To many workers, the idea of “corporate culture” has become a platitude without any real value or meaning. Look to the legions of “quiet quitters” who feel that working harder to serve a “broader company purpose” is really just working harder to enrich shareholders without earning more themselves.
But, at an executive level, a corporate culture can be a vital unifying framework that allows senior management to trust in each other and rest assured that members of an executive team are all pursuing the same goals.
“The function of Schneider’s Executive Committee is to come together as a team with a common purpose where we all have responsibilities but…there’s only one scoreboard, and we all have a common definition of winning,” says Aamir Paul, the president of Schneider Electric, North America, and a member of the multinational energy management firm’s executive committee.
Schneider Electric is a prime example of a company that has deployed a singular corporate culture to offset the diversity of its global team. Although Schneider is ostensibly a French company, headquartered in Reuil-Malmaison, outside Paris, the firm likes to say it operates a “multi hub” model where decision-making is split across four centers—Paris, Boston, Hong Kong, and Noida, India.
The company’s management team, the executive committee, is similarly scattered around the globe, with a CEO in France, a CHRO in China, a CIO in the U.S., and other executives dotted in between.
So what’s the common purpose that Schneider’s executive committee has all subscribed to?
“We believe that to be sustainable is responsible. We believe that we need to dramatically reduce the carbon intensity in the world, and we need to do that in a way that doesn’t rob several billion people from improving their quality of life,” Paul says. “We believe that is our mission, but we believe achieving that mission will look different in India than it does in China, than it does in France, than it does in Canada, or in the U.S.”
Maintaining a shared goal while recognizing the different needs of the company’s disparate regions helps committee members duke out disagreements on resource management or which area should be prioritized over another. As Paul says, committee members try to debate the criteria for making a decision on a problem, rather than debating over the decision itself.
Schneider’s insistence on a shared goal has paid dividends. Corporate Knights, a media company focused on sustainability, has ranked Schneider among the top 100 most sustainable companies for the past 12 years—proving that the C-suite really is focused on that unifying mission.
But sharing a common goal isn’t enough. All business ultimately boils down to the strength of personal relationships, and those relationships are often built on shared experiences.
According to Paul, the 17 members of Schenider’s executive committee get together at least twice a year for team-building trips that help nurture the personal relationships gluing the C-suite together. Of course, those retreats were put on hold during the pandemic, and the committee was unable to assemble in its entirety until last fall. (They went to Rome. Some members gorged on art; others, gelato.)
Spending quality time together also helps committee members learn each other’s communication styles, which, again, helps settle disputes when they arise.
“At our retreats, we debrief on key decisions we made during the year and discuss what we could do better in reaching those decisions—where did we slip into being passive-aggressive, or acquiescing, or not truly having constructive conflict,” Paul says. “We are able to collectively study ourselves, and that goes a long way toward helping you understand why people were taking the positions that they were taking at the time.”
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
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TRUST EXERCISE
If you're a CEO leading a C-suite that's spread out across the globe (or even across the country), take a page out of Schneider Electric's book and plan a way you can all get together for some shared experiences and build those relationships that keep teams united.
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