How to Lead a Values-Based Professional Services Firm

2Values-Based Culture

Company culture is the product of a company's values, expectations, and environment.

—Courtney Chapman, product manager, Rubicon Project

Culture is more powerful than any law, belief system, knowledge, or process. Professional services firms today face challenges that didn't exist twenty or thirty years ago. The way we work has changed: organizations used to be housed under one roof and everyone worked the same hours. Today, we have the gig economy with remote workers, flex-time workers, 1099s, and multiple generations from babyboomers to Gens X, Y, and Z, with modern demands and desires. Culture is the glue that holds a diverse organization together. To attract top talent and inspire employees to thrive, leaders must adjust their cultures to meet the standards of current and coming generations. Culture helps to create the new markets, experiences, products, services, content, or processes necessary for a company to survive and grow. The Three Keys—your purpose, values, and story—are the underlying drivers of your culture.

By 2020, millennials will comprise half of the workforce, and Gen Zers will begin entering the workplace. Our corporate cultures must evolve in order to ensure that our organizations have the vital lifeblood, broad knowledge, and increasing momentum to scale creatively, rapidly, and adaptively in the 21st century. The contemporary generations demand that company cultures be more social, free, equal, diversified, and purposeful. A culture ...