The critical question for leaders is how to bring organisational culture to life. How do we make sure we are living our culture on an ongoing basis?
A key lesson is that a company cannot successfully embed their culture without making it tangible. In our previous post, we covered the importance of communicating and promoting the importance of your company culture to your team. Here we thought we would turn the lens on ourselves and show one of the ways we bring the culture of Corporate Edge to life.
The first step in clarifying culture is to define what you stand for. In our case, one of the first things people see when they walk through the door of our Sydney office is an entire wall of artwork that visually outlines our principles – in effect, a daily reminder of what we stand for at Corporate Edge.
As we frequently hold internal and external meetings in this room, the artwork becomes a talking point and an ice-breaker. Talking about things like “do you know your culture?” in client meetings or culture-fit in job interviews, become more natural when our principles are displayed on the wall as a shared experience.
In our latest video, our Managing Director, Phil Allison takes us on a cultural journey to explain our artwork – the blueprint of Corporate Edge. It was created in late 2005, when we first moved into the office in Pyrmont, with input on the most important issues and the icons that would best represent them provided by team members, clients and people who knew the team well.
In essence, the blueprint illustrates the “top line” issues – the must-have principles (enablers), as well as the “bottom line” issues (disablers) – the issues we can’t afford to have.
Some of our top line principles include:
- Being passionate and committed, first and foremost
- Innovation and creativity
- Attracting and retaining the best people
- Effective communication
- Aligned people
- Being agile
Some of our bottom line principles include:
- Complacency
- Dependency
- Bad planning and preparation
- Not sticking to our knitting and losing sight of our vision
- Failure to follow through
- Power plays and egos
Phil goes into each principle and why it has been included in our blueprint in much more detail in our video below, so we encourage you to take five minutes to join him on his walk-through of our boardroom wall.
