Culture is more important for organizations than an average participant of business life realizes. It manifests when the CEO’s seemingly brilliant ideas aren’t popular among staff at all, when middle managers care more about the company’s politics than performance and out of fear try to hide all their mistakes. It manifest when employees suffer in quiet desperation without anybody to trust and without hope for change. But if well designed it can constitute one of the competitive advantages that might decide whether you survive and thrive in the competitive market or you fail.

A culture is a collection of individual habits, group traditions, rules and know-how. It is the way the leader interacts, talks to people, rewards and compensates them. Habits are repeated regularly behaviours of individuals or groups that are hard to give up.

Tradition is an inherited, established, or customary pattern of thought, action, or behaviour such as a religious practice or a social custom. An example of a tradition is eating turkey on Thanksgiving or putting up a tree on Christmas. Rules are agreed verbally or on paper regulations governing people’s behaviour in certain situations.

And know-how is a set of skills and knowledge present in the organization.

The aim of a strategy is to find a set of competitive advantages that allows you to: first – survive and then – thrive. And very often the decisive factor in thriving and surviving is culture. Most companies have default cultures based on strongest personalities, it’s not always the best situation, it might be toxic or unproductive. That is why you should make a plan for your culture, make it systematic, design it and implement it. Don’t drift and see where the default culture will take you. Grab the steering wheel and create the culture you want.

When you want to create a culture try to define what culture you would like to create (rules, behaviours) and then create rituals (for example: take one value and discuss it for 5 minutes every meeting, then next time, next week and so on).

Start with small steps and simple behaviours. As a CEO wash your employee’s cups and help them succeed, talk to them informally, be curious about their life, show that you care. Tell them that you want your people to have fun and develop their careers and personalities. Don’t tell them only about hard work you that you value. Tell them you want them professionally and personally thrive. You want them to have fun at work! And you want them to tell you if this is not the case. Come down to the shop floor and work with your employees, ask them questions, learn from them. Too cold, too hot, kettle broken – act quickly, show that you care. Why should you care? Because companies with high employee engagement make double their profits. And when you care, your people start caring as well, and you create a main ingredient of success: trust and psychological safety – basis for best teams where it is safe to be yourself, to make mistakes to the point that they’re not only tolerated but even celebrated, where it is safe to learn and where it is a place to belong.

When you ask people to do something, tell them why and ask them if it can be done in a better way. Let people think in isolation and work in teams. Give them time to think before a meeting and make them write down their ideas. Not everyone is relaxed enough in the meeting to be creative. Go even further and reduce peoples’ stress and anxiety by organizing meetings with groups of people that like each other or at least tolerate each other. Identify it by surveys or questionnaires. Identify what is fun? Ask individuals what they mean by fun, what they like doing, what is their passion. Ask them what is their favourite drink, food, place or activity. Embed fun into strategy.

Not only achieving goals is important in organizations. Let employees, managers and owners enjoy their way to the goals. Good execution may help: use KPIs to measure the employees’ performance. Prioritise using leading measures more often, for example, in sales – number of phone calls to the clients, number of new contracts, number of new meetings. Use lagging KPIs such as sales revenue less often, as they are used as a finishing line and you can’t improve them easily as leading ones.

Appreciate at least one recent feature in achievement of your employees, do it often, or tell their colleagues, friends, about their positive feature, have a list of employees’ names and ascribe at least one positive feature to a name.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. You have a wonderful strategy, but without a proper culture that induces engagement, you can’t achieve the results you expect.

When you create culture, start from behaviours, not values and then say: these are our values and these our behaviours – the way we practice our values. Values and behaviours don’t need to be mapped directly.

Go even further. Create, like some visionary companies do, a cult like culture, one that is demanding of all employees so much, so that some, even many might feel uncomfortable and quit. Such cultures should exhibit a fervently held ideology, mechanisms for indoctrination, procedures to ensure cultural fit and a feeling of pride, bordering on elitism.

Organize blind coffee dates, so that people from your company can meet each other, bond, learn and be inspired. Maybe some of them finds a more suitable position in your company and in result of that increases profitability of the whole business.

And don’t be afraid of differences in your team. Use them to your organization’s benefit, because you need a healthy level of disunity for progress. Too much unity and there are no new ideas, no criticism and no improvement. Observe the level of conflict, look at it whether it is open, transparent and constructive. If not - instigate cultural changes to make it so.

Culture is often an expression of the company's values. And the values are roughly about how employees behave when management isn’t there. Lived values will significantly decrease the need for supervision and it will also free time for top management to focus on strategy.

Ask yourself frequently important questions about values: what do you value, what are the cultures and norms of your organization, what is acceptable or not acceptable behaviour, what is the way you do things around here, do you only say values or you live them, how do you live them, what is the company’s promise, what can people expect from your organization 100% of the time?

If you are advanced enough in creating conscious culture, you can also experiment with leading edge organizational culture methodologies and tools like: conscious leadership, law of attraction, infinite intelligence and joy management. Let employees thrive not only survive and make one of business’s purposes to create more joy. And hire a rock star human resources manager to help you with that.

But before any advanced movements check your company's culture using Incentive and Penalty Structure Review by asking these questions: What do employees need to do to get paid, to get bonus, to get promoted and what happens when employees report bad behaviour or whistle blow?

Check and increase commitment – the most valuable resource. The commitment is a powerful emotion and 80% things people do is irrational, emotional. When they are committed they want to contribute and they will want to know the company’s strategic intent. Check who knows and who understands the business purpose, because when company put pressure on employees - and the employees won’t support or won’t know the company’s strategic intent – they will cut corners and that could only mean increased losses.

Leaders need to be motivational and inspirational, but they also need to make their direct reports successful and teach them how to make their reports successful. Remember about these fundamental behaviours to create a good culture: honour commitments, get clear on expectations and practice blameless problem solving.

If your employee’s performance is low, practice blameless approach. Ask them 5 questions: Where are we versus our expectations? Better, worse, same? Why it’s better, why it’s worse? What might be a corrective action? What help do you need? When will we be back on track?

Vision and mission originate to significant extent from intuition, create in your culture places to nurture intuition, good spaces and good mood, make people experience joy and laughter. Make people psychologically safe.

When business is good, replace command and control with values based management. Instead of galvanizing people through fear of failure, energize them through hope and aspiration, inspire them to pursue a common purpose on values they help to define.

Value based management requires several steps: propose values from top management first; then gather your employees’ input on values helping to face strategic challenges and to have fun; next step is to analyse employees’ input; revise your proposed earlier values; identify obstacles to living the values and finally launch change initiatives to remove obstacles.

Hopefully, this article stresses the importance of well designed culture and it will inspire you to work on creating the culture that will become one of your strongest competitive advantages and will bring great fun running the business and working for it.