3 Keys To Growing Your Business By Strengthening Your Culture

Culture is the backbone of any organization.

—Entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk

What exactly is company culture?

Everyone feels the effects of it, but it can be difficult to describe. Just as fish don’t realize that they’re immersed in water, culture is the organizational fishbowl in which everyone swims. Harvard Business Review Senior Editor Vasundhara Sawhney states, “Culture is an organization’s DNA. It is the shared values, goals, attitudes, and practices that characterize a workplace. It is reflected in how people behave, interact with each other, make decisions, and do their work. It impacts everything — including your happiness and career.”

Gary Vaynerchuk’s metaphor of culture as the organizational backbone isn’t just figurative. Gallup found that strong organizational culture accounts for a 50-point increase in employee engagement over a three-year period, and 85% net profit increase over a five-year period. On the flipside, poor culture costs dearly. A recent FlexJobs survey found that the #1 reason people quit their job was a toxic company culture.

Strong cultures don’t just happen by accident. It takes great leaders to build them. These leaders take time to reflect on and clarify their organizational values. Then, they do the critical work of bringing those values to life through behavior, systems, and processes.

An example of a such a leader is Joseph Shalaby, founder and CEO of E-Mortgage Capital (EMC). Shalaby has built powerful connections between company culture and company performance. Founded in 2015, EMC has gone to experience significant growth, and culture is a huge reason why.

Make Your Values Visible

Many companies like to talk about how great their company culture is. But the majority don’t walk their talk. Only 23% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they can apply their organization’s values to their work every day.

Shalaby and EMC know that the secret to maintaining a terrific culture is by embedding their core values in everything that they do. EMC’s five core values spell out the acronym Se.C.R.E.T.:

• Service
• Community
• Relationships
• Ever-Forward (continuous learning)
• Thumb Pointers (as opposed to finger pointers)

When asked how EMC ensures that leaders bring these values to life every day, Shalaby shared, “We actively engage with the EMC community daily through several channels. Our instant chat system (Microsoft Teams) allows leaders to answer questions in real-time, fostering immediate communication across the entire organization. We also hold weekly training sessions, averaging 1-2 coaching sessions per day, to ensure continuous learning and development. We listen to internal pain points and grow from within by collaborating closely with our front-line leaders in sales and operations. This approach helps us address challenges and improve our processes effectively.”

Living the EMC Values begins on Day 1. Shalaby explains, “When onboarded to EMC, employees receive a card – The EMC way – which highlights our core values and serves as a placeholder to enact the values every day. Our core values are also featured in our initial recruitment video, our onboarding materials, and addressed in our daily trainings.”

Keeping Your Door Truly Open

Given our post-pandemic world, it’s no surprise that mental health issues in the workplace have been growing exponentially. In their new 2024 State of Workplace Empathy report, Businessolver reports that the most valuable benefit that employees say helps them care for their mental health is an open-door policy. An open-door policy is a means by which team members can approach managers outside of regular meeting times (and/or levels of hierarchy) to have a discussion. Such a policy supports employees to speak up when they have issues that need to be addressed.

Businessolver discovered that the percentage of employees who desire an open-door policy (91%) even outranks the desire for flexible working hours (89%) as well as encouragement to take breaks away from work (88%). These findings highlight the importance of a genuine human relationship between managers and employees.

Shalaby understands that an open-door policy is essential to a strong culture. He shares, “My business partner (President Sam Hijazin) and I both keep an open-door policy. This allows us to have a more personable relationship with EMC employees, allowing the team to address concerns, morale, and active challenges within specific roles. It helps us prioritize work-life balance at EMC. It also encourages our operations and internal sales team to contribute ideas while feeling confident that they will be heard. We strive to be constantly available via email, phone, or Teams despite the scale of requests and day to day responsibilities. Sam Hijazin guarantees an email response to any team member within 24 hours of sending and he sticks to it.”

Develop a Culture of Leadership Excellence at All Levels

In their Global Leadership Forecast, Development Dimensions International reports that one of the top concerns of CEOs today is developing the next generation of leaders. No matter how great you are as a leader, you can only reach so far as an individual. A good part of a top leader’s job is developing leadership excellence at all levels.

Shalaby is working to meet this challenge head-on. He shares, “At EMC, we’re very selective of who we elect to lead from C-suite all the way to middle management. We believe that strong results are not all that makes an effective leader. The intangibles such as empathy and compassion, strong communication, and fostering growth are more relevant than you might expect when selecting leaders. I would go as far as to say that hard skills and soft skills are equally important for leadership roles. We believe in growth from within, allowing us to build and develop leadership that best serves the organization and our staff.”

Building and developing leadership capacity does not mean trying to force fit a one-size-fits-all style of leader. Shalaby explains, “At EMC, we believe that you should come as you are. Authentic leadership means leading with genuine intent and staying true to oneself. I regularly engage in open dialogue with our team, sharing personal experiences and lessons learned. This approach fosters trust and encourages everyone to bring their whole selves to work, knowing their unique perspectives and contributions are valued.”

Shalaby’s ideas about developing a strong culture have gone hand in hand with growing the business. EMC has had an enviable track record of growth. In their first year, they achieved $3 million in mortgage loan volume, a key metric in their industry. In 2022, EMC achieved a mortgage loan volume of $2.1 billion. This increased to $2.7 billion in 2023, and is on track to reach $4 billion this year.

If you only see your company’s culture as one element of your overall business strategy, you might not be seeing the forest for the trees. Lou Gerstner, former CEO of IBM, had this realization:

Until I came to IBM, I probably would have told you that culture was just one among several important elements in any organization’s makeup and success — along with vision, strategy, marketing, financials, and the like… I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

As a leader, each action you take influences your culture, for better or worse.

To increase the collective capacity of your people to create value, use these three keys:

1. Make Your Values Visible
2. Keep Your Door Truly Open
3. Develop a Culture of Leadership Excellence at all Levels

Not only will it help strengthen your culture, it’ll help you grow your business.