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FROM THE FOUNDER
“C orporate culture” is one of those terms that is regularly bandied about by management practitioners, but I am not sure it’s really understood by those who own and manage AEC firms. “Culture” has been defined as the “way of life” inside the company. What behaviors are celebrated; what behaviors are punished. These 10 things will make a difference if you are serious about making your people more entrepreneurial. Building an entrepreneurial firm culture
Mark Zweig
But the whole point of it is this: IF you have a strong culture that guides individual and collective behavior, you don’t need a lot of formal rules and policies on how to do everything. It just tends to happen. And a good culture can take good people and make them great versus sucking the life out them and making good people mediocre. So what if you want your people to act and behave more like entrepreneurs? You can’t do it with policies. You have to manage the culture. Here are my thoughts on some things you can do: 1. Get and distribute more client and potential client feedback. Entrepreneurs are tuned into their clients more so than non-entrepreneurs. So that means you need to get and share more
client feedback if you want your people to be more entrepreneurial than they currently are. One company in this business that we worked for years ago paid us to interview their current, past, and potential clients and then distributed the unedited feedback we got to every single employee every single month, regardless of whether it was good or bad and regardless of whose names were mentioned. That’s being serious about it. 2. Meet weekly to discuss how you use that feedback to make changes in how you do things. It’s one thing to get client feedback, but it’s another thing to actually use it. Put this topic on your regular management meeting agenda
See MARK ZWEIG, page 6
THE ZWEIG LETTER JUNE 3, 2024, ISSUE 1540
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