Company culture is the ultimate competitive differentiator, says Fadi Ghandour, Jordanian entrepreneur, investor and initiator of a whole entrepreneurial movement in the Middle East.
Ghandour led his company Aramex from startup through scale-up to global publicly traded giant facing different challenges at each growth phase. The company employs 14,000 people and trades with a $1.3 billion market capitalization on the Dubai stock exchange. Ghandour now concentrates on helping entrepreneurs in the Middle East.
A company that enters a market with the ambition to grow and win must have a strong culture and shared values, he says in our boatside chat.
The old model of command and control does not work in fast-growing customer-focused companies with a dispersed organization - which is what most modern companies are. The values that the organization shares must be present inside the organization and also outside it. Every employee is a standard-bearer for the company, both at work and outside it.
The people may represent many different national cultures and ethnicities, yet as employees they all stand for the same set of values. To enable the company to grow fast while being highly customer-focused, organizational hierarchies need to be as flat as possible. Strategy and culture is global while customer service is local.
Company culture is something you arrive at and write down, advices Ghandour. Then you can use it to inform potential new hires and train those who join the company. Employees who don’t subscribe to the company culture will find more suitable careers elsewhere.
As you distill the culture of your own organization, here are some practical hints from Fadi Ghandour:
* Corporate culture is the glue that keeps the company together.
* The key persons building the company culture are the CEO and the senior management team. If they don't do it, no one else will. To do this they need to be open to input and influence from the organization. Culture trickles down and trickles up at the same time.
* The culture must be talked and walked and made to happen by engaging those inside the organization. Culture takes time to happen. It is not a policy. Everyday behavior must be consistent with the culture. It is not possible to talk about it one day and not do it the other day.
* Although a strong company culture will not change much, it is not a culture if it doesn’t change with time. Companies evolve and the culture needs to keep up with reality.
* Customer centric culture will not happen without immediate and quick communication within the organization. Middlemen translating between senior management and people on the front lines are a hindrance.
* Democratizing the organization makes it human and so does caring about the community outside the business. As a result, employees and customers become more committed to the company.
* Every employee needs to be trained in the culture. The culture should be a story that is communicated to everyone and a requirement for every single person that comes into the organization. * Culture defines how people treat each other and conduct themselves inside the organization.
