Culture has become a challenge and an opportunity for organizations. Some of the challenges facing companies are:
Competition for talent
Retention of key employees
More employees working from home
Productivity
Quality of services and products
Customer retention
Supplier relationships
All of these challenges are related to culture. The opportunity for organizations lies in creating a healthy culture to address these challenges. Yet, most companies struggle to create a healthy culture.
In our book Healthy Culture, Healthy Business, we interviewed 21 companies with healthy cultures, identifying six key attributes that defined their culture:
Clarity of expectations
Alignment of workers and management
Belief and trust in people
Teamwork
A winning attitude
Involvement in the community where the company resides
The leaders of these 21 companies had one thing in common: they created healthy cultures because they believed in their people and how they should be treated. They also believed that a healthy culture would bring out the best in their employees, contributing to the success of their company.
And they were right. Each of the 21 companies was successful in growing its sales, profits, and employee and customer satisfaction levels.
We closely examined the leadership of these 21 companies to help us understand how they created their healthy cultures. Some common themes emerged from these leaders. They talked about their culture with pride and passion. In addition to being totally committed to their culture, they were driven by values and programs to support the culture. They were determined to overcome obstacles that stood in the way of a healthy culture.
And there were many obstacles. There was resistance from those who preferred traditional ways of managing employees, with control and authority. Some managers struggled with adopting a style of leadership that treated employees with respect and dignity or that involved employees in business decisions. Not to be deterred, our sample of healthy culture leaders met this challenge by offering those managers who were resistant an opportunity to change through encouragement and coaching.
For those who declined coaching or could not change, the decision was to remove these managers from leadership positions, replacing them with leaders who fit and supported the culture. In hiring new employees, culture was one of the leading criteria in the selection and onboarding process.
We began our research to identify the components of a healthy culture while exploring the relationship between a healthy culture and a healthy business. Our 21 company leaders incorporated the six components to create a healthy culture and demonstrated how their healthy cultures were instrumental to their business success. Best practices on how these leaders implemented their healthy cultures are presented throughout the book.
How Twenty-one Companies Built a Culture for Success
What professionals have to say about
Healthy Culture, Healthy Business
“There have been hundreds of books written on organizational culture, including my own. This one is different. Most of the books written have a great deal of theory and esoterica. They are mostly conceptual, offering information that one must first understand and process, then execute. Healthy Culture, Healthy Business offers practical, immediately applicable steps through real-world examples in businesses like yours: the small-to-medium business environment. Alan and Donald take an abstract, for some difficult-to-understand concept like culture, and make it immediately accessible, tying it to our own health, personally and organizationally. We all know what health looks like. We all aspire to be healthier. This is the book that will guide you to achieve a healthy culture and a healthy business.”
“In this well-researched and well-written new book, Alan Weinstein and Donald Rust hand us the keys to creating and nurturing a healthy culture and thriving business. The six key components that were discovered as common threads among companies with great cultures—which drove great profits—serve not just as interesting reading but as a road map to creating a company that thrives and flourishes. Thriving and flourishing people. Thriving and flourishing profits.
“We get an inside look at twenty-one companies that serve as models of ‘culture first, profits will follow.’ We all yearn to feel alignment—to live and work in authentically fulfilling ways. This book shows us how to use core values (like honesty, respect, community, teamwork, fun) to build cultures that resonate and to avoid the mistake of investing resources in things that don’t matter.
“Whether you’re looking to fix a broken culture or take a good culture to great, or how to keep a great culture going, this book has something for every leader.”
“In Don Rust and Alan Weinstein’s previous book, Unleashing Human Energy through Culture Change, they showed us how one organization—GM’s Tonawanda Engine plant—could move from a toxic workplace environment to a highly productive and healthy workplace environment through a culture change. Healthy Culture, Healthy Business takes us twenty-one steps into reality. This book shows how twenty-one very different companies in several different countries deliberately modified their workplace cultures to improve relations within the company, improving productivity, product quality, retention, and profitability. Anyone seriously wanting to understand how to begin improving their company’s culture should read this book.”
“Weinstein and Rust peek under the hood and get at what really powers many successful companies—not innovation or compensation or smarts or talent, but a healthy, robust culture. Healthy Culture, Healthy Business provides real-world examples and practical thinking behind twenty-one successful companies that have leveraged culture to fuel growth and multiply the capacity of human capital. If you’re looking for a path to a better culture, your first step is to open this book.”
“In today’s fast-paced, frequently divisive world, it is increasingly difficult for even the most capable business leaders to rally their teams around a common purpose. A crucial aspect of the problem involves corporate culture, which can be frustratingly opaque. Healthy Culture, Healthy Business cracks the code on corporate culture and makes it accessible to all. It reads as if the authors are leaning over your shoulder, whispering words of wisdom that get to businesses’ true bottom line. This is not only the most insightful book ever written on corporate culture but it’s chock-full of firsthand advice that will empower you to magnetically attract the trust and respect of your tribe.”
“I truly admire the way Weinstein and Rust define and distinguish between symptoms of an unhealthy culture—drama, internal politics, bureaucracy, marginalizing people, and a winner-take-all attitude—and the attributes of a healthy culture: creating clarity, believing in people, teamwork, creating alignment, cultivating a winning attitude, and commitment to the community. Throughout their book, they provide examples of how company leaders were able to succeed by creating cultures based on these six attributes. They also make a compelling case for intentionality in creating a healthy culture.
“I wholeheartedly agree that the biggest challenge for a company is finding leaders who have the values and commitment to create and maintain a healthy culture. This became apparent in recent years when leaders, faced with the COVID-19 pandemic, had their cultures challenged. The authors showed how leaders who stood by their values and focused on the health and well-being of their people were able to maintain their cultures. In my practice, leaders who went into task mode, neglecting the pain their employees were experiencing, had low engagement, higher turnover, and lower productivity.
“I am passionate about culture. This book offers a practical guide on how to create a healthy culture as an intentional strategy to build a successful company.”
““I stumbled upon Alan and Don’s methodology for swift, lasting change in organizational culture when I was in the midst of leading just such an effort myself on a rather large scale.
“As a lifelong practitioner of industrial/organizational psychology, I can say with certainty that this duo has organized the only methodology any leader should be following for culture change, bar none.
“This is not academic theory. The perspective and processes are rooted in actual business outcomes so impressive that they seem unbelievable to those who haven’t applied what’s prescribed in these pages. These practices are so effective, I require everyone who works for me to read this book as the first deliverable in their role.”