Help me build a culture for competitive advantage

We help companies with culture, change and growth. This page describes how you can build a culture for competitive advantage.

Why focus on your growth culture?

There are three key reasons to purposefully design or refine your company culture based on driving up its valuation, making it a great place to work, and ensuring it is scalable and future proof. Together these enhance your competitive advantage and also reduce the risk of your culture becoming toxic.

How to build your growth culture

We can help you to build extreme competitive advantage by purposefully developing your culture through our 5-Step DREAM for Competitive Advantage process. Take our 5 minute diagnostic now!

DREAM stands for Define, Refine, Engage, Assets, Mechanisms. This is the process we have successfully used with flourishing early-stage businesses like Blue Fire AI. See the videos here.

Define your growth culture

In this step, you will create your culture building blocks. These are your Purpose, Values, Philosophy, Identity and Vision. Each is described below.

Purpose – why we exist

Strong culture for competitive advantage is purpose-led. This means that you have a statement of why your company exists, and the impact you have.

Values – what we value most

Your values are the way you want to be and behave. They describe what we do now and in the future, and what we value most.

Philosophy – our MO

Your philosophy is your Modus Operandi – your way of working. It is your fundamental “how” to which you can always return as your core guiding principle.

Identity – how we operate

Your identity is essentially the soul of your business. It’s how you and your team would describe what it’s like to work here.

Vivid Vision – what we will be and do

Your culture comes alive through the outcomes that you achieve as you build a great place to work. You do this by creating a detailed 3 to 5 year “vivid vision” of your future.

Refine your growth culture

The steps above will result in a draft set of culture building blocks. The next step is to test that these stand up to any work you’ve previously done around your building blocks – you may already have a set of values for example – and that they make sense both rationally and emotionally.

Engage your team

Then you must engage with your wider team and perhaps some other key stakeholders in your business (your board for example if you have one). This step allows the wider team to have input into the cultural building blocks, understanding how your culture drives competitive advantage and begins the process of making the target culture “a part of the way we do things around here.”

Assets help communicate your growth culture

This is where you create the assets and artefacts that describe your culture. As a minimum, it is a great idea to have an interactive PDF that describes the cultural building blocks and also starts to bring them to life by describing what good looks like and some expectations for how you and your team will live your culture. Other artefacts would include communication pieces to be used in shared digital and physical spaces.

Mechanisms “hard wire” your growth culture

This is where you reinforce your target culture for competitive advantage through a series of mechanisms which typically include:

• Employee lifecycle mechanisms, for example, a recruitment guide on identifying culture fit and using values-based interviewing.
• The cultural building blocks themselves and how these can be reinforced. For example, how you will revisit your values in meetings and create innovative ways to recognise team members for living the culture.
• How you manage health, welfare, benefits, and the physical environment e.g. creating digital or physical spaces for inventive collaboration if innovation or invention features in your values for example.
• Your approach to communications and connectedness, especially where you are experiencing even more remote working than before.
• The way in which you manage performance and the related intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
• A people and culture dashboard to allow you to track your progress against key metrics.

A strong purposefully developed growth culture will give you an edge that other organisations simply cannot copy.