Culture Can Make or Break a Organization

Peter Drucker said, “Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast!” Truth is Culture can make or break an organization.

It is incredibly important because it sets the tone for everything from how the early team interacts to the kinds of hires made to how customers are treated. It impacts everything! Culture recognizes and embraces that shared values, attitudes, standards, and beliefs influence & characterize the goals of the organization.

Helping our clients create culture is at the heart of everything we do at American Strengths Center. One of our passions is to help organizations to evaluate their culture or identity and improve employee perceptions of their organization’s leadership. For any cultural initiative to take hold, employees have to be fully invested and on board with their leaders’ vision. Research demonstrates that the best-managed companies in the world build a strengths-based culture.

At American Strengths Center…

…we help our clients appreciate that Culture simply stated is, “How they live. It is who they are, how they interact, how they engage one another.” We help organizations establishing a culture they believe in means by having a clear and consistent purpose (which includes both Vision & Mission) and knowing how they would like everyone, inside and outside, to view the company (Brand).

Gallup’s latest research concluded:

When determining which levers to pull and in which order, leaders must keep their cultures in mind and honor their core identity. They can confuse their employees by trying to imitate some other culture. That said, a culture can and should evolve over time.

In 2017 State of the American Workplace, Jim Clifton – Gallup’s Chairman & CEO said,

Here’s my short answer as to how to transform your workplace culture:

1. Call an executive committee meeting and commit to transforming your workplace from old command-and-control to one of high development and ongoing coaching conversations. Gallup can hold your hand through this. We will teach you everything we have learned as fast as we can.

2. Dive in — don’t put your toe in. You can afford a lot of mistakes and even failures because the system you currently use doesn’t
work anyway.

3. Switch from a culture of “employee satisfaction” — which only measures things like how much workers like their perks and benefits— to a “coaching culture.”

4. Change from a culture of “paycheck” to a culture of “purpose.”

5. If you have 25,000 employees, then you likely have about 2,500 managers and leaders at various levels. Transform them all. Gallup has all the new tools for the right conversations — how to coach, building strengths-based workplaces, pulse polls. Everything is ready to go, tested and validated.

6. Require all 25,000 employees to take the world-renowned CliftonStrengths assessment so your organization recognizes each individual by their God-given strengths. Institute a leadership philosophy of developing strengths versus fixing weaknesses.

Love What You Do, Do What You Love

Experiencing a Fully Engaged Life

So often the people will ask us, “What do you do for a living?” Our answer always shocks them. We say, “We help people love their work.” This inevitably gets the same reaction. “Wow, I could sure use some time with you.”

We are reminded of a quote from Bill Gates, “Paul and I, we never thought that we would make much money out of the thing. We just loved writing software.”

We love helping people ‘love their jobs,’ ‘be the best version of themselves’ (who God created them to be), and ‘be fully engaged’ at work & play to impact their world.

The question is how do you do this? Naturally our ‘core values’ are a huge part of this. Also important are things like trust, confidence, curiosity, and things like the ‘wow’ factor. The truth it is a combination of both what we like to call ‘secret sauce’ and ‘stuff.’ We invite you to journey with us towards experiencing a fully engaged life by loving what you do, and doing what you love!

Are you ready to shape your culture and future?

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American Strengths Center specializes in helping Leaders & Organizations leverage analytics and best practices to help them do what they do best & unleash transformational cultures.