Identifying Your Culture Czars®

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Even the most dynamic boss can’t propagate culture alone! These “czars” of culture will help you bring every team member on board and monitor the company’s cultural health. Your czars may include upper management colleagues, department heads, HR gurus or any employees who display passion for cultural direction. 

As you begin to share your mission through inter-company communications, pay close attention to the responses. When you see the light come into someone’s eyes or you receive effusive, enthusiastic emails supporting your quest, you’ll know you’ve found a czar. You’ll take your strongest czars as your confidantes as you deliberately discern your CoreVal™ priorities and the language that best expresses them. During this discovery process, your Culture Czars will often self-identify by volunteering or showing the most exuberance. Embrace their contributions so that all levels of the company are represented and not simply the leadership. 

Great Culture Czars champion your CoreVals internally and externally, taking every opportunity to discuss them, sharing stories about the company culture on every public stage — at company-wide meetings, at speeches outside the organization, even during engagements with partners. Your Culture Czars will tell stories to ensure they become a part of company folklore. They’re proud of the culture they have worked hard to cultivate and they help make it thrive by sharing current examples of how the culture positively shapes their workplace.

The inclusion of your Culture Czars from the beginning goes beyond the ideation of CoreVals. Include them when seeking creative input when developing the graphic display of your CoreVals, from deciding on a theme and style for print materials to the core values rollout event itself. Including them in this process will also help you memorialize your CoreVals so that others will remember them. The suspense and excitement among your leadership team and the passion of your Culture Czars will grow as you plan how to bring your message to the masses. Your people won’t have to take it on faith if they also hear the same thing from their peers as the leadership. Culture Czars will serve as peer liaisons both leading up to the launch event and in the daily operations that follow. 

Once your CoreVals are established and become a daily ritual within your company, we recommend using the CoreScore™ as a tool to regularly measure your current employees as well as potential additions to your team. Your current Culture Czars will, of course, earn a perfect score! Embrace these team members and their adoption of your CoreVals by including them in the process to grow your business. When hiring, hold on-site interviews with the hiring manager, a representative from leadership, and a panel of at least two experienced Culture Czars. You should be able to trust them to interview on the company’s behalf, in line with core values, using behavioral and scenario-based questions. This practice will ensure that potential team members are exposed to your CoreVals and leading Culture Czars from day one!

I, personally, wish to create at least 2020 Culture Czars by 2021. In financial terms, if we can lift the revenues of 2,020 small businesses with, say ten million dollars in revenue, by just five percent, we can create a one billion dollar impact on the business community in a single year. Once those businesses are doing twenty million dollars in revenue, we can have twice the impact. If this is the return, what has been the cost, and what is the ROC? What has implementing these 9 Deeds in your company cost you? Some time, for sure, yet mostly internal resources that the business was already carrying—the value of your time and that of your Culture Czars. Other costs may include some copies of The Culture Fix and related books, plus some printing and promotional products. Generally speaking, nothing huge. I challenge you to calculate your possible ROC - Return on Culture - using the ROC Calculator available when you sign up to access exclusive resources via my website. 

Enjoy the process of identifying your leading Culture Czars and feel free to share your stories with me!