Sticky People, Sticky Culture
Posted on Mon, May 21, 2012
I’d like to talk for a minute about glue. Not the white sticky kind my kids love to use generously when working on school projects, but the kind that we try to bring into the work place whenever we can. Sometimes glue in the workplace is a person – that individual who brings people and ideas together in a way that others can’t, the person who attracts talent and makes them “stick.” Most organizations have at least a few of these people. Some are the historians, yet other times they can be that new person that almost magnetizes the air with a different way of doing things.
What’s really fun is when you get several of these sticky people in one group – watch out. You know how rubber cement only works when you smear it on two surfaces and then put them together? The best types of organizational glue are sort of like this, but even more three dimensional. They include the people that make things stick, the systems and processes, and dozens of little reminders of what makes an organization special. Yes, I’m talking about culture. Any strong organizational culture is nothing more than really powerful glue that has a way of binding people to it - new and existing employees, business partners, and yes, clients. When the stickiness starts to spread beyond traditional organizational boundaries, it can be pretty cool. I believe that a strong and sticky culture is hard to compete with. Just like the times I’ve helped my kids with those projects and found that my fingers still have a residual ability to stay attached to everything they come in contact with for a while, organizations with stickiness have a tendency to stay on your radar more than the rest. They might share ideas that make you think differently, have a style or personality that you just want to be around, and yes, their people may just be the kind you want to be stuck with for a while.
We think a lot about creating and building stickiness at Pinstripe – both for ourselves, and for our clients. Especially for our clients. We are fortunate to partner with some pretty amazing organizations, many who make products or deliver services that either make people’s lives more fulfilling and rich, or save them (literally). We spend a lot of time trying to identify the formula of their unique glue so that we can accidentally spill some in their candidate pools – oops! We aim to help them find talent that will add to the stickiness and extend it. In doing some, sometimes it makes us stickier too.
Post contributed by Angela Hills. Follow me on Twitter @angelahills.
