How to *Manage* a Culture of Recognition

Recognize This: It’s possible to proactively manage a company culture with a little directed effort.

Once you’ve created a company culture, how do you manage it?

As we explain in Winning with a Culture of Recognition:

“Culture management is the direction of behavioral choices based on values. It is a clear communication, training, and reward system, and recognition is one of its tools. In fact, culture management is implicit in every organization. The relevant question is, will culture management be deliberate, measurable, and globally directed toward shared, transparent values? Or will it be haphazard, unmeasured, and individually directed toward vague or hidden agendas?”

There’s three key elements to managing your culture implicit in the above:

1. Directing – Managing culture is a proactive endeavor. You can choose to sit back and let a culture develop, or you can proactively create the culture you want that you think employees will choose to engage in and be most productive under.

2. Behavioral Choices – If you choose the pro-active route, you must make an investment of time and energy to notice, acknowledge and appreciate the behaviors of employees that reinforce the culture. You can’t do this once a year (or even once a month). You must do it in the moment so the behavior and the recognition are closely associated in the mind of the employee.

3. Based on Values – What behavioral choices do you reinforce? Those that reflect the values that you’ve already determined to be important to the success of your company. Again, recognition of employees when they demonstrate those values in their daily work is the best method to bring the values to life in a meaningful way.

Are you proactively managing the culture in your company? Is anyone? Or is the culture something that “just is” or “just happens?”