Digital Dealer - January 2020 - 12

DEALER OPS & LEADERSHIP

Culture

By
Dave Anderson
President,
LearnToLead

Seven Key Rules of Culture

One of the areas worth
stressing is the importance of
building and protecting a high
performing culture. "Culture"

is often an overused word that
many managers have trouble deﬁning in
precise terms. Following are seven rules
and insight into the importance of culture,
building a high performing culture, and
protecting it from cultural infections.

" Culture is
defined as a
collection of beliefs,
values, traditions
and practices
shared by a group
of people. "

The leader is the chief architect
and primary influencer of
culture. While everyone contributes

to shaping the culture, as well as strengthening or weakening it, no one has the level
of inﬂuence in this regard as the leader(s).
The culture a leader builds, and the quality
of people he or she can attract and develop
make up a signiﬁcant portion of that leader's report card. And the culture he or she
creates goes a long way in determining the
quality of people one can attract, develop,
and retain within the organization.

Culture is the foundation of your
organization. Just as in erecting a

building, without the right foundation
supporting the structure, you'll be limited
as to how high you can go. Thus, whenever
one wants to go higher results-wise, he or
she must ﬁrst go back to the foundation and
strengthen each of culture's ﬁve primary
pillars.

The five key pillars of culture
are core values, mission,
performance expectations,
core competencies, and people.

Culture influences behaviors
and behaviors determine results.

It's easy to overlook this tenet and
try to change employee behaviors without improving the culture in which those
behaviors are found; to hack at the leaves
rather than strike at the root. Culture is
deﬁned as a collection of beliefs, values,
traditions, and practices shared by a group
of people. Naturally the strength of those
beliefs, values, traditions, and practices -
as reﬂected in performance expectations,
accountability, teamwork, and quality
leadership - go a long way in determining
how people behave and perform within
that culture day-in and day-out.

[ d i g i t a l d e a l e r. c o m ]

Think of these ﬁve pillars as supporting the
foundation mentioned in the prior point.
Core values relate to your non-negotiable behavioral standards - regardless of
what type of numbers someone produces
they must do it the right way, according to
your values. Mission is the shared purpose
uniting your entire team from all departments. A team becomes unstoppable when
they passionately believe in and pursue the
same purpose. Performance expectations
relate to the "numbers:" how many calls
per day, sales per month, getting receivables to a speciﬁc level monthly, producing
the monthly statement by "x" date of the
month, "x" hours per RO, and the like.
Please note that the ﬁrst three pillars of culture all relate to clarity. Without clarity, you
have chaos in the cubicles and there can be

no accountability because the question becomes, "Accountable for what?" Thus, if you
have core values or a mission statement that
are never discussed or that no one knows, or
cloudy performance expectations that are
too vague, too low, or for which there is no
accompanying accountability, your culture is
weakened dramatically.
The core competency pillar of culture pertains to the corporate strengths that make
your culture unique, different, and better
than the competition. Too often, leaders
ignore their strengths precisely because they
are strong, and never fully edify their culture
by putting more talent, dollars, and resources into the areas where they already excel,
which could pull them further away from the
competition. The people pillar of culture is
the key. Nothing makes a culture stronger,
weaker, or more memorable to a customer-for better or for worse-than the people
that comprise that culture. The people
must share your core values, believe in your
mission, have the skills to reach your performance expectations and the talents to align
with and leverage your core competencies.

Culture is never "finished." It's

not an exaggeration to say that the
day you think culture is done, YOU are
done, and it'll eventually catch up with you.
Think of culture as you would a garden that
requires constant attention and can't be left
to fend for itself. This is why isolated leaders
who spend more time polishing their ofﬁce
chair with their rear end than out in the
trenches helping to shape culture, eventually
plateau or fail outright as they leave their
culture up for grabs to be shaped, rather
than actively shape it in the right image.

Culture must align with your
vision. It does little good to have lofty

goals or forecasts if you don't have the
core values, purpose, standards, strengths,
and people to make it a reality. Again, if
you're missing the numbers you've got to

January 2020

http://www.digitaldealer.com

Digital Dealer - January 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Digital Dealer - January 2020