Three Tips for Ensuring Culture Really Is Your Competitive Advantage

Waterstone Culture Institute

It’s often said that corporate culture is the one thing about an organization that cannot be copied – the special something that, all else being equal, makes your company truly unique. It’s your competitive advantage.  But how do you know when your culture is working hard to drive performance (organizationally and with your team members), and when it’s starting to fall down on the job?

Here are three tips for how you can ensure you’re leveraging your culture to its full advantage.

  1. Really understand your current culture (assess)
    The best way to get a handle on your culture – your real culture, not the culture you think you have or the culture you hope you have – is through a culture and/or engagement survey. A good cultural assessment will include both qualitative and quantitative questions, allowing you to understand the behaviours that are key to your culture as well as how people feel about the organization, the leaders, etc. If you’re not already doing annual surveys, backed up by regular pulse surveys to determine your progress against key goals, you’re missing a big opportunity.
  2. Have a clear picture of what your culture would need to look like in order to achieve your goals (craft)
    Once you know where your culture is at, you need to ask yourself: is this what and where we want to be, or do we want to be something different? Visioning – or curating culture – isn’t about the “how”. It’s about dreaming big; sitting down and seriously considering what the best version of your culture would be. How do you want the organization to look? How do you want people to feel about your organization? Will the values be any different in the future? What words would you use to define your culture? What are the key behaviours of your top performers? If you can’t see where you want to be, you can’t make a plan to get there.
  3. Have a roadmap for getting from “now” to “when” (plan)
    Sometimes your reality and your vision will match up perfectly; sometimes you’ll have some work to do to get you from Point A to Point B. But clearly understanding where you want to go means you can map out a plan to get there.

Assessing your current culture, crafting a vision for your ideal culture, and planning your route from Point A to Point B are three key steps to ensuring your culture is really your competitive advantage. They’re also the first three hubs in Waterstone’s Culturepreneur Operating System  – a facilitated process that walks leaders through a simple, proven, and measured process to drive performance through culture transformation.

Whichever process you choose, assessing, crafting and planning your culture are three key ingredients for making sure culture truly is your competitive advantage.