If the Shoe Fits: Banking Culture
by Miki SaxonA Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here
If you work, no matter the industry, company size or the level, you’ve been hearing a lot about the importance of culture, especially over the last 10 years or so, most recently from investors.
Bosses know that ignoring culture puts them at peril, but the lesson is just sinking in for many founders.
Culture is a lot more than foosball tables, fancy food and kegs on Friday.
Culture is the values and ethics of the founders made understandable to all.
Sustainable culture is like a tripod, with customers, investors, and employees comprising each leg.
Founders often tend to focus on two of the legs — investors and customers — leaving the third leg to get along more or less on its own.
The problem is that when you over-favor one leg it will get too long; ignore another leg and it will shrink, but the end result is the same—the tripod tips over.
Simply put, concentrating excessively on one leg or another won’t assure success.
Worse, the third leg, employees, is often the shortest, scrawniest, and weakest leg of the tripod.
However, hip perks and a great ‘cool’ factor doesn’t always convert to loyalty and loyalty is bankable.
Founders who doubt loyalty’s bankability should read Frederick Reichheld, who’s written numerous books on the economic effects of loyalty, and shown in carefully researched studies that a 5% improvement in retention translates to a 25%-100% gain in earnings. (Loyalty Rules).
Loyalty happens because people like and trust what the company says it believes in and which is embodied in its culture.
In other words, good culture pays!
Image credit: HikingArtist