Successful companies recognise importance of their companies culture – keeping, protecting and nurturing the good things, the ‘assets’, in company culture, as well as shaping the culture to remove the harmful or less valuable elements. They also have the awareness to address where the culture is not appropriate and must change for the business to be ‘fit for the future’. Importantly, these boards enact their role in culture by inspiring it, ensuring alignment, demonstrating authenticity by both reflecting and demonstrating the behaviours implicit in the culture, while guiding, encouraging and assuring themselves about it.

The four core pillars of company culture

Agility and adaptability

To deliver this it’s vital boards promote an entrepreneurial spirit which will help unleash the potential of their people to provide new ideas to help take the business forward. As part of this, boards must encourage a curiosity and fearlessness to inspire creativity, innovation and continuous improvement. It’s through leading by example, by demonstrating diversity of thought and ideas in the boardroom, that the rest of the business will have the confidence to follow suit.

Resilience

The capacity to bounce back from setbacks is a prized cultural attribute which is in demand. To deliver resilience an organisation must have robust, transparent and visible leadership, engaged and empowered employees, and strong brand trust, both internally and externally.

Courage

It’s important that directors are courageous in confronting reality. This requires them to have a healthy scepticism, but avoid the corrosion of cynicism. In fact, a culture of courageousness must run throughout the organisation. This will see everybody within the business having the opportunity – and responsibility – to speak up, to do the right if sometimes difficult thing. To achieve this there must additionally be a culture of psychological safety to encourage people to speak up and protect those that do.

Candour

Finally, an open culture where bad news comes more quickly to the board than good news is critical for effective governance and leadership by the board. Only then can boards quickly focus on and solve challenges before they potentially become bigger issues, which can easily happen if they are not picked up early.