Your company’s culture is driving performance or departures right now. Every day, the words and actions taken throughout your organization impact whether people bring their A game to their work or whether they return recruiters’ phone calls. As a leader, you can influence how your culture impacts the organization, but you have to be intentional about it these days.

Long gone are the days of letting the culture take care of itself.

It’s just not that simple when times are tough and changing. Your culture will be challenged, and you will have to decide whether your culture is what you say it is or not.

For example, you may lead the HR team when a colleague in Accounting confides about another colleague who has repeatedly lied on expense reports. Your company declares integrity as one of its core values. What would you do? It’s not about the words on the core values list or in the Mission Statement.

Another example was shared recently by the head of sales. The top salesperson is not a great teammate. Extra effort is required to work around the salesperson to complete the client work. Morale is low too, as the rest of the team is discouraged by how poorly they are allowed to be treated. While the person brings in a lot of revenue, they also cost more to get the work done. The sales leader has worked with the salesperson for several months to improve the interaction within the team, yet nothing has helped. The salesperson is not interested in being the teammate needed or the one the rest of the sales people are. Should the salesperson remain on the team?

What does keeping the person say about the culture? What does a respectful termination say? (Yes, terminations can be respectful and agreed upon.)

It’s all about the actions.

People decide how to treat their jobs based on the actions of their leaders and others around them.

Here are three ways culture drives performance of people and companies:

#1 Respect. Culture decides what/who is respected.  One potential client I visited years ago had a customer respect problem. Customer service people hollered to each other over cubical walls rude things about customers after their calls ended. That was allowed to continue, so disrespecting customers became part of the culture. The same thing happens with coworkers, managers, leaders, and suppliers too. How are you influencing what/who is respected?

#2 Decisions. When decisions are made out of alignment with espoused core values, people lose trust in the decision makers. For example, when an employee asks their operations leader about the frequent practice of under-bidding to win work then over-billing clients, and the leader admonishes them for the question, trust dissipates. How can the employee trust the leader to be truthful about anything else? How do you ensure your decisions align with core values of the company and yourself?

#3 Vision. Leaders need to have a vision for the company. They need to picture it in five, ten, even twenty or thirty years or more. Give people something to rally around and work toward together. Without a commonly shared vision, people become self-centered. They will make decisions accordingly. For example, without something bigger to rally a team around, the leader might just be working toward their bonus. People have no interest in working hard so someone else can get big bucks off their backs. How are you sharing a vision for the future to give your people hope and something to work toward together?

Respect, decisions, and vision impact retention and attraction of top talent. You can impact those three drivers. You can drive the culture. Be a responsible driver and take care of yourself and others.