Lucy Paulson, Director of the European Leadership Programme, an organisation dedicated to supporting the success of entrepreneurs with high-growth companies, discusses Creating Culture - Who do You Want to Work For:
It’s an old maxim, but it’s true: your people are your most important asset. Unless you’re a one-woman band you can’t help but rely heavily on your staff to help make the business a success. The happier your team is, the better they will do their jobs, and better workers mean a more successful and profitable business. It is therefore essential that you decide right from the start what sort of company you want to create, from your own and your employees’ perspective.

Whether it’s your own company and you have built the team from scratch, or you have inherited someone else’s team, if you as the MD / CEO / owner / boss aren’t clear on what you want your company to look and feel like, then you can bet that the rest of the organisation will feel similarly unsure. This is because a business’s culture flows from the top down.

For example, the culture at The Body Shop under the leadership of its late founder Anita Roddick was a vastly different organisation to other high street cosmetics chains. From the design of the stores and their products to the way the salespeople presented themselves, as well as the company’s corporate agenda, this is a company that thrived as a result of its clear identity and the way this was adopted by everyone within the company. Its eco-ethical approach became part of the organisation’s DNA, and without such a figurehead this would have been far harder to achieve.

You can train your people as much as you like, but all the coaching and mission statements in the world won’t actually create a culture for your business. As the boss, you have a responsibility to be that creator, otherwise what you will discover is that your employees will decide for themselves what the business stands for and feels like, and you can easily end up working for a company that you don’t recognise – or possibly don’t even like. Companies with this ‘rudderless’ approach to culture are far more likely to have a high staff turnover, planning that fails to deliver results, mixed brand messages and dissatisfied customers.

This doesn’t mean your team isn’t crucial to developing a company culture though – if you’re going to develop a unified team then empowering your employees to give their best, as well as forgiving their mistakes, is essential. Share your motivations and your ideals with your team and use your personality to help them buy into your goals. By building the company in your own image, whether you are friendly, open and empowering or perhaps serious, respectable and clever, will give a consistency to the company ‘feel’ that helps bring everyone together. Whatever suits you and the industry you operate in, it has to be believable, so don’t try to be something you are clearly not. Culture is about intangibles and if what you want to be clashes too obviously with what you are, it won’t feel right for your employees or your customers.

Whether you are a natural leader that finds it easy to engage with a team and inspire and motivate, or whether it takes you longer to develop your own style and communicate that to the rest of the organisation, it is certainly worthwhile if you want to get the best out of your business. Lead by example and from the heart, after all this is your business. If you can create a company you like, chances are everyone else will like it too.

As Membership Director, Lucy Paulson is responsible for expanding ELP's community of Chairmen, Founders & CEOs. Lucy has a 10 year career of Executive Search in the Technology sector, most recently as Head of Talent for Harvey Nash Executive Search where she worked with the MD to accelerate the firm's growth in Europe. Prior to that she ran her own recruitment consultancy. Whilst completing her post-graduate diploma in Marketing at Salford University she also provided marketing communications support to leading retail property services business, Styles & Wood, in the run up to its IPO.