Culture Connection: How Developing a Winning Culture Will Give Your Organization a Competitive Advantage - Hardcover

Parker, Marty

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 007178876X ISBN 13: 9780071788762

Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education Ltd, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

“Great companies, focused on long-term value creation, recognize that a deeply rooted, sustainable culture is the foundation of success. It is an asset to be managed like any other. Marty Parker has long understood this, and Culture Connection offers a blueprint to create, nurture, protect, and grow this most essential asset to a level of competitive advantage. It’s a leadership must-read.”
—MICHAEL MCCAIN, president & CEO, Maple Leaf Foods

“Marty Parker has captured a compelling collection of corporate culture insights and learnings in this book, making it a great tool for leaders at all levels in profi t-based, charitable and government organizations alike. Marty truly gets it that culture is the ultimate competitive advantage.”
—DARREN ENTWISTLE, president & CEO, TELUS Corporation/p>

“This is perhaps the best book I have read on why a winning corporate culture is critical in today’s competitive global marketplace. . . . Culture Connection is a must-read for any current or future business leader or owner, and it will become a must-read for our leadership team.”
—DAVE MACKAY, president, Ceridian Canada Ltd.

“Marty Parker has developed a practical and insightful guide to establishing a company culture, enforcing it, and ensuring it endures for the long term. This has been a fundamental element of our success at Four Seasons and now companies everywhere can learn how adhering to a strong set of core values can bring tremendous rewards.”
—ISADORE SHARP, founder and chairman, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts

“ Marty is one of Canada’s leading executive recruiters and an expert in culture. . . . This is a very insightful read and the takeaway from Marty’s interviews with leading North American executives is outstanding.”
—DON BABICK, director, Torstar Corporation; former president and publisher, National Post

“Marty Parker’s book is essential for anyone who leads or aspires to lead an organization if they truly want to understand how to unleash the potential of their people.”
—CLIVE BEDDOE, founding shareholder and chairman, WestJet

About the Book:

The business world is only now beginning to open its eyes to the fact that a powerful corporate culture can generate hard-currency results. But Marty Parker has known this for years. Since 2003, his executive search and cultural assessment firm, Waterstone Human Capital, has focused its recruiting strategy on employee fit and on the best corporate cultures. Each year, the firm’s “Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures” program singles out companies whose cultures have led to measurable growth, increased profits, and a distinct competitive advantage.

Now, Parker reveals the best practices of some of the world’s top companies to help you generate extraordinary business results by spearheading cultural change in your own organization. Culture Connection helps you define your vision and gives you invaluable guidance on how to:

• Set the stage for improved communication, innovation, and performance
• Provide significant shareholder return
• Measure and align your organization’s efforts
• Recruit and retain the best people in your industry

Culture Connection is filled with advice from top business leaders, including Clive Beddoe, founding shareholder and chairman, WestJet; Isadore Sharp, founder and chairman, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts; Darren Entwistle, president and CEO, TELUS Corporation; Marc Tellier, president and CEO, Yellow Pages Group; and Michael McCain, president and CEO, Maple Leaf Foods.

These leaders know what they’re talking about: each represents an organization that has been a previous winner of “Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures”, and whose performance has outperformed their peers. In fact, the 2010 winners of Canada’s 10 outpaced the S&P/TSX 60 by an average of 600 percent.

Culture isn’t just connected to performance; it drives performance. Today’s top companies invest in their corporate cultures, and they don’t pull back when times get tough. Even in the most challenging times, they behave like great companies. And that’s what they remain.

Learn their hard-earned lessons with Culture Connection—and establish the kind of culture that seizes and holds the competitive edge.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marty Parkeris the founder, chairman, and CEO of the executive search and cultural assessment fi rm Waterstone Human Capital. In 2005, he founded the annual program, “Canada’s 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures”, which recognizes best-in-class organizations for creating cultures that have helped them enhance performance and sustain a competitive advantage. Parker also publishes a regular newsletter called The Waterline: Highs and Lows in Leadership and Corporate Culture, which can be found online at www.waterstonehc.com.

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CULTURE CONNECTION

HOW DEVELOPING A WINNING CULTURE WILL GIVE YOUR ORGANIZATION A COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

By MARTY PARKER

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Marty Parker
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-07-178876-2

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Know Thyself
2. The Answers Are in the Stars
3. The Few and the Mighty: Essential Tools to Align Culture in Your 
Organization
4. It Starts at the Top: How Leadership Impacts Corporate Culture
5. The Culture Conversation: Why the Best Organizations Are Great at 
Articulating Their Culture
6. The Train Drain
7. Culture and Celebration: How Celebration and Rituals Impact Culture
8. What's Your Reason for Being? How Credos and Belief Statements 
Reinforce Culture
9. Measure Once and Cut Three Times
10. Culture Killers: Tips and Tricks for Identifying Things That Can Hurt 
Corporate Culture
11. Culture Change: Changing Habits, Systems, and People
12. The Culture Club: The Importance of Culture Champions
13. Culture Clash: Why Culture Is a Critical Component of International 
Expansion
14. Culture and Governance: The Role of the Board in Supporting Corporate 
Culture
15. Taking It to the Streets: Corporate Culture as Your Brand
16. Recruiting for Fit
17. Performance Management for Fit
18. Culture and Performance: Proof Positive That Culture Is More than 
Connected to Performance—It Drives Performance
Notes
Index
Photo Gallery

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Know Thyself

Know thyself.

—Socrates

The leaders of corporate Canada don't usually stand on their chairs andcheer—and certainly not at stuffy awards dinners.

But this was no stuffy awards dinner. From the get-go, we had deliberately gonein the opposite direction for our Canada's 10 Most Admired Corporate Culturesawards gala: we wanted the night to be fun. More important, our objective wasfor the program's annual winners to "show off their culture" at theevent—to bring out their teams and celebrate. And boy, did they ever ...

So there I was, in February of 2010, in the sold-out ballroom of the FourSeasons Hotel Toronto, standing on my chair like the rest of the 500 willingparticipants. From the stage, Patch Evans, CEO of Goodlife Fitness (one ofCanada's 10 winners in 2009), led our audience through a signature element ofGoodlife's corporate culture: a ritual at all employee gatherings called theMargarita. Part motivational cheer and part physical stretch, the end result ofthe Margarita is the reinforcement of the company's brand, "I'm Sexy, Smart andStrong".

Who'd have thought that Canada's leading CEOs and senior HR leaders would bestanding on chairs with their hands waving in the air, shouting that phrase atthe top of their lungs, at an awards dinner on a Monday night in Toronto inFebruary?

To me, it was yet another reinforcement of a belief that we've had for quite awhile in our executive search practice: culture matters to successfulorganizations. But culture is more than company foosball tables, in-house gyms,and nifty lunchrooms. Culture matters precisely because (and we have proventhis) it leads to great performance. In fact, organizations with clearlydefined, easily communicated, and well-aligned cultures win in the marketplaceand outperform their peers.

Ten years ago, no one thought much about corporate culture. The term was barelyused. In fact, as a new search firm back in the early 2000s, the marketingresearch consultants that we hired advised us to "not go down the culture road".Even our own board of directors warned that we might be going at this alone andthat this type of positioning, although noble, might not be the ideal place tostake our claim. Thankfully, our search experience at the time was providing uswith enough anecdotal evidence to ignore all of that advice.

What were we seeing? Clients were putting a higher weighting on "fit" in thehiring process. And the candidates we placed, those who were hired for havingthe right kinds of behaviours—the same behaviours that defined success atthe client's organization—were more successful and had longer tenures thanthe ones who were hired strictly for their skill set. The dynamics became clearto us: we realized that in order to do great work in executive search, we neededto understand the culture of an organization and what makes its high performers,high performers.

Clearly, culture is more than an employee group cheer. It's about how peoplebehave, day in and day out. In fact, in truly high-performing organizations,culture starts with a defined set of behaviours or the values that governthem—behaviours that are then reinforced, communicated, and alignedthroughout the organization. And driving those behaviours is leadership.

Great organizations, like our annual group of Canada's 10 Most Admired CorporateCultures, exercise the principle that I'll call "Know Thyself". This knowledgeoften begins with a frank assessment of the organization's existingculture—which may not have always been a great one. In fact, culturalassessments (the fastest area of growth in our business) often happen because anexisting culture is not well defined, is misunderstood, or is verging ondysfunctionality. But sometimes the situation is not nearly as dire as this.Often, an organization's culture may simply be in need of definition rather thanimprovement. In any event, knowing thyself begins with assessing your culture.The objectives are to clearly define that culture—and, most important, toarticulate it—and to find new and systematic ways to use your culture tounleash the power of your people to perform. With knowledge and understandingcome great power.

Knowing thyself also means taking that assessment and driving its outcomesthroughout the organization. It means defining the behaviours that should berewarded and recognized, and aligning those behaviours throughout yourorganization's HR systems. It also means understanding how your high performersperform and recruiting new leaders based on that knowledge. As we'll learn inChapter 16, "Recruiting for Fit", finding successful people isn't enoughanymore—it's finding out how they're successful that's really important.In fact, the successful people who are currently in your organization are thekey to finding the right kind of new talent. In our practice, this is exactlyhow we approach executive search. Why? Because it consistently leads to theright hire.

The ultimate outcome of the Know Thyself principle is great performance; it'sthe first step towards that goal. I'll come right out and say it: culture is thesingle greatest asset that an organization can have. If you don't believe me,take a look at the numbers. We've proven the impact of culture on performanceeach year through our Canada's 10 Most Admired Corporate Cultures program. Forinstance, in terms of a three-year compound annual growth rate, our 2010 winnersoutpaced the S&P/TSX 60 by an average of nearly 600...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: McGraw-Hill Education Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 007178876X
• ISBN 13: 9780071788762
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 215
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar