At Calix, 98 Percent of Employees Understand Our Mission Because We've Built a Winning Culture

Without a winning culture, companies are doomed to mediocrity. That’s what 81 percent of senior executives said in a Bain & Company’s worldwide survey. At the same time, 91 percent of those same executives agreed that culture is just as important as strategy for business success.

At Calix, we agree that culture is critical to success. It’s especially critical now, as the broadband industry (and our company) continues to grow by leaps and bounds. But how can leaders and teams work together to build that culture? And, more important, how can everyone sustain it?

Everyone at Calix works together daily to build a culture that never stops winning. I’m happy to say that we’re succeeding. Here are three ways we do so.

1. Aspiration: We’re mission-focused—and every employee gets that.
If you want employees to succeed, they need to know their purpose. At the same time, they must know how that purpose aligns to the company’s overall mission.
According to our internal surveys, 98 percent of employees feel our goals are clear. Even more, they report they’re invested in them: 33 percent of employees say the main reason they stay at Calix is because of our company mission.
Every employee knows that our company’s mission is to help our customers simplify their business, excite their subscribers, and grow their value. This shapes our culture in a positive way—keeping the focus on customers, rather than internal politics or turf. With clear goals aligned to our mission, employees are better able to execute on strategy.

2. Accountability: Everyone understands the “three C’s” behind our culture (collaborate, create, communicate).
We’ve all seen the elements of an unhealthy culture. It’s easy to complain, blame others, and try to deflect responsibility because so much seems out of our control—the economy, regulatory requirements, technological changes, costs of raw materials, and many other factors. Even inside of organizations, employees can feel disempowered by the complexity of matrix structures, slow decision-making, and extra layers of reporting.
The antidote to this is to create a culture that promotes personal responsibility. We encourage this by asking everyone, including leaders, to follow three simple principles: communicate, collaborate, and create. This encourages everyone to be accountable. We all think and act like owners, and we all take personal responsibility for overall business performance, not just our slice of it. By giving everyone this responsibility, we give them “response-ability.” 
The “three C’s” remind everyone to present problems without attempting to solve them alone. If you’re a leader, you must develop a process to ensure you're informed as needed. This helps avoid unnecessary risks and surprises. In a culture that never stops winning, people propose solutions as they collaborate with others to create success.

3. Alignment: We don’t take wild guesses—we use the Predictive Index to recruit, manage, and lead teams successfully.
Let’s face it. Most people don’t wake up in the morning with the goal of making others’ lives difficult. Meanwhile, we all know that complaining and backstabbing exacerbates and creates toxicity that quickly destroys a winning culture. A more productive path is to better understand the nature of the problem—and move toward creating a joint solution.
To help us stay aligned at Calix, we leverage a tool called the Predictive Index® Behavioral Assessment™. PI is a simple, easy-to-use behavioral map of different types of people, grouped by those with similar motivations. After taking a short survey, prospective and current employees are assigned a “reference profile." This profile offers a deep understanding of how people think and work—giving every organization a quickly scannable, yet holistic snapshot of the people within it.
Everyone who applies to a role at Calix takes the PI survey. But it’s not just a tool we use for recruitment. We use it across all layers of the company to better understand our basic behavioral patterns and key motivators. Leaders at all levels actively use data from PI to understand how to coach, manage, and support their teams. We openly share our PI profiles so everyone can understand how to best work together and stay aligned. (For example, everyone has seen the PI profiles of our C-level executives.)
By staying close to what really motivates people, we can design teams thoughtfully and address misalignment with a tool in hand—not blindly.

Instilling a winning culture can be a tough challenge. It requires changing how people think and feel about the company—but you must alter habitual behaviors.

Your culture must align with your business’s strategic agenda. To create a winning culture that supports your agenda, set targets for the business and be explicit about how these targets cascade down to individuals. Hold everyone accountable. Weekly and monthly reviews should focus on performance against targets and pay close attention to problem areas. In communicating these expectations, company leaders should focus on reaching milestones and how each team can contribute to achieving results.

A critical task for leaders is to provide feedback (sometimes publicly) to ensure that each team member is modeling the right values and behaviors for his peers and subordinates. Empower your people to look for opportunities in obstacles. 

Change can be a potent catalyst to develop a winning culture. If there’s one thing we’re used to at Calix, it’s continual evolution. As the industry continues to grow, our pace of evolution (and innovation) just gets faster. This makes it an incredibly exciting time to be at Calix. At the same time, change can be a challenge.

Still, the best companies see any kind of marketplace change—new competitors, new technologies, new regulations—as an opportunity to break down old, unproductive habits and instill the elements of a high-performance culture.

At Calix, we strive to create a winning culture which includes cohesive core company values and behaviors that sustain an environment conducive to success. 

Ready to join a winning culture where 98 percent of employees know the mission is clear? Browse our open positions and apply today.