Shaping a Culture that Drives Success (take the quiz now!)

Far too many organizations view company culture as an abstract concept that’s set in stone or left to chance. Company culture shapes how an organization operates – the norms, behaviors, and unwritten rules within a workplace that influence performance, job satisfaction, and collaborative efforts. Consciously developing a culture aligned with organizational needs and goals is not something that should be ignored.

We’ve developed a short quiz to help leaders identify the key factors that shape their company culture. The questions explore preferences across four common workplace cultures that prioritize different values. Take the quiz now and then read on to gain a deeper understanding of the results:

One way to build self-awareness around cultural fit is through understanding the four common workplace culture types:

1. Collaborative cultures, “Like a Family”: These cultures focus first on relationships, emotional safety and support systems that spur innovation through inclusion and belonging. They tend to move methodically, mitigate conflict, and reward based on mentoring and team success.
2. Innovative cultures, “Energy and Passion”: These cultures concentrate on speed, agility, speaking up, deconstructing assumptions, and trailblazing ideas. They can feel chaotic to some. But the energy and openness powers breakthroughs. Failures get embraced as part of the journey rather than embarrassments.
3. Achievement cultures, “Best of the Best”: These cultures run on ambitions, metrics, competitive spirit, and personal accountability in their drive to win. They can seem intense and stressful but tend to deliver strong results by leveraging workforce competitiveness. Leaders impose demands and expect high performance.
4. Structure-based cultures, “By the Book”: These cultures value order, consistency, standards, policies and analysis through a workplace oriented around rational control, precise roles and quantitative efficiency. They minimize surprises that could distort judgments.

Mapping team members against these cultures provides invaluable perspective on compatibility. It enables consciously shaping an environment for more employees to excel. Does the culture lean too heavily on structure while lacking enough freedom? Does it enable both visionaries and implementers to contribute? These insights guide impactful decisions on dynamics, training, leadership approaches, and more to build a culture where the collective operates at full strength.

The ultimate objective is a self-reinforcing cycle where the organization’s priorities feed into culture-shaping that consistently empowers efficient, engaged, and empowered workforces to drive success. But those environments only emerge through understanding what motivates people.

Understanding what culture is and does is only the first step in building a powerful company culture. To learn more about how to evaluate and shape a culture that produces better business performance and more reliable growth, check out our event, “The Leader’s Role in Shaping Culture.”