Culture Starts With You: A Leader's Roadmap To Building A More Competitive And Cohesive Company

Forbes

19-05-2025

Culture is a puzzle that can be solved.
Culture vs. Brand
Culture refers to the shared values, beliefs, behaviors, practices, traditions, and norms that define a group of people or an organization. It encompasses how people interact, make decisions, and approach work or life. In an organizational context, culture is often described as the "way we do things around here" and is shaped by leadership, history, environment, and internal dynamics. Culture is deeply embedded and can take time to change.
Brand refers to the identity, image, and perception an organization or product conveys to the outside world. It encompasses visual elements, such as logos and design, but also extends to the company's reputation, promise, messaging, and how it communicates its values and purpose to its customers and stakeholders. Culture primarily focuses on employees and the internal community, whereas the brand is aimed at customers, prospects, and the broader public.
Aligning culture and brand is crucial for creating a cohesive and authentic experience for employees and customers. When a company's culture and brand are in sync, it leads to greater employee engagement, customer satisfaction, and long-term success. Conversely, misalignment can lead to confusion, frustration, and a lack of trust. Culture is often quantified through metrics, but perhaps the most transformative catalyst within an organization isn't a statistic, but a sentiment: compassion. In embracing compassion, organizations not only enhance their culture, they unlock their full potential.
'As a people leader, you have the greatest potential to be a culture carrier. You have an outsized opportunity to create norms around the type of culture you want to build.' offers Sarah Feely, Chief Learning Officer at Compassionate Leaders Circle.' It begins with leaders setting the tone, but flourishes when every team member embraces and embodies compassion. Implementing culture change requires focus and resources, but it can also enhance your company's productivity.
Competitive Advantage
Recent research highlights that a company's culture is increasingly recognized as a competitive advantage:
Healthy Cultures Drive Revenue and Stock Performance. A joint study by Grant Thornton and Oxford Economics found that companies with extremely healthy cultures are:
Adaptable Cultures Enhance Financial Performance. Research from the Berkeley Haas School of Business indicates that firms with strong, adaptable cultures—those that encourage risk-taking and responsiveness to change—experience higher revenue, net income growth, and ROI, especially during economically turbulent periods.
Great Cultures Improve Retention. According to a 2023 SHRM report, employees who rate their workplace culture as "good" or "excellent" are:
Leader's Roadmap
Understanding your role as a leader in creating a resilient and healthy culture is a foundation for implementing effective strategies, which can lead to more profit. You can begin with this five-step roadmap, which I have developed and honed over the last 30+ years while working with leaders who want to create better organizations:
Step One: Heart - Become a more compassionate and effective executive. Understand the ROI of leading with love and strive to be a more heart-centered leader. This starts with being self-aware and connecting your actions to culture-building. Culture is created in every meeting, every decision, and every act of leadership. It's in how you listen, how you hire, how you promote, and how you recognize your team. Compassion in the workplace transcends mere kindness. It's about creating environments where employees feel seen, heard, and valued.
Step Two: Soul - Revisit your organization's vision, purpose, and values. Review them with your team and update them if needed to ensure everyone understands and knows how to apply them to day-to-day activities.
Step Three: Talent - Enhance your approach to talent acquisition and development by fostering a positive culture. Talent can include DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging) recruiting and onboarding initiatives. The quality of people you hire is the most crucial element in creating a healthy culture.
Step Four: Quality - Create excellence through the power of purpose and continuous improvement. Quality encompasses the processes you have in place for updating standards or SOPs, learning and training, and regularly analyzing the effectiveness of both on an ongoing basis.
Step Five: Spirit - Infuse humanness and energy into whatever gives your company culture a personality. This step included upgrading how you reward performance, celebrate your culture and successes, and communicate internally.
Compassionate Leaders Circle offers practical tools for leading compassionate culture change initiatives in your organization through Culture Labs that expand upon this roadmap. Chief Compassion Officer Meryl Eriksen leads these programs and offers, 'Compassionate cultures provide psychological safety, where people are truly seen and empowered to thrive.'