What is culture? Culture is the shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and behavior patterns that characterize the members of a family, a community or an organization. In a healthy business culture, what is good for the company and its customers come together to become the driving force behind how everyone behaves.

A quality culture begins with leaders who believe in the necessity of serving customers for their organizations to succeed. The result is a culture where a positive internal environment and delighted customers go together.

An effective quality culture is dynamic and needs nurturing to emphasize continuous improvement of processes, one that results in a healthy workplace, satisfied customers, and a growing, profitable company in which everyone benefits. According to the late Dr. Armand V. Feigenbaum, a strength of total quality management (TQM) is that it shows that growth, profitability, customer satisfaction, and a healthy environment are not mutually exclusive. They are mutually supportive and necessary to succeed over the long haul.

Effective quality cultures begin with core cultural values. If we know what our values are, we can better understand what we are likely to do in various situations.

We can think of values as a mental toolkit we use to understand how to relate to various circumstances and decide what action to take.

Employees will behave in ways that are consistent with the core values of their organization’s culture. Who establishes these core values? Everyone has a role, but managers and leaders are the ones responsible for establishing those values.

How many core values should an organization have? People can get confused if an organization has too many core values! There can’t be that much room at the “core.”

There are some values that transcend others. There should be a short set of values that guide an organization. With core values people don’t have to worry about priority, or about balancing one value against another. These drive everything else!

In defining a set of core values, we choose values not for their relative popularity, but rather for their value in describing an organization that is worth working for. The list of core values should center on three items. Few enough so that people can remember them and focus on their criticality. They are integrity, customer focus, and people.

Integrity: The cornerstone of all that is honorable, integrity is a value that requires us, in all our relationships, to conduct ourselves in an honest and straightforward manner. An organization with integrity at its core believes in a high-trust environment, honoring commitments, an absence of noxious politics, true teamwork, and an open exchange of ideas. Integrity is a high standard, but it is exceedingly easy to know whether we have acted with integrity. It is as easy as knowing right from wrong.

Customer focus: Anyone working in business is consistently torn about having to make difficult choices. Sometimes the choice is obvious: clearly wrong, immoral or illegal. It gets tricky, however, when there are conflicting requirements, or something that involves reasoning on the fringe. At these times, success means getting a higher percentage of these choices right than we might by flipping a coin.

We’re not talking about technical decisions. We are talking about judgment calls such as, “Do we ship product as it is or work to get it right?” There usually is not a simple answer when operating in what I call “the grey zone” where nothing is exactly black or white. Philip B. Crosby talked about that in his book, “Quality is Free.”

There is a simple criterion you can use to help frame the decision.  Two important questions to ask: “Is this the right thing to do for our customers?” “How does that reflect on our reputation?”

Doing the right thing for the customer may sometimes cause internal organizational pain. If we don’t do that now, however, then all we’re doing is deferring the pain to a later date AND it will be more expensive! In addition, failure to do the right thing has a lasting negative effect not only on customers but employees as well. Everyone is watching!

Customer focus has many cultural manifestations: a drive to release products on time, a passion for creativity and quality, and products that are genuinely fit for use. But it all starts with having the courage to ask, first and foremost, “What is best for the customer?”

People: People are an organization’s #1 asset. Employees should be seen as assets, not expenses. Assets are something to invest in. Organizations with a strong quality culture invest heavily in all their assets, including their people.

Leaders institutionalize ways in which to recognize and reward positive behaviors they want to reinforce. It’s been proven that employees in a positive quality environment become more engaged, productive, receptive to change and motivated to succeed. Everyone wins!

Leaders must be willing to accept that a quality culture is critical to success. They must demonstrate their commitment to sustaining and growing that culture. All employees must nurture that environment and share ownership of the culture of quality. We are all in it together!