The best human resources professionals do more than see to compliance issues and candidate identification. They make themselves cultural custodians for their companies, creating a foundation for consistent year after year performance and improvement protecting the work environment and delivering great financial results.

What is a cultural custodian? Perhaps before we answer this, we should define culture.

Answers.com defines culture as, "The totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought. The predominating attitudes and behavior that characterize the functioning of a group or organization."

This definition is a good start for understanding corporate culture. Corporations are more specific. Corporations are more focused in that their goal is production. That is to say, corporations are focused on the profitable creation and distribution of products and services. Achieving these goals has specific implications for the meaning of culture in the context of a corporation.

For a corporate culture, a few more specific behaviors are central. Some of the more important are:

* Teamwork. Business is not an area that supports simple individual contribution. Business depends on the coordinated effective cooperation between individuals to accomplish the productive or service objectives that determine revenue and profitability.
* Quality. Productive enterprises cannot simply go through the motions. A business must meet standards. The best businesses foster attitudes and norms that continually improve the performance of the business. We all know quality when we see it. However, teaching a team, the individuals, the divisions, and the groups to effectively recognize and improve quality is challenging.
* Cost and revenue management. These areas are central to business success and great businesses have their associates and management team thoroughly tuned into this area. The company works on suggestion processes, skills development, purchase management and a range of behaviors to improve this area.
* Customer service and satisfaction. Great companies place tremendous emphasis on the effective and brilliant delivery of products and services to their customers. They are concerned about time of delivery. Interaction of all sorts with the customer are considered critically important. Great businesses look at person-to-person communication, the quality of all written material, and the clarity and attractiveness of visual items. Courtesy, promptness, and responsiveness are front and center.

A great business develops a culture that focuses the culture on these items. Depending on the company, other items may prove useful to the culture. For example the attitude of the crews is a major part of the cultural success of Southwest Airlines. At 3M, innovations drive the company.

Great human resources professionals identify, define, and cause the human capital effort to deliver an ever-improving cultural impact.

Peggy McKee is known nationally for placing top sales talent at companies that are Fortune 5, 100, and 500 organizations as the owner and chief recruiter for PHC Consulting. Her firm works with sales, sales management, marketing and technical support candidates in the medical products/laboratory products/healthcare products arena.   See her website at http://www.phcconsulting.com/