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Building Culture, cont.
4
Communicate Clearly, Constantly, and Consistently
When you’re striving to build a successful and world-class culture, you really
cannot communicate too much. When you’re the leader, you step up every
day to preach your core values and standards to your team. You need to be
like Joel Osteen captivating the crowd through creative storytelling. That’s
your job: to tell the brand story.
The problems that most owners and operators talk about most are core
values, standards, and expectations, usually at the beginning of the
onboarding process for training or hiring. When they don’t see that they
did not clearly communicate those foundational aspects, three or four
months down the road, those same owners and operators wonder why their
employees changed so much. They don’t seem like the person they hired and
they’re just not sure why. Is it really any surprise?
Your communication with your team has to be three things:
clear, consistent, and constant.
Clear
Don’t assume that your team understands what you’re saying. Always ask for
clarification and have them explain it to you.
Consistent
Your message has to be consistent from day to day and from employee to
employee. There can only be one standard and you have to be the gatekeeper
of that. Once you start having different standards for different people in
different situations, you have embarked on a downward spiral that is hard to
come back from.
Constant
Repetition is the mother of skill and your team will need to be constantly
reminded of your core values, standards, and expectations. It has to come
from you personally—not from some cute poster you put up in the employee
break area thinking that is going to reinforce your message. If you do, you are
fooling yourself.