If your company were a car, what kind of car would it be?  This may remind you of a bad line from an old interviewing manual: if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be? Every interviewee’s worst nightmare. Unlike that bad line, this one is actually helpful so keep reading…

For an exercise in identifying company culture this an excellent and useful question. If you held a meeting and asked the team how they would describe your company culture you would probably get blank stares, generic answer, or recitations from the company website. It’s not an easy question to answer or articulate.

Using the car analogy is fun and something everyone can relate to regardless of their knowledge of the vehicles.  The team can visualize a clear concept and then come up with the words to describe why they choose what they did.  It also brings to light similarities and differences in how people see the organization.

I did this exercise with the leadership team of a non-profit I was doing some leadership development for. They were having some conflict with a couple of board members who wanted them to move in a more contemporary direction which is not what the leadership team wanted.  The problem was that they couldn’t quite describe their position so it was a problem that continued to simmer below the surface.

When we got into it I asked them to describe the culture and they struggled but eventually came up with the usual vague answers: honesty, integrity, etc.  They couldn’t come up with anything concrete to grab on to so I asked the question:  if this organization were a car, what kind of car would it be?  They relaxed, everyone participated, and in short time they came up with perfect vehicle to embody their organization.  A Chevy Silverado extended cab, heavy-duty pickup truck.  They went into the details.  The color was an unobtrusive silver, cloth interior, basic accessories, and had towing capacity.

This helped them articulate the culture as hard-working, solid, unassuming, helpful, room for everyone, and reliable.  This was a picture they could bring back to the board members who wanted them to take a more contemporary and flashy direction.  They now had the words to describe what they stood for.

To gauge alignment with the staff, the leadership team introduced this exercise at their next team meeting. Without telling the staff what they had come up with, the leadership team facilitated the activity. The staff came up with an almost identical description.

This is a fast, easy, and fun way to identify company culture and check for alignment. This may seem too simplistic but it works. Oftentimes it’s the simple ideas that have the most impact. That’s good news for organizations who prefer to work smarter, not harder.