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Building a Winning Culture in a High Growth Environment
By SiliconIndia | Friday, 19 August 2011, 04:56 Hrs |
1 Comments
Jeffrey Katzenberg, co-founder of DreamWorks, sums up the value of good company culture in a nice quote: "Our philosophy is that if you love your work, and you love coming to work, then the work will be exceptional." According to a Bain & Company survey of senior executives at global companies, 91 percent of 1,200 executives agreed that "culture is as important as strategy for business success."
Building an entrepreneurial and productive culture is essential to building a successful and a great company. I have been part of two high growth companies - first at Amazon and now at DataSphere Technologies, where our culture has been instrumental in driving 250 percent year over year revenue growth and an increase in staff over the same period from 35 to more than 400 people. In both instances, I have seen culture play a big role in driving the success of the companies throughout the growth cycle. It is also critically important in weathering the inevitable dark days and maximizing opportunities presented when things are going well. Many other highly successful companies such as Netflix and Zappos have similarly stressed the importance of their company culture in driving business growth.
In this article, I will share the principles you can utilize to build an amazing productive culture for your company.
* Set up company philosophy so that everyone is aligned
We have built a culture where every employee is asked to act as a CEO of their role and leverage others as resources to best service their customers. We have also established key company philosophies that guide everyone's actions-
a) Pursue "game changing" opportunities
b) Obsess about delivering value to customers
c) Create compelling value for all team members
d) Provide a culture where the "best ideas" win
e) Work hard, have fun, make a huge impact
It is very important to choose values that everyone in the company can believe in, embrace, apply, and evangelize. Communicate core philosophies of your company to potential candidates during the recruitment process so that they can self assess if they want to be part of your company's journey. Do a company orientation for all new employees in their first week of employment led by executives. Go over the company's values, with lots of examples, so that everyone is crystal clear about the company's guiding principles. It is also helpful to pick successful role model companies that you would like to emulate and share the rationale with your team. Our current role models are Amazon.com, Netflix, and Google. Drawing specific parallels between well known "great" companies and our company helps employees share the vision of where the company can go with their help. We explain that these role model companies aren't just household names because they are lucky, they are great because they created an amazing culture of continuous innovation to deliver value to customers and employees.
* Everyone needs to play a role in building the company culture
Culture is not built by giving employees a handbook with nice phrases no on can repeat. Everyone in the company, from the CEO on down , needs to constantly apply the values in their day to day activities and explicitly highlight when these values are being used as a guiding light in decision making. To ensure the company-wide adoption of your core values, think of all the tactics you use to drive product adoption and apply similar approaches for this exercise. Tactics should include: leaders constantly reinforcing core values in contextual meetings; highlighting good and bad application of core values across the team; explicitly recognizing and rewarding good behavior; and, most importantly, ensuring that their own decision making actually and obviously lives up to these principles. For example at Amazon and now at DataSphere everything we do is guided by the impact it will create for our customers- it is part of our core principles and our company DNA. We constantly reference this principle as part of how we make we make tradeoffs and prioritization decisions. In a rapid growth environment with many new employees, you must repeat, repeat and repeat until the concept becomes ingrained. To maximize the impact, everyone in the company needs to believe in and contribute toward building the culture as opposed to relegating it to human resources.
Building an entrepreneurial and productive culture is essential to building a successful and a great company. I have been part of two high growth companies - first at Amazon and now at DataSphere Technologies, where our culture has been instrumental in driving 250 percent year over year revenue growth and an increase in staff over the same period from 35 to more than 400 people. In both instances, I have seen culture play a big role in driving the success of the companies throughout the growth cycle. It is also critically important in weathering the inevitable dark days and maximizing opportunities presented when things are going well. Many other highly successful companies such as Netflix and Zappos have similarly stressed the importance of their company culture in driving business growth.
In this article, I will share the principles you can utilize to build an amazing productive culture for your company.
* Set up company philosophy so that everyone is aligned
We have built a culture where every employee is asked to act as a CEO of their role and leverage others as resources to best service their customers. We have also established key company philosophies that guide everyone's actions-
a) Pursue "game changing" opportunities
b) Obsess about delivering value to customers
c) Create compelling value for all team members
d) Provide a culture where the "best ideas" win
e) Work hard, have fun, make a huge impact
It is very important to choose values that everyone in the company can believe in, embrace, apply, and evangelize. Communicate core philosophies of your company to potential candidates during the recruitment process so that they can self assess if they want to be part of your company's journey. Do a company orientation for all new employees in their first week of employment led by executives. Go over the company's values, with lots of examples, so that everyone is crystal clear about the company's guiding principles. It is also helpful to pick successful role model companies that you would like to emulate and share the rationale with your team. Our current role models are Amazon.com, Netflix, and Google. Drawing specific parallels between well known "great" companies and our company helps employees share the vision of where the company can go with their help. We explain that these role model companies aren't just household names because they are lucky, they are great because they created an amazing culture of continuous innovation to deliver value to customers and employees.
* Everyone needs to play a role in building the company culture
Culture is not built by giving employees a handbook with nice phrases no on can repeat. Everyone in the company, from the CEO on down , needs to constantly apply the values in their day to day activities and explicitly highlight when these values are being used as a guiding light in decision making. To ensure the company-wide adoption of your core values, think of all the tactics you use to drive product adoption and apply similar approaches for this exercise. Tactics should include: leaders constantly reinforcing core values in contextual meetings; highlighting good and bad application of core values across the team; explicitly recognizing and rewarding good behavior; and, most importantly, ensuring that their own decision making actually and obviously lives up to these principles. For example at Amazon and now at DataSphere everything we do is guided by the impact it will create for our customers- it is part of our core principles and our company DNA. We constantly reference this principle as part of how we make we make tradeoffs and prioritization decisions. In a rapid growth environment with many new employees, you must repeat, repeat and repeat until the concept becomes ingrained. To maximize the impact, everyone in the company needs to believe in and contribute toward building the culture as opposed to relegating it to human resources.
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Reader's comments(1)
1:
The followings will rule :
a) Pursue opportunities to build leaders from your team members
b) Deliver values to customers for their money
c) Create compelling growth plan for all team members
d) Provide a culture where talent wins
e) Work hard, party hard . Always with the team
a) Pursue opportunities to build leaders from your team members
b) Deliver values to customers for their money
c) Create compelling growth plan for all team members
d) Provide a culture where talent wins
e) Work hard, party hard . Always with the team
Posted by:Vandeep Gupta
- 21 Aug, 2011
Beautiful and dress selection, please go to Dresses
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