Hi, my name is Candice Elliot, and I am a community-driven human resources strategist, which means that I work with business owners essentially in the beginning to define their community and what it is that their organization looks like and what they want to bring into the world. Today, I'm going to be talking about the four main types of culture that exist in our businesses.
Often businesses will have multiple cultures at once, but generally one predominant culture. The first one that we're going to talk about is the creative or entrepreneurial culture. This is generally found in small businesses. A lot of tech companies prefer this type of culture. The entrepreneurial culture is defined by thinking quickly on your feet and reacting quickly to the changing external environment, having little fear of failure, encouraging risk, trying a lot of different things to figure out what works best. It generally also has a little bit of a flat or hierarchical structures so that teams and people are communicating directly with the owners of the business which helps them to understand the changing external environment and to be able to react to it. That's entrepreneurial and creative.
The next structure that I'm going to talk about is the collaborative culture. A collaborative culture is really community-based. This is found in oftentimes cooperatives, a lot of nonprofit organizations are operated [00:02:00] this way. The primary driver in this type of a culture is the community that you're belonging to. Belonging is really important, establishing strong relationships across all of the people inside of the business is really important and having a very strong mission, and a way that you're bettering the world and bettering society through your work is essential to this kind of a collaborative culture. In this kind of accompany when a reward is given, it's typically given to all of the people or all of the department rather than to top performers.
That brings us to the individualistic or the competition-based culture. This is really typical, especially in any kind of company in the sales team. The driving force in the competitive culture is winning and having winning streaks and not having losing streaks and being the best at what you do and being better at it than everyone else. This can be really, really helpful in certain kinds of environments, but it also is really stressful for people to be in for a really long time. That's the competitive culture.
Then the last one is, let's just called it bureaucratic. This is more common in larger businesses and in the government. In a bureaucratic culture, you have very clearly defined roles and responsibilities, very clearly defined cultural norms. People really, they do well in this culture if they really want stability and they feel comfortable in general, you have very hierarchical structure. [00:04:00]
This works really well for clearly defining departments and job roles. It's generally a much easier on entry-level staff to be in a bureaucratic environment because there's limited expectations of what they should be doing. Those are the four types of organizational cultures that exist. One of the takeaways from this is that probably one or two of these are going to resonate with you as things that you identify with, or as things that you see in your business. Probably one or two of these are going to feel like they don't fit with you or don't fit with your business, but really all of them are useful in different ways at different times.
I encourage you to just dive deep a little bit further into both the ones that resonate with you and the ones that don't resonate with you to see what kind of fits best with each of your different departments or just as you're expanding your business. As you grow some things that may not work overall for the whole structure of your business may work really well for just one of your teams, so I encourage you to continue to look at them. Thank you.
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