Hilton Barbour Explains the Importance of Culture in an Organization

Hilton is Vice President of Marketing at Kognitiv Corporation and an Independent Consultant at HiltonBarbour.com. Hilton is a career-long marketer, with a background in communications agencies, for 20 years. Through the course of his career, the one thing that has struck him repeatedly is the real impact of the culture of the clients he worked with. Time and time again the projects produced are inspired by the culture that their clients themselves produced. This culture has been his inspiration for the last 7 years of his career. “The word culture has come with a lot of baggage and misconceptions,” Hilton mentions. Rather than it being “fun” or “happy”, culture is how your organization behaves and how you make decisions inside that organization. If you're not looking very hard at your culture inside your business, you're not going to succeed or set yourself apart. What's more important? A good culture is one that reflects your own values and behaviors and has many benefits, and is defined by the worst behavior tolerated by your management. Culture definitions deter confusion, so that you're able to make decisions with consistency, and allows you to attract the talent that will thrive in your organization. “Culture and marketing are a natural intersection, and we should be thinking like that more often.”

There are three things each agency can do to assess their potential clients’ culture, to see if they're the right fit. One, you should be having a candid conversation around important elements of your relationship. What does collaboration mean to them? What does teamwork mean to them? What does respect mean to them? There must be an appreciation for each other's values in order for things to align. If you're not aligned, is the client worth the pain?

Another factor of collaboration is how you act. An easy way to discover if you’re the right fit is if you have similar values and decision making. Individual experiences can shift the meanings of values, like “trust” or “leadership”, depending on how they perceive them. So without the right communication or challenges, there can be differentiators you are unaware of. You're creating a challenge for the people in your organization by having these values and cultural definitions, and seeing how they react in stressful situations that require a kind of decision making that will reflect how you want your company to be represented.

Hilton solidifies his point by stating that organizations need to be thinking of their culture as something that is asking two things from you as a user: believability and consistency. Are you being honest in what you say and do? And do you act consistently, in how you empower your team members and make decisions? If the leader has this believability and consistency, you're setting your culture. You should start to think about culture as a defining factor of your business, Hilton recommends, as it sets you apart from your competitors and can give you greater opportunities you may not have had otherwise.

Hilton recommends these resources for those looking for a better understanding of in-house culture:

• Can find out more on Hilton’s website
• “The Insiders Guide to Change” by Siobhan McHale
• “The Culture Engine” by S. Chris Edmonds

Written by Juliana Bermudez