If I asked your employees, “What’s it like to work at your company?” their answers would largely describe your company culture. How would your employees answer? Would you like what you heard?

If not, a leader’s responsibility is to change that. This is more important than ever because customers have so many choices for where they want to eat or where they want to shop. As the convenience store industry evolves, your brand image and what it stands for will define you in the eyes of your customers and employees. Consider the outstanding social perceptions of CStore Decisions Chain of the Year winners like TXB, Nouria, Kwik Trip, Sheetz and Wawa to realize the importance of how your brand is perceived in the marketplace.

Brand image is something c-store retailers need to constantly nurture. Forward-thinking chains across the industry are building new store formats with eye-catching graphics and impressive branded and proprietary foodservice programs. The newer stores present a refined retail experience and help to build a perception of brand excellence.

Still, many c-store owners talk about their company culture but often can’t define it. Oftentimes, retailers will perceive their brand as their culture. However, that trap often creates an undefined and confusing message to consumers and employees. A well-defined culture is crucial for attracting top talent and returning customers to your stores.

Winning company culture is simple and emphasizes three areas: serving the customer, growing the business and developing employees. Culture can be consciously created by company leadership — and should be.

Some leadership teams attempt to create culture by acting as wordsmiths, spending untold hours carefully crafting vision, mission and values statements. That’s unfortunate because, in the end, culture is not created by words plastered on the wall or carried around on laminated cards; rather, culture is defined by actions on the ground. As you work on your company culture, keep these five steps in mind:

1. Outline three or four guiding principles that define who you are as an organization. Leadership’s job is to define in simple terms what your organization is all about.
2. Use the principles to guide every business discussion and decision going forward. Words are meaningless unless they spur new behavior. Once you have defined your guiding principles, use them to guide all of your business discussions and decisions.
3. Build the principles into all your people’s performance and management systems. Simple words and good intentions are not enough. You should ensure that your people and performance management systems measure and reward behaviors consistent with your guiding principles, and discourage, if not punish, the opposite. Leadership actions here are key — if employees see leaders act in accordance with principles, yet go unrewarded, or worse, see leaders defying principles and getting perks and promotions regardless, you will struggle to have a winning culture. There must be consistency between what you say and what you do.
4. Create a leadership development experience that reinforces the behaviors and values consistent with the principles, and insist all senior leaders attend. You have to constantly reinforce your words with action. One way to do this is to create an experience-based leadership development program that reinforces the values and behaviors consistent with the guiding principles.
5. Expect resistance, but stay the course with passion and patience. Changing culture means changing people, and that takes time. Expect some cynicism, skepticism and resistance at first. With the NAG Conference, for example, over time, more and more retailers attended, including senior leaders, who came back to help facilitate later sessions, inspiring even more retailers to join future events.

Customers are overwhelmed by messages today, both in stores and online. As a result, it’s tougher than ever to grab and hold customer attention. If you can’t make people see what makes you unique, your offering is a commodity, and you’ll compete primarily on price alone. This approach will be short-lived as your competitors offer a fuller shopping experience.

Elie Y. Katz is the president and CEO of National Retail Solutions (NRS).