Improving Your Business Through Cultural Values
Creating a Competitive Advantage
There are four critical issues preoccupying
the boardrooms of both large and small companies around the world
in the 21st century:
- How to attract and keep talented people?
- How to increase profits and shareholder value?
- How to increase creativity and productivity?
- How to ensure ethics permeate the corporate culture?
Building a successful corporate culture has become the most significant
source of competitive advantage and brand differentiation in business
today. Our experience in mapping the values of more than 600 companies
supports the statement that:
Values-driven companies are the most
successful companies.
Why?
- Values drive culture
- Culture drives employee fulfilment
- Employee fulfilment drives customer satisfaction
- Customer satisfaction drives shareholder value
What Are Values and Why Are They Important?
Values are deeply held principles that
people hold or adhere to when making decisions. Individuals express
their values though their behaviours. Organisations express their
values through their working culture. Research shows that there
is a strong link between financial performance and the alignment
of an organisation’s operating values to the employees’
personal values. Who you are and what you stand for is becoming
just as important as the quality of products and services you
provide.
In Corporate Culture and Performance,
John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett show that companies with
strong adaptive cultures based on shared values outperformed
other companies by a significant margin. Over an eleven-year
period, the companies that emphasised all stakeholders grew
four times faster than companies that did not. They also found
that these companies had job creation rates seven times higher,
stock prices that grew 12 times faster, and profit performance
that was 750 times higher than companies that did not have shared
values and adaptive cultures.
In Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras
show that companies that consistently focused on building strong
corporate cultures over a period of several decades outperformed
companies that did not by a factor of six and outperformed the
general stock market by a factor of 15.
John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett,
Corporate Culture and Performance, (New York: The Free Press)
1992 James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, Built to Last, Successful
Habits of Visionary Companies (New York: Harper Collins) 1994
Measurement Matters
Traditionally, intangibles such as culture
and values have been difficult to measure and, therefore, have
not been included as part of the business manager’s scorecard
or the dashboard of key performance indicators.
In 1997, an innovative set of assessments that map the values
of individuals and organisations was developed called the Cultural
Transformation Tools (CTT). The CTT assessment is a detailed diagnostic
report of an organisational culture and a roadmap for continuous
improvement. The Cultural Transformation Tools are based on the
Seven Levels of Consciousness model. They allow the organisation
to measure the alignment of the personal values of the employees
with those of the current culture of the organisation, and those
of the current culture with the desired culture.
The Seven Levels of Organizational Consciousness
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Leadership Styles
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