82. Governing the boundaries of corporate culture

SCRIPT: In the last episode, I mentioned a series of roundtables I got to participate in where groups of corporate directors shared their perspectives on the role of the board in corporate culture. If you’re interested, the Institute of Corporate Directors wrote up a nice report on some of the roundtable insights. It’s called The Culture Imperative and it’s available on the ICD website. As you might imagine, one of the most important discussions during these sessions was about what culture is in the first place. One expression that a lot of people like is “culture is the HOW of strategy.” It’s neat and tidy, but it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of helping us understand what good and bad culture might look like. A few directors mentioned that it can help to create measurable objectives around culture – a culture of safety, for example, might have an objective of “zero workplace injuries.” To that, one might reasonably ask “ok but is knowing you probably won’t get injured at work enough to get you out of bed in the morning?” Anyway, you can probably already see the intersection between corporate governance – or how we make decisions in our organization – and culture. When we make a decision about what to do, ultimately it’s PEOPLE who get it done. What role can your board play in making sure those people do great work and feel good about it?