Built on Values

Organizations differ and so must their cultures, but every great culture rests on values.

Leaders should help fashion the right culture for their firms. Culture depends on values, which reflect how you want employees to behave and how you want to shape perceptions of your firm. Your corporate values will attract or discourage new talent and customers.

Workplace cultures and subcultures manifest whether leaders influence them intentionally or not. A culture derives from integrating appropriate values into every decision and into the mechanisms through which the company recognizes and rewards achievement.

Your culture may need repair if you have fallen behind your competitors, have high attrition, have employee or customer survey results that dropped significantly, have trust issues, or are successful but want to improve. Southwest and JetBlue, for example, built their outstanding cultures deliberately from the inception of their companies. Others, such as Loma Linda University Medical Center and Doubletree Hotels, rebuilt existing cultures around new values and gained performance improvements.

Don’t adopt another...