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At a leadership training programme for a group of high-tech managers, a distinguished-looking man came up to me at the break and said: “I love what you said about the need for each one of us to develop a leadership culture within our organisations.

At our company, one of our top priorities is to work on our culture. We talk about it all the time. Last year, our company grew 600 per cent. Our focus on culture-building worked splendidly.” Impressive.

One of your most sustainable competitive advantages will be developing a ‘culture of leadership’. When clients engage Sharma Leadership International for organisational development and employee training, one of the first areas we focus on is developing the company’s culture — because all performance is driven by culture.

Your competitors will copy your products, services and branding. But they will never be able to copy your culture. And your culture is the very thing that makes your organisation special, what sets — and then drives — the standards of behaviour.

Your culture tells your people what’s acceptable and important. Your organisation’s culture states its philosophy, its mythology, its religion. To me, culture is king.

The five best ways to build culture are as follows:

Rituals I like the ‘cult’ in culture. The best companies, like Dell, Google, Southwest Airlines, Apple and Wal-Mart, have something in common with cults. They have unique rituals like 7am team huddles to promote team bonding. Rituals shape culture and keep it special.

Celebration John Abele, founder of the multi-billion-dollar Boston Scientific, once told me over dinner that “you get what you celebrate.” When you see someone living the values your culture stan ds for, make them a public hero. Behaviour that gets rewarded is behaviour that gets repeated.

Conversation Your people become what the leaders talk about; to get your vision and values into your people’s hearts, you need to be talking about that stuff constantly — at employee gatherings, at your weekly meetings, during your daily huddles and at the water cooler. You need to evangelise what you stand for.

Training A mission-critical focus to build culture is employee development. If you agree that your organisation’s number-one resource is your people, then it only makes sense to invest significantly in developing your number-one resource. Hold seminars and have leadership workshops to instil the values you seek to nurture and build a leadership culture into their hearts. When your people improve, your company will improve.

Storytelling Great companies have cultures where great stories are told from generation to generation. The story about how the company was founded in a basement, or the story about how a teammate went the extra mile and delivered a customer’s baby, or the story about how the organisation fought back to victory from the brink of disaster. Storytelling cements a company’s most closely cherished ideals into the hearts of its people.

People want to go to work each day and feel they are a part of a community. One of the deepest psychological needs of a human being is the need for belonging. We also want to work for an organisation that values us, promotes our personal growth and makes us feel that we are contributing to a dream.

Robin Sharma is author of The Greatness Guide (Jaico)
dnasunday@dnaindia.net