What IS the culture in my business? How do I start defining it? These questions and more went through my mind when I first began to hear the word culture. Until that point I thought culture was going to the ballet, or museums, or playing a musical instrument. The idea of creating a culture in my business was foreign. I knew that we had amazing, kind people working in our restaurants, people I had hand selected and liked working with. But I wanted to know more about this word I kept hearing, and how to create it intentionally.
When I stepped out of the daily operations role in our first location to open locations 2 and 3, it was the real test on what we had built in Dublin for our brand, our culture, and the people that worked with us there. We hit some stumbling blocks, because we were in unknown territory. Thankfully we have a strong and loyal client base and core team that rallied around us and gave us the support and the critical feedback along the way to let me know in real time how things were operating without my daily presence. Many of my fears about growing our company were unfounded, but just as many proved true. I found it challenging to continue to improve our standards, and maintaining alone was difficult at times! Too much of the first 3 years after opening our second and third locations was spent putting out fires and plugging holes.
The shift began with a final straw. I’ve said it before, I have been a slow learner. But that’s changing. For me, the most difficult thing to do as a business owner is to make the hard decision to transition someone off the team. It is hard to make the call that there is nothing more that you can do to coach someone into the position or level of performance that you must require to operate your business successfully. I get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I know I need to do this, and I remind myself that I have a responsibility to my team to make the best decisions for them. Sometimes people get stuck in a job they don’t like or that they cannot do with success, and if they don’t make the move on their own to improve or move on, it becomes up to me.
The final straw was when I decided to stop looking for solutions outside of myself. I made a decision to change my mindset about how we hire, who we need on the team, and to invest my energy with the people already on board. We began intentionally coaching, mentoring, training and developing people already in our organization to help them grow. I took off the blinders and saw that we had so many diamonds just waiting for someone to notice them, give them tools and to believe in them. These people are teaching ME about the culture we are building.
What is a culture? Its a shared belief, a shared vision. It is people like us who do things like us. A culture based on LOVE. What that means is that the people in our tribe, our family, know that we care about them. It means that we respect each other and want to help each other out. We say please and thank you, and believe in empowering people to do what it takes to brighten someone’s day. We believe that growth is mandatory and its always a process. Success is defined by the fact that we are headed in the right direction, even if we have not arrived. We believe that one person can make a huge impact, and we are working towards creating a kinder, more loving world. This is our culture.