Choosing the right words to describe your culture is crucial.
Every company has a language, some more developed than others. If you want to shape your culture, shape the words that describe your culture.
As a review, there are three steps to shaping culture within an organization. In a previous article, I spoke about beliefs and how to go about deciding how the culture should be formed, principles to believe in, and choosing an ethos you desire. The next important step is to put these beliefs into words, written words, crafted and chiseled to reflect both the heart of the organization and the nuances of the behaviors that will make an indelible impact.
Choosing the right words to describe your culture is crucial. A common mistake I see when trying to define culture is only focusing on a few succinct words or punchy, memorable sentences. While this approach may produce impressive phraseology, frequently these sentences easily become cliché and fai to come to life until they are further explained. While most are interested in brevity, I want to focus on clarity. I would much rather you write a whole page that clarifies one aspect of the culture, than one sentence that sounds poetic but remains unclear.
For example, when we defined the culture at TotalCare, it was a process of many years of research, discussions, and trial and error before we finally created a document outside the standard mission, vision, and values. We started by telling our story in a short paragraph. The next section describes our dream. Then, instead of a short vision statement, we wrote a long paragraph to describe who we are. I will include it at the end of the article. After reading about who we are, one is usually moved at a deep level. We are intentional to paint a clear picture of who we want to be.
The rest of our document details 24 values, principles, and behaviors we desire to follow. Each of them is described by three or four words. For example, the first one is: “We honor God.” But how do we honor God? Which God do we honor? Do we honor every God? If we simply leave it as, “We honor God,” there’s room for confusion.
So, the two guides to follow for defining culture are brevity and clarity. “We honor God,” is very brief, very succinct, but it is not clear enough, so we describe our intention behind that. Here are examples of our 24 values at TotalCare and our Foundational Document as well for your reference:
These documents are often referred to on a daily basis. All of our locations in every country, all 700 people who work for us have a daily team huddle, or at minimum a few times a week, when these principles are revisited. These words and phrases become part of our folklore and part of the TotalCare language.
