Culture
Creating culture—Can you create it? Buzz words, mission statements, acronyms on walls, etc. is not culture. Service is the by-product of our culture at KB. I think the biggest mistakes we made early on were thinking that we could somehow go and “get” the culture we wanted. We had a culture, it just wasn’t what we were saying it was. The inconsistency of what we both said and did was eye opening to me as a leader. Just because I said what I wanted our culture to be didn’t make it so. The truth about culture is that it is real. It is whatever you allow it to be. When we wanted our culture to be about trust then we had to trust. When we wanted our culture to be about empowerment we had to empower our people. The fact was our culture just happened more so than it was actually made. It was the action of the leaders in our company, not the words. And after we cleaned our actions up, we attracted people that wanted to be a part of our culture; not people that wanted to memorize sayings on our walls.