by An Entrepreneurial Culture Assessment
Openness: A willingness to share information and lessons learned widely
- Do you share lessons learned from success as well as failure?
- Is it a norm for individuals to share constructive criticism to push thinking and minimize risk?
- Do employees at every level understand “the big picture”?
Adaptability: A commitment to monitoring your organization’s internal environment through measurement and your external environment through research and using the results to identify possibilities for change and improvement
- Are you monitoring customer (e.g., client, donors, volunteers) feedback — quantitative and qualitative — to detect shifts in needs and/or behaviors?
- Do you regularly seek feedback from external stakeholders about your performance and what more you could be doing to serve your mission?
- Do you question the status quo (a.k.a., “We have always done it this way.”) to ensure that it is still the best way?
Results and Rewards: A dedication to tracking outcomes and impact, but also rewarding the right behaviors, including organizational citizenship
- Do you push decisions downward to those on the front line and with the most information?
- Do you reward the right behavior more than you reprimand negative behavior?
- How does your organization handle failure? Do you learn from it and share lessons learned?
Learning Organization: A promise to employees to support a learning organization that will encourage them to grow and learn without fear
- Do all employees have goals for personal improvement that are regularly discussed and nurtured?
- When something goes wrong, does everyone pitch in without playing the blame game?
- Do you share best practices and newsworthy trends with everyone for feedback and possible implementation within the organization?
Role
1. Create a culture of experimentation
Articles, books, and other resources give the same account: Failure is a precursor to success. When you accept failure as a part of the learning process that helps you achieve your goals, you get more comfortable with this concept.
The key to making failure work for you is conducting experiments that are small enough you won’t be left shirtless if things go south. Creating a company culture that experiments on a regular basis thrives only when you’ve also developed a consistent feedback loop. This crucial communication tool ensures you’ll have the clues needed to iterate and produce something remarkable.
2. Make idea generation a habit
Innovation begins with an idea. And to exponentially increase the odds of producing a winning idea for your business, quantity trumps quality. Of course, not every idea will be a great one. But a large arsenal of thoughts from which to choose makes it easier to refine your understanding of what your customers want from you.
Work to make idea generation a habit in your business. Encourage team members to bring forth their own suggestions, and create a system to catalog what is presented.
3. Diversify your experiences
When it comes to innovation, realize that homogeneity is a liability. Steve Jobs knew this to be true. It’s why he encouraged others to branch out to take the road less traveled. “If you’re gonna make connections which are innovative … you have to not have the same bag of experiences as everyone else does,” Jobs said in 1982, as he accepted the “Golden Plate” award from the Academy of Achievement in Washington, D.C. He was 26.
Make it a point to step outside your comfort zone. Accumulate new experiences for yourself both professionally and personally. As you look to build a rockstar team, be intentional about seeking talent that brings to the table diverse backgrounds, experiences and ways of thinking.
The observations, skills and expanded frame of reference you obtain as a result will prevent you from being satisfied with the status quo.
4. Encourage dissent
Want to improve the quality of your ideas? Encourage others to tear them down. A capable team of people whose opinions you value will generate constructive criticism to help make your idea better. You’ll produce a much better product or offering than you ever could have done alone.
Research backs up this principle. Data from UC Berkeley demonstrates that conflict improves the ideation process. A team whose members cosign everything you say can’t help you or your company become more innovative.
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Obsess over your customers.
Your business exists to serve your customers. The more value you provide, the more they will reward you with their loyalty. When you focus your efforts on knowing your customers intimately, you’ll gain a tremendous amount of insight into how to solve their problems like none other.
Talk to your customers every chance you get. Take the opportunity to walk a mile in their shoes so you can develop a deeper empathy for their issues. Seek out pain points at every step of their customer journey and brainstorm ways to improve the experience for them.
