Would you believe me if I told you that our core purpose, plus the Hedgehog Concept, plus a bunch of fun parties helped our company take the next step on our way from good to great?
It was at our next meeting that Smartie-Pants introduced the concept of the Flywheel Effect to us. It is another idea offered by Jim Collins in his book Good to Great.
As a company implements the practices outlined in the book, inertia builds, momentum accelerates, and in time, with consistent practice, a breakthrough occurs. The key is to persevere through the awkward phase, embrace culture-building, and keep putting one foot in front of the other until our best intentions become our reality. Eventually, culture building and smart business practices like the Hedgehog Concept will operate with their own momentum. It is at this point that breakthrough occurs and the flywheel propels itself. This is when good companies become great.
In his book, Collins mentions many, many factors that contribute to a breakthrough. But it has been my experience that building our culture consistently over time has been the single most influential force leading to our success as a company.
Our core purpose, values, and our culture are one of the first things we discuss during new employee interviews. It is more important to us that an employee fit our culture than it is that the employee has the skills to do the job for which they are applying.
The way we build culture at Crystal D involves establishing company-wide and department-wide events (aka fun parties) that occur on a regular basis. We also take time out to celebrate our employees and their personal, unique, and valuable contributions to our company twice each year: once at our recognition event called WOW Day and once at our golf outing to recognize years of service.
We have intentionally layered culture-based events one on top of the next slowly over time, and as a result, they have taken on a momentum of their own. Today, our culture is owned and operated by our employees rather than a leadership team.
A Special Note to My Readers Who are Business Owners, Executives, and Managers:
If you think that culture-building is something that only higher-ups should initiate, you are believing a big fat lie.
Years ago, I believed the same thing. As a result, I wasted a lot of time and energy trying to get my employees to do what I wanted them to do.
I can save you the blood, sweat, and tears by advising you to skip over this line of thinking and go right to the employees. They are the flywheel of your organization.
You may be asking yourself, how do I get started? How do I reach them?
Small things, implemented consistently over time, with lots of communication is the key.
Here is an example. Our company organized a Community Outreach/Volunteer Event to “adopt” a family for which we buy and wrap holiday gifts. We used this opportunity to connect with our employees and use their efforts to reinforce the company culture.
- Pre-Event Collateral: We have messaging that ties the core purpose and/or values into the event promotion. Hang posters in the office space that includes this terminology:
- Together, let’s Turn Emotions Into Memories® for our Adopt-a-Family. With your donations, time, and effort we can make this possible!
- Event Introduction: Make a conscious decision to make an opening speech at the event reminding everyone of the purpose of the event and how it ties into the company’s core purpose or core values.
- Thank you for helping us gather gifts for our adopted family. Together we can make the holidays memorable for this family; which is our core purpose.
- Event Closing: This is another great opportunity to reinforce your company’s core purpose and core values by explaining how it relates to each employee during the event. Use specific examples of actions that your employees took during the event.
- Collecting and wrapping gifts for our adopted family has been fun! I especially liked how the Sales Department choose to purchase a new microwave for this family. They chose and shopped for the gift together. This is a great example of our Passion Value because…”
- Post-Event Reinforcement: Ask your managers to talk about the event with their teams. The management team can help reinforce their employees by acknowledging their effort to align with the purpose and values as they participated in the event. Such as, “I saw you demonstrate the Respect Value when you…” or “I could tell you were modeling commitment when you…”
In coming posts, I have more examples like this to share with you. So please stay tuned.
If you’d like to discuss this in more detail please reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you.
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