A positive culture is critical to attracting and maintaining the right people in any SME and keeping them productive. But the goal of any SME is growth, and with growth comes change. As a founder-led business embracing a period of high growth ourselves, we wanted to share the 3 ways in which we are ensuring we maintain the culture that we’ve maintained over the last ten years.
- Setting a clear vision and mission statement
- Appointing the right people who align with your company values
- Partnering with businesses that match your values
Setting a clear vision and mission statement
From day one, ensure that your SME’s purpose is defined, and the values that underpin everything your SME and its people do. Your mission (or purpose as we call it) is the one key thing that gets you out of bed every morning and the one thing you want to be famous for.
Rowan’s purpose is “To enable people to fulfil their ambition.”
Your vision, or your niche, is what you do on a daily basis to drive your business towards its mission. For Rowan we “Advise ambitious owner founders and their stakeholders on how to strengthen their leadership teams through our data-backed insights, deep network and decades of experience in the SME sector.”
Defining your values
Your values are the levers against which you measure yourself, your people and your output – the products and services you deliver to your customers. For Rowan our people deliver our services via our values and no matter how much Rowan scales, we will always maintain our mission, vision and values – and our people are fully aligned to this from day one
Once you’ve identified your company’s mission, vision and values it’s important that they stay front of mind. Demonstrate them during the hiring process and reinforce them during meetings, gatherings, and during the day-to-day business operations.
Appointing the right people who align with your company values
It may sound obvious, but it’s the people that create the culture, so you have to get the people strategy right.
Experience, gut feel and a meticulous interview process plays a part in this, but with Rowan you can de-risk the process with the ‘Leadership Dynamics’ solutions suite and the PACE behavioural analysis tool.
Our unique approach to leadership analysis optimisation provides objectivity and clarity. The result of the Leadership Dynamics process is a ‘leadership bridge’, with real-world, actionable to take to achieve your people structure.
We can test for the right attributes and behaviours, but also the complementarity of potential new hires compared to the existing team, wider people structure and the SME’s unique value creation plan.
Interested to find out more? Get in touch with a member of our team today.
