Operationalize Your Culture

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Now the important piece: how do you actually put this into practice so it’s something you can hold people accountable for, so you can say, “You’re not living up to our culture”? That matters, because you don’t want people who aren’t living up to your culture. That will destroy your company. One bad apple spoils the barrel.

The phrase I use to link culture to execution is simple: it’s not about just doing anything, it’s about doing the right thing, and in many instances doing the right thing as opposed to the easy or obvious thing. Remember, culture is about how you do business, not necessarily what business you’re in. So how do you get people to do the right thing? The more values you give people as touchstones, the easier it becomes. Enterprise Rent-A-Car is the classic example: because they had a clear cultural value focused on customer service, an employee on the spot on 9/11 broke the two-way-contract rule and wrote a one-way rental, and every one of those customers came back. It wasn’t in a rulebook, and you couldn’t have predicted it, but a value created huge, loyal customer relationships. Culture is the touchstone when things go wrong or there’s no obvious answer.

To operationalize, you need clear responsibility and accountability. Give people clear responsibility and make them accountable, and create the right recognition and rewards to reinforce your culture. Remember: lots of people can be responsible for something, but only one person can be accountable. A simple question I ask good execs is whether they know the difference between ownership, responsibility and accountability. Everybody “owns” keeping customers happy, and everybody’s responsible for it; but who is accountable in the company for a customer being successful? There should be only one person. In small companies the big problem is everybody feeling they should do everything; that works for a while, but as you grow, you must have a single accountable owner for each function, whether it’s customer service, sales, product delivery or quality.

This is where the anti-examples bite. If you put up values you can’t live up to, people laugh at you and it becomes an anti-culture. Meta says “keep people safe and protect privacy,” and you’re all laughing; I’ve nothing against Meta, I’m a user, they’ve done amazing things, but you don’t need me to say more. Say “Apple and privacy” and you’re all nodding: they fought the government, refused the back door, and now advertise the iPhone on privacy and face identification. It doesn’t work if you put up values you can’t live up to; it does work when you deliver and don’t just promise. So operationalizing culture is where form meets substance, and the way you do it is through the next three things: communicate it, reinforce it, and evolve it.