Corporate Culture is What You Do, Not What You Say

Corporate Culture is What You Do, Not What You Say

from Strategy Speaks: a Peppers and Rogers Blog by Don Peppers

 

You can't earn the trust of your customers with a policy statement. You can only earn trust with actions. The problem is that the "actions" your company takes are taken by employees, not by the CEO or the Board of Directors. As far as a customer is concerned, the ordinary, low-level customer-contact employee they interact with on the phone or at the store - that employee is your company.
If you want to ensure that your company treats customers the way you would want to be treated if you were a customer yourself, then you need to manage the way individual employees deal with and interact with customers. Obviously, policies and practices will be involved, but procedures by themselves won't be sufficient. What you really need is a "culture of customer trust" within your company.
Writing a "value statement" for your company is not at all the same thing as living it, nor will it have much impact on your real-world culture. I once visited a company that had a written set of official company values, and these values were posted throughout the headquarters, along with the company's official mission statement. You've probably seen stuff like this before (who hasn't?) but to protect the identity of this client, I'll paraphrase the mission statement they posted, which went something like this:

Do the right thing for customers and be a highly admired company.

Now doesn't that just sound terrific? That's a great attitude to take toward customers, the market, and the business's overall purpose. It's a marvelous statement of values for a forward-thinking, customer-oriented company. Yet the more employees and middle managers I met, the more it became clear to me that everyone in the organization was focused on one thing: Make this quarter's numbers at any cost. These managers' daily actions and decisions supported a different set of values - a set of values that weren't written down and posted on the wall, but which permeated the culture and dominated how the company decided which actions were right for it and which were wrong. The unwritten value statement, if it had been posted on the wall, would have read:

Do whatever it takes to make the numbers.

We haven't yet read about this firm being involved in any kind of covered-up product defect scandal, or industrial safety failure, or customer service meltdown. But my guess is that the only reason we haven't is that the company just hasn't encountered any serious threat to its quarterly bottom line yet. Sooner or later, however, they are likely to meet such a problem, and when they do they will fail the test. And then everyone will wonder how a company with such marvelous values could have acted in such a self-centered, uncaring fashion toward their customers, their employees, or their shareholders.
The culture at your firm will reflect how you measure success, how you reward people, what tasks you consider to be important, how quickly and effectively you make decisions, and who approves decisions. Your culture will reflect how friendly people are to others, how trusting they are, how much disagreement is tolerated, and what actions are considered out of bounds. You can write down the values you wish you had, but if you want your firm to live up to them then you'd better make sure that all your systems and processes are aligned with them, too.