As CEO, you’re responsible for providing company-wide vision and leadership. At the same time, you need to cultivate the leadership qualities and potential of the managers and employees whose ideas will propel your continued growth. Nurturing and capitalizing on their capabilities positions your business to pursue and achieve peak performance and profitability. That’s why you must remain conscious of, and play a prominent role in, shaping the company’s culture.

The keys to building a culture that fuels productivity and profitability include:

• Acknowledging formal and informal cues, through institutional initiatives like employee recognition programs, and unofficial (but equally powerful) cues, such as which employees are invited to or excluded from meetings.
• Leading in a consistent, uniform style, which helps your team feel more comfortable with certain types of actions or changes and encourages behavior that supports your mission and growth.
• Keeping track of how intermediate managers deliver and present informal feedback, whether recognition or reprimands. Employees must have a sense that their performance will generate a consistent, and therefore fairly predictable, response from one department or location to another.

Culture plays a central role not just in statements of corporate values, but in your company’s bottom-line results. By recognizing that role and leading your team toward understanding and appreciation of the culture component, you can create an environment that fosters optimal individual and organizational achievement.

Read the fourth in our series of Connections to Growth guides, Entrepreneur to CEO: Making the Transition, to learn how you can create a culture geared to profitability.