PRESIDENT’S LETTER Martin Howard Have you ever thought about the culture (a.k.a.personality) of your com- pany? If you haven’t, I’d like to invite you to give it a try. There are many cultures that compa- nies seem to gravitate to, and we’ll look at a few for comparison. • The Traditional or Hierarchy Culture is common and tends to be found in “Top Down” structured compa- nies. This culture can be demanding with little employee empowerment, expecting employees to just follow directions. • The Market Culture is most often characterized as having “market share and profitability” as their top priority. One issue with this culture is that the top goals of market share and profitability can often compete with each other. • The Family Business Culture is very common in the construction industry, especially among trade contractors. Multi-generational owners usually hold the leadership or management positions. This can be good if a high level of training and career devel- opment exist to ensure competent and smooth transitions of leadership. Employees can feel that if they hold different ideas or opinions than the family, they will not be heard. They can also see that they will never grow to attain a high-level position and this makes it difficult to retain good tal- ent. Additionally, this can cause good people to leave or do enough to get by rather than give their best effort. At our company – David Allen Company – we had a mixture of cul- tures that had developed over a 90-year period. In 2010, we hit the restart button to rebuild our culture, led by our Chairman, Robert Roberson. This process required a 100% commit- ment from the ownership/leadership to establish trust and transparency. Our goal was simple: we wanted to become a great company with high value to our customers and team members while creating a great place to work and build a career. We utilized several tools to assist us in this process, including 360 Evaluations, Skip Level meetings, and One to One listening sessions. These tools creat- ed dialog between departments and group discussions around a set of topics designed to foster honest dialog. Early on in this process, we utilized a little book with a big impact: FISH! by Stephen C. Lundin, Harry Paul and John Christensen. Here we learned that, “There is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself.” Said another way, we can choose to have a positive attitude while doing work we may not enjoy. To help encourage a positive attitude our leadership began to work harder to regularly communi- Is it time to refresh the culture of your company? Rebuilding a company culture can lead to new levels of engagement and satisfaction for all 14 TileLetter | December 2017