NEW YORK – Successful companies and consultants have said it over and over again: Building a positive company culture is essential to achieving success. But many companies struggle with how to foster positive culture, or how to clean up a negative culture.

While every business is unique, a column in this month’s Inc. magazine suggests that there are several near-universal challenges inherent to vibrant company culture: attracting and retaining top-level talent, inspiring employees to do their best work and creating a harmonious environment.

Author Molly Reynolds writes: “Everybody knows a great company culture is critical, but most go about creating it the wrong way. Typically, company leaders meet in a conference room, isolated from the staff, and come up with words to define their company's culture. This might be a list of "Core Values," or a set of "truths" to be posted in every conference room around the office. They roll out staff trainings, create expensive collateral, and blast these words across company websites--all in an effort to "tell" employees what the culture should be. After a while, they discover that the message didn't stick and their actual company culture is a far cry from what they have on paper.”

She suggests several strategies to help leaders of “toxic” companies with their cultural “detox”:

• Define Your Vision as a Leader: As the brain of the operation, you need to map out a clear company vision. It is hard to create a strong culture if the leader can't articulate where the company is headed and having a plan is critical.
• Have an Ongoing Conversation: Sit down with focus groups and talk about what culture looks like. Ask the right questions and be ready, willing, and brave enough to listen. Leaders have to be willing to hear the bad and to be able to help guide the team to a healthy solution. This starts with understanding how people behave now and why.
• Create a Visual of Your Culture: After you've accurately determined where your company is at, create a visual of what a solid culture would look like in terms of behavior. Create visual images of the behaviors associated with cultural goals. 
• Identify What is Important to Your Employees: Your employees are individuals and may (or may not) care about these specific things that are different from the “best” baselines. Your job is to find out what that they do care about and implement those strategies.