5 Warnings About So-called Corporate Culture
In small business
We shouldn’t write about corporate culture in small businesses because small businesses do have their unique cultures but they aren’t corporate. There’s a real difference between culture as you and I deal with it in small business, and corporate culture in larger businesses.
Larger companies can create and manage corporate cultures over the long term because they’re a mosaic of strategies and policies. When I consulted with Apple Computer, IBM, Xerox, and Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s and early 1990s the cultural differences were obvious, even though they were all big companies in the same industry. It’s not for nothing that research and the academic discussion focuses on culture in larger organizations. Corporate culture is something the upper levels of management can decide on and dictate, if they’re effective, throughout the organization. Not that it’s easy, but it’s possible.
2. You can’t fake it
While maybe the big companies can influence culture over time with high-level decisions, in startups and small business the culture is determined by owner-operator-manager actions, period. It’s actions, not words. It’s what ideas win, and whose ideas win, who and what rises and who and what falls. Do you give that customer a replacement product? Do you refund that money? Does the person who’s always late get held accountable? Do you listen to suggestions?
You don’t get to read a list of corporate culture tips and decide to change yours. You have to change yourself first.
3. Just being nice doesn’t cut it
This one is subtle, hard to explain well, but also critical. The literature on corporate culture is a lot about humanizing the large corporation because there’s the assumption in larger organizations that the individuals, personalities, beliefs and such get lost in the larger numbers. Since business metrics and cold analysis are assumed, culture in business literature sounds like counter culture: Lisa Baron’s advice, for example, includes “abolish hierarchy, support mistakes, and give people access to information.”
In small business, in contrast, we tend to emphasize the personal and forget the metrics and analysis. Most of us confuse small business culture with me being liked. As I look back on may own small business management between 1995 and 2007, the 1960s counter-culture values I have didn’t optimize the business side of small business culture. I wasn’t comfortable enough with wielding authority. It seemed like everybody liked me well enough, but we needed more hard-nosed management. We missed the real work ethic at crunch times. Well, actually, we missed the crunch times. My daughter is doing a better job at this, but it’s hard. We needed to be more hierarchical, harder on poor performance, and more careful about access to information.
It would be nice if everybody loved their work, but nobody loves it like you do, and business has to go on, whether they like it or not. What does your small business culture say about that? I’m not saying that nice guys (guys is both genders in this case) finish last, like the cliché would have it … but they don’t finish first that often. To make a team work, you need to be somewhere in the middle between nice and hard-nosed, and to waver between the extremes with a lot of fine tuning, and a lot of change.
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