural inclination is to start putting a bureaucracy in place, implementing procedures, and putting in some controls. Yes, the company will benefit from standardized processes and automation of standard procedures. But, putting in explicit controls on people often drives out the most innovative, entrepreneurial contributors that are critical to the success of a company.

Low entrepreneurial zest leads to:

Suffocate the entrepreneurial culture that people value.
Stamp out creativity.
Drive out the key innovators to new start-up opportunities.

5. Do company leaders walk their talk?

In organizations today, there is great discrepancy between what is said and what is done. Often people do not know which conversations they can rely upon for action. Many times this is because company leaders have not learned how to have effective conversations that generate powerful action.

Not walking the talk leads to time and energy wasted on empty conversations and:

Formal work processes that don't work
Missed deadlines
Long product introduction cycles

6. Can you show your emotions at work?

People are human. They are not machines. Motivation is the root of emotions and decision. Most decisions in business and life are made based upon a person's emotions or emotional state. A person cannot be separated from his or her emotions. A person working with passion achieves so much more than someone working on the clock to get a paycheck. How can people be passionate about their work if they cannot have any emotions?

When Emotions and passions prohibited:

Leaders cannot recognize and adjust the mood of an organization
People will express their emotions inappropriately, and often destructively
An organizational mood of frustration, anger, or apathy

7. Do you have a community of people in the company that support your efforts?

Healthy corporate cultures offer their employees a community of people that support each other as they learn and grow. As we spend more and more time at work, we are looking to our work environments to provide community that we used to get elsewhere. The number one cause for people either liking or disliking their jobs (and staying in them) is their relationship with their direct supervisor.

Lack of community leads to:

High attrition rates
Poor communication
Dissatisfied employees, customers, and partners

8. Are your contributions valued?

People are not interchangeable. They are unique individuals - each with a gift to share with the company. If people are blindly shuffled through departments or into job descriptions, they will lose their creativity and tend towards "group think".

When people are viewed as "widgets" this leads to:

Group Think
Low creativity
Organizational mood of low energy and resignation.

9. Do you trust the leaders of the company?

It is virtually impossible to work productively with people that you do not trust. If employees do not trust the leadership of your organization, they will not be comfortable being their authentic selves and will expend tremendous energy putting on game faces every day.

Lack of trust leads to:

Poor communication with employees, customers, and partners.
Organizational mood of low energy and resignation.
Difficult to attract and retain good people.

10. Can you say "I don't know"?

If your culture has an invisible rule that says "never admit you don't know something", then no learning or innovation can take place within your company.

Inability to say "I don't know" leads to:

Low rate of innovation
Errors in judgment and operations
Company overtaken by innovative competitor

Using these questions to structure frequent conversations will help the leaders of an organization to keep their fingers on the pulse of the company.