Building Your Company’s Culture Around Purpose

Are you familiar with the Conscious Capitalism series of books? My favorite book from the series is the Conscious Capitalism Field Guide – Tools for Transforming Your Organization. I love this book because it’s chocked full of bite sized actionable steps, frameworks, checklists and forms for building a purpose driven business. I think I like this book best because it helps business owners take the wonderful examples from the other books and put them in action in your own company. Chapter 6 of the field guide is entitled Enculturating Your Purpose. The chapter provides a framework to implement a culture of purpose into your company.

As you build your team, keep in mind the business culture you want to create. This should be established before you hire anyone. As you interview potential team members, consider if they will contribute positively or negatively to your desired culture. Remember, skills can be learned, but a crappy attitude is engrained. When recruiting new hires, look for those who demonstrate sincerity and commitment to serving the purpose of your company.

Once you make the hire, the enculturation begins during the onboarding. When bringing on new hires, the orientation and training process should be steeped in purpose, utilizing the opportunity to inform, inspire and engage the new team member.

To “inform”, you should come up with ideas on how you will communicate your purpose. As the CEO you can write a welcome letter or create an inspiring video to share during the onboarding process.

Next, you’ll need to “inspire.” To achieve this, you should demonstrate and celebrate how the organization is fulfilling its purpose through real and meaningful impact. The company should foster language that reflects the spirit of their purpose, such as using words like freedom, liberating, inclusive, and diverse.  

Once you’ve inspired, now it’s time to “engage” your employees. You can do this by inviting team members to contribute new ideas. In your messaging, be super clear about their personal responsibility when it comes to fulfilling the purpose of the company.

This is where the second part of the framework comes into play; determining where your purpose is not being fulfilled and make the necessary modifications. For instance, if you already have an orientation and training process, the book suggests figuring out ways you can adjust these programs to incorporate your purpose.

This is not a one and done thing. The culture of purpose needs to be examined during employee evaluations and celebrated throughout the year with rewards and recognition. Indoctrinating purpose is not going to happen overnight, it is best to establish goals and design a structured plan that includes the initiatives, leaders, tasks, deadlines and participants. Great things don’t come easy. It’s important to be realistic about your endeavors, putting this in place will require time, resources and effort. But once you’ve put all this in place, just think of the positive impact your company can have.

But you can’t stop there. The last level of the framework is reviewing all the decisions and actions made. Keep in mind that things change, so these goals should be evaluated, revised and removed when an activity is no longer relative to your purpose. Building a business based on purpose takes time, but the impact can be phenomenal.

On this episode of Get the Balance Right podcast, we are talking about leading a purpose driven team. To discuss this topic, we are joined by Anne Stefanyk, the founder and CEO of Kanopi Studios, a digital agency that designs, builds, and supports websites for nonprofits and mission-driven businesses. Anne shares strategies she implemented in her business to help build a cohesive purpose driven team. She has created a thriving, positive and supportive culture with over 50 distributed team members known as Kanopians. 

In this age of technology where employees often feel disengaged, creating a cohesive, purpose driven culture can be incredibly challenging. Whether you are currently leading a team or about to bring on your first hire, this episode is full of great ideas that you can implement in your business. Also learn about the Conscious Capitalism Field Guide book and how you can utilize it to build your company culture based on purpose.

SHOW NOTES:
Contact and Follow Anne Stefanyk: LinkedIn - Twitter
Kanopi Studios: Website -  Facebook - Blog
Podcast Episode 45 with Kayleigh Nicolaou (Kakadu Creative) on Running a Business Based on Ethics and Episode 11 with Tom Herring and Mary Anne Harmer, who founded Benefit Corporations for Good.
BADcamp (Bay Area Drupal Camp): Website
Books Mentioned: Conscious Capitalism, Conscious Leadership, Conscious Capitalism Field Guide, Start with Why (Simon Sinek) and Dare to Lead (Brene Brown).
Apps Mentioned for Slack: Hey Taco and Donut.

CONTACT HEATHER:
Zeitzwolfe Accounting: Website  - Facebook
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Tools Heather Recommends…

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