Communicate your culture
You don’t always have the advantage of molding your employees from the ground up. If you’re growing as aggressively as Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., many employees may come in through acquisitions where a certain culture is already ingrained.
When you don’t have years to test employees against your culture, you have to articulate it clearly instead.
“People say, ‘Why do you think you have a different culture?’ and I’ll say, ‘Because, frankly, we believe we do,’” Gallagher says.
He estimates that 99 percent of his due diligence focuses on culture. Finding that match starts with the people and, more specifically, their principles. Gallagher looks at how they do business, which includes both employee and client relationships, as well as the opportunities they provide for training and developing employees.
But culture is a two-way street, so you also have to paint an accurate picture of your culture to the acquired company. To make it d
ig
estible, distill it into small, actionable pieces. Gallagher uses The Gallagher Way, a list of values from professional excellence and mutual respect to trust and empathy.
“They’ll typically come here to our home office. We share (The Gallagher Way) with them and say, ‘These are the 25 tenets as to how we want to run our business. I hope that you agree with those: morality, integrity, ethical behavior, commitment to client and commitment to the development of employees,’” he says. “We’ll talk about that stuff very openly with them.”
Part of that discussion is explaining why your culture matters, not just reading it off of the due diligence script.
“We’re constantly emphasizing the fact that we believe our culture is a strategic advantage because we’re a people business,” Gallagher says. “Don’t get me wrong; this is a competitive world. This isn’t soft and namby-pamby at Gallagher. We work very hard so it’s a huge emphasis on teamwork and openness.”
To help illustrate your environment, offer real-life examples of your values in action. To show the company is the open society it claims to be, where everyone is equally important, Gallagher tells about the decision to freeze the pension plan three years ago.
“Everybody has ‘hollerin’ rights.’ People call me and tell me that we’re making mistakes all the time,” he says. “A branch manager sent me an e-mail and said very simply, ‘I think you’re a good leader. I think you’ve been good for our company, but this is the dumbest decision you ever made.’
“And I wrote back and said, ‘Thanks for your input. I feel pleased that you feel confident that you can say that to me, but we’re freezing the pension plan.’ So it’s a very important part of what we do: We talk about it, emphasize it, work on it, and we train to it.”
Those stories shouldn’t stop after employees come on board. Communicating your culture is an ongoing process, and the key is shaking up how you deliver the message. For example, Gallagher celebrated the 25th anniversary of The Gallagher Way’s creation last year with posters around the office, internal magazine articles, audio vignettes where different employees spoke about the values via e-mail and even a cookbook that emphasized the values between contributed recipes.
But that’s only part of the communication.
“More importantly, you communicate it every day in your behaviors,” Gallagher says. “You just have to live it. I don’t have a magic way to tell you, ‘Come in at 6 in the morning; it will all work itself out.’ That’s not how it works. You’ve got to emphasize it, live it, tell people that’s what it’s all about and let them see you.
“People tend to watch the leader, not listen. So you just have to be someone that actually really does that stuff, and you have to surround yourself with people that believe in it and do it, as well.”