The Culture Community Manager
The Case For Your Most Important Role You Are Not Considering: The Culture Community Manager.
Are you struggling with how your business is operating? Are your people unhappy? Are teams not connecting? Or worse still deliberately working in silos? Are they not connecting with your vision statements you carefully crafted?
The honest answer is, almost all businesses are struggling to gain cut-through and this is down to not having someone specific that the business trusts and the people trust.
If you really consider how these points, it’s time to look within your business.
Why? Within almost all businesses you have someone who knows:
- The pulse of the company, the temperature of how it is operating and how people are feeling, importantly they understand your people
- They understand the business, how it operates, they want to know the numbers, and what makes the business tick (or in some cases, what used to make it tick)
- They have trust amongst colleagues and the most important aspect, the respect of the business (ideally they have the support of the leadership team and likely held a manager position previously)
- They most likely do not work in HR and likely are not part of the senior leaders, the incoming culture community manager understand why these things matter but haven’t been given the right company-wide role to formally influence the business
This is who should be your dedicated Culture Community Manager.
If you cannot identify them quickly, go and find this person ASAP. This can be a dedicated role or a blended role.
For the last two years, I have been a big advocate for the Culture Community Manager.
Why?
Speaking to numerous businesses (experts and ex tech leaders) and understanding their ongoing issues, the next most important role the most important upcoming business issues are likely within culture, staff retention and company happiness.
It is essential to keep in mind, this is:
- A political role,
- A role that takes time to formally bed in
- But a lot less time to influence change.
- The role requires good IQ and high levels of EQ.
The role also needs a lot of self-confidence and essentially backing from the leadership team (ideally the most senior person in your organisation) and support from HR (or People Team) to build out the highest level of trust to drive real positive change within your business.
Having worked with companies and helped to roll this role out, it is important this person is already in your business and likely one of your secret weapons.
As I suggested in my recent newsletter no rules rules, culture is something Netflix was very deliberate with and they had senior management (the top 10% of the company) were always focusing on culture and the inner workings.
The Culture Community Manager will be your most important reshuffle in 2020 and 2021, by improving company culture, improving retention and communication you will be able to drive a high performing organisation and attract great talent for the foreseeable future.
What are you waiting for?
