Company Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast

What are the keys to a successful business? Many will claim that businesses can stay ahead by keeping up with current trends, being innovative, and offering competitive price points, but what about other competitive advantages? What about a high level of respect for your employees and the same amount of integrity?

Eric Soederberg, President of Sunrise Labs, joins today’s podcast to discuss corporate culture as a competitive advantage. Soederberg says that “high respect and high integrity are the only things that are going to get you long-term success as main ingredients,” and that it starts with letting employees know that they are fully trusted. This also includes admitting when a mistake has been made.

“I took a class on participative leadership connected with my church, and in class, the instructor told a story of a minister who had 4 words tattooed to his forearm where he couldn’t overlook them,” says Soederberg. What were the words? “I might be wrong.”

By assuming always that employees have positive intent, and asking (and listening) when workers explain why they did things a certain way, managers will realize that employees often had perfectly sane and rational reasons, of which perhaps they weren’t previously aware.

There is a whole attitude that has to change, and this culture is one of “let’s work on this together to make a better product because none of us are perfect. Let’s work together and make it as good as it can be.”

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