Company’s Culture is Always Created By What Its Bosses Do

Business Daily (Nairobi)

Jenny Luesby

19 July 2011

opinion

No matter how vigorously we articulate our company culture and values, the culture we end up with is the one we create through what we do. Glossy pictures, smart slogans, and even sharp outlines of core values are nothing to the decision the MD or CEO takes, or the way he or she behaves daily.

A reality that sat starkly before me last week , as some of my longest serving reporters were regaling us all, and our newest interns, with ‘tales’ of who and what we are, over drinks on a Friday night.

The picture they outlined was extremely funny as they told it. Stories of trips to Malindi where the draw of the swimming pool slightly delayed the writing process – as and until the SMS texts started pouring in ahead of a news deadline, keeping up a team of four writers until 4 a.m in the morning.

The time guys worked through the night getting a hacked website back up and open, having discovered the back-up was a dud. Stories of traipsing from hospital to hospital collecting real stories on health conditions, in between searches for cybercafes to send the results, suspicious doctors, ill patients, and texts and calls from a strained news editor and client.

Those seasoned guys spoke about the papers they got hold of, the interviews deep in the bowels of government organs, the stories that shifted whole agendas, and the excruciating feedback when they skipped a step, or the bar was set higher than they had reached.

What came through was just how hard they have worked, and yet how all the pride, and our identity itself, has been created almost exactly by our most trying times – when they’ve gone further, done more, and, even, reached for the stars.

But the real surprise for me was when one of our newest reporters chipped in to tell us how when he was applying to work with us a friend working with a competitor was concerned to the point of warning him “the demands there are impossible”. He even got a follow-up call later asking if he was “surviving”.

Time for a smiley face. But that’s fantastic. Warn away. I can bear any level of taking pot shots at our working environment when what it shows is we aim higher.

For the reality is that it is there – embedded in conversations between former college mates, the warnings that get passed, the complaints that knock around – that the truths are held that define the outcomes for any business, the real data on where and how the competitive advantages, and the most scorating dysfunctionalities.

Yet how often do we managers get to hear that state of truth? As it is, I remember every one of those staff starting, and how hard it was to get them to say what they really thought about anything at all.

Truly, no misery for me as they teased me so mercilessly about how hard I push them: a team that can tell it like it is to the MD – what bliss. What an achievement. Worth every moment of shock – oh no, did I really say that – every sheepish grin, hands held in head.

As it is, every recruit that comes our way we say “we are a non-hierarchical company. We have a flat hierarchy.” I’ve heard my team tell others countless times: “we’re more like a family here. We’re really friends”. But who ever believes that stuff? I worry constantly about it myself. Can we truly walk the talk?

Yet come this weekend, me, I was the happiest criticised MD in this city. Tell me like it is guys. It’s what we stand for, it’s what we believe in, and it’s the only way to do it better than it’s ever been done before.

Though, may I just say, while I’ve the stage for a nano-second, I really don’t remember Ken saying you wrote better emails than articles. Guess it was really a bad day, that one. What a great team!

AllAfrica – All the Time