Street-Wolf Sound Box and Streamers; How Company Culture Needs Them

Can you remember when you got your first bike for Christmas or your birthday?

What colour was the frame? Did it have streamers? Maybe a disc back wheel? Maybe you had six gears, or more? Or did you reach the upper echelons of kid-cool with the Raleigh Street-Woolf with its (retrospectively, quite dangerous) handlebar game and sounds? Sheeeeeeeeeeeze 

That bike became part of your identity – the kid on the block with the shiny new bike; you wanted to power it through the streets, elaborately changing gears, accelerating through puddles, rolling down hills with the grace of a Parisian schoolchild, or skidding like a Police interceptor vehicle; styling it out on the pavements to get to where you wanted to go.

When we join new companies, it can bring as much joy, anticipation and expectation as that new bike did. Every new team member becomes part of a new tribe, our identity grows into being part of something new, bigger than ourselves, heading in a new direction.

The responsibility of leadership is maintaining the new bike enjoyment; adjusting and checking in to drive engagement, productivity, and loyalty, allowing the ‘stealth weapon’ of culture to pay out its very attainable dividends for future success.

You can’t win the Tour-De-France on a Penny Farthing

Nearly every bike is made up of the same five key components that need to work together to make it possible to ride. Every business has a few key components too.

1.   The strategy front wheel enables the forward direction for the mission towards the vision. If your strategy is muddy, without a strong product and an inspiring vision for the future, supported by a mission illustrating how to get there, why would your team want to ride there? It needs to be visible and visited often but not changed regularly.

2.   Handlebars enable the rider to choose the path they so desire to get to the destination. He/She/They must provide the freedom to creatively design the path towards the destination the vision provides. 

3.   The frame supports the rider with its established processes and policies, just to keep things moving and locked together.

4.   Each rider needs to be motivated and have the energy to continue to pedal in the direction needed each day. The business moves nowhere without the team. Engagement with the vision and mission, and the peloton teammates, mean energy levels can remain high and tackle the changing terrains ahead.  

5.   And lastly, the rear wheel of company culture; the environment that enables function. When it comes to company culture, it is a more complex element with many variables, but it’s not hard to describe, it’s ‘the way we do things around here’.

This rear wheel can be neglected, or de-prioritised at times to focus on winning a short-term stage, however research shows that those companies who tend to their cultural elements, gain sustained competitive advantages over those that do not, for very little investment.

Greasing Your Gears; Two Stats For Getting Your Hands Dirty 

Great company culture drives sustained long-term performance; books by some of the business thought-leader greats like the “Culture Cycle” by James Heskett, outline how culture can be the ‘stealth weapon’ in company performance, providing significant ROI with very low monetary investment. 

A.   One HBR study found that positive employees drive over $5,000 extra revenue per head, and toxic ones cost over $12,000. Well smash-on-the-breaks-and-catapult-over-the-handlebars…as someone with a finance background I think this is a no-brainer when it comes to the simple financial benefits of creating a great culture, let alone the fulfilment and happiness-driving benefits from an engaged and productive team.

B.   Another powerful stat comes from Larry Senn’s study of the amount of time an employee spends thinking about cultural issues as opposed to strategic, needle-moving projects. The study found it can be up to two hours a day – I gasp.

Let’s extrapolate that over a year with Gallup’s 17% of unengaged workers and their knowledge-worker salaries, and you have a lot of money left on the table from slower innovation times and lower customer value-driving solutions, as well as poured down the drain from salaried time spent on issues not being managed for growth.

If the companies that experience a proportion of these could invest small amounts in measuring and improving their culture, the generated ROI could, I don’t know, be spent on a significant controlling portion of Peloton (yes the shares are at an all-time low but it’s only a matter of time before they rocket in my humble, completely uninformed opinion*)

BHAG To Win The Pedal-Powered Drag Race 

As leaders kicking off your 2022 annual budgets and plans of BHAGs, SMART KPIs and OKRs, what are you measuring in your culture that will enable the proverbial back-wheel powerhouse to be used to full effect, and empower your teams to win the yellow jersey at each stage of your journey?

Can you operationalise the cultivation and compounding, of your company culture for the ROI that’s available to you this year? 

I’d love to hear what ideas you have for the period ahead; get in touch and we can take a wizz around the block on your two-wheeled wagon and chat about ideas to supercharge it for your future. I’m bringing my streamers.

*No investment should be made based on my writing. I am not at all qualified to advise, I just enjoy Jess King’s sparkly workouts regularly.