BUILDING THE RIGHT CULTURE

“CULTURE” IS ONE OF THE SQUISHIER CONCEPTS OF MAN agement. It can be hard to define, even harder to quantify, and it often has nothing to do with what’s in the employee handbook or the corporate mission statement. But research shows that culture can often be an important driver of company performance.

In the essays that follow, leaders tell how they worked to create cultures that drive performance—or fix broken cultures that imperiled a business. One describes building (from scratch) a company where a telephone rep feels it’s perfectly okay to spend six hours on a single customer call. Another describes what it’s like to be hired into a company that’s had seven CEOs in the past 10 years. One faced an unusually grim managerial dilemma: What to do when 40 employees were killed on the job at your company last year? Another describes going undercover as a mystery shopper to understand why his company’s employees were scoring high in existing performance measures even as sales fell.

Many management tasks are fairly discrete: You choose an employee, set a budget for ad spending, do (or don’t do) a deal. Changing a culture can be immensely harder—it’s a task for which no spreadsheet analysis will help. That’s why one of the best ways to learn how to do it is to hear from others who have tried and succeeded.