Ducks in a Row: KISS Culture
by Miki Saxon
Are you familiar with KISS? It stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid” and is the best guidance for developing your culture.
KISS culture is a product of the boss’ MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy)™.
KISS culture attracts the best people and is a powerful force for retaining them.
A few years ago I wrote about KISS culture and this seems like a god time to revisit it.
KISS Corporate Culture Instead Of Branding
A blog post from India caught my eye earlier this week. Its premise was that retention starts with hiring (absolutely true) and went on to explain how to create and use “employment branding” for recruiting.
Essentially, pretty much everything that falls under the banner of employment branding also falls within the company’s culture—call it corporate MAP—along with the necessary processes.
But corporate culture isn’t static, it’s a living organism that shifts and changes as you grow and hire.
So it’s about hiring to match your corporate culture and using your corporate culture to screen candidates, limiting your hiring to people who are at the very least synergistic with your it—something I first wrote about in 1999.
Understand, I’m not disagreeing with what Sourabh said, just with the way he said it.
Using jargon to cast it as ‘branding’ makes it far more complex than it needs to be—especially if you want the knowledge to permeate your organization from top to bottom.
If that’s your goal, then take the time to understand your culture, KISS* it and communicate it to your people through a Cultural Mission Statement; once they understand it they’ll talk about it using language and terms with which they’re comfortable.
The result will be a culture that sounds and is real—not one invented by the marketing department.
Flickr image credit: ZedBee | Zoë Power
