The Vital Importance of Corporate Culture
I came across some research done by Columbia Business School on the challenges that CEOs face in building and maintaining their company’s cultures.
The challenges they identified capture the essence of the work I do with management teams to assess and help them improve their company cultures. Evidently, culture DOES have a direct impact on company value.
Here are some of the more compelling results and conclusions of the study: More than half of the senior executives surveyed said that corporate culture is one of the top three drivers of firm value.
92 percent said that improving their culture would increase their company’s value; yet…only 16 percent said that their culture was where it should be.
Their conclusion is something I have been talking about regularly with my CEO clients: motivating executives to pull together towards a common purpose is even more critical now than ever.
The heart of culture is in the informal elements that are not often written down: specifically, the company’s values and norms.
In order for a culture to be effective, the company’s formal policies and practices have to align with and support these informal factors.