What impacts a growth culture? In hiring an executive or a key person in your organization, how important to you is culture? If you believe that kind of stuff takes care of itself, you are missing an opportunity to hire toward building a well-defined environment, essential for continual growth. While there are many factors to culture, three aspects impact culture more than most.
I’ve learned that how you pay people, how you manage people, and how you expect to grow your business are three really important facets of what creates culture in a company. Business owners that take this seriously have a focus on creating a long term relationship with employees. And it begins with how you’re hiring people and how you approach the hiring process. But I think beyond that it also is impacted by how you expect to manage those folks.
Let’s first look at compensation. How people are paid will drive your culture. For example, if you like to reward your best sales person with large commissions, that incents differently than if you bonus all employees, including the sales team, based on EBITDA. It’s likely not just sales revenue that makes you profitable; it’s a well-run operational group, and it’s administrative support that is customer driven. This different way of incentivizing creates a clear and different sense of what it’s like to work in a company that values its culture.
Next, let’s look at management of people. Do you approach people-management as an accountability-oriented process, that offers a transparent view into what’s important? Do you have a leadership-style that is inclusive, that is more of a player-coach leader who doesn’t mind rolling up his sleeves. Again, you’re creating a culture of trust which increases the likelihood of sustained growth over time.
Finally, how do you grow? If you do it through organic growth, through promoting from within, through spending time and money on training your team, and hiring with an interest in long term customer and employee relationships, that will impact in a different way the likelihood of a sustained growth culture.
Three facets – compensation, management, and how you grow your company impact culture, all important in selling the company in the hiring of a key person,
If you’d like to discuss how culture is involved in the hiring process, contact us at Dan Toussant & Associates. We’re a member office of the Sanford Rose Associates network of offices.
