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I was never watching culture as a piece or part of the engine that would drive growth. I knew it sort of intuitively, but I never sort of studied it or watched it. There is so much out there around the power of culture and those that have really strong and vibrant cultures see greater growth rates. You can copy people’s products. You can copy their price points. You can copy their distribution models. You cannot copy their culture because you’re looking from the outside. The secret sauce of the culture is it’s internal. It’s all the little things that make up the success of the organization. That is a competitive differentiator that is much more difficult to try to replicate.
Trusted Leadership
So trust is really the bedrock of culture of a company. But building that kind of environment has to start with the leadership team. It will be impossible for the rest of the organization to operate that way if the senior leadership team does not. And if you aren’t sure you have that problem or don’t have that problem, here’s the advice I’d give. Ask your employees and then you really have to be open to hearing what they have to say.
As a leader, you’re also going to have to expect that you’re going to get a different set of responses if your employees don’t trust the fact that if they tell you the truth that it won’t risk their future career, maybe their job or maybe their opportunity for promotions later down the line. Now maybe you start out by doing it in an anonymous way so that they can tell you feedback without their name associated with it. And then maybe, over time, they will be more and more willing to share their name.
Once you see employees being willing to share their name and raise their hand in a public setting and actually tell you the truth about something, you know you’ve crossed the chasm between where they didn’t trust you to where they do trust you. It is a journey. Trust is earned over time, but it can be lost very, very quickly. So you constantly want to be depositing into the trust bucket because if you need it and you need to lean into it, it will be there for you to take.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
If you’re competing with another team within your own organization, you are not paying attention to what’s happening outside your company. You’re so focused on what’s happening inside your company. So you want to make sure that you foster an environment that regardless of where ideas come from or who was leading the project, that everybody participates in the success of an organization, all the way down from the cleaning crew to the CEO. So, as leaders, we have to work hard to make sure we foster that kind of collaboration as often and frequent as we can.
So always make sure you keep an eye on are people working together cross-functionally? Do you hear different voices throughout the company giving examples and ideas and suggestions? Or is it always the same 10 people that you hear in your ear? And if that culture does not foster collaboration between people, you will continue to have internal competition and that will get in the way of your ability to be resilient and grow.
Diversity of Thought
On the people side internally, employees, you want diversity of thought. You want different makeup of people so that you have a good insight and line into how do we create the greatest environment whereby all these people can work harmoniously. You don’t want groupthink, like you don’t want to hire the same person out of the same university with the same points of view. You get no diversity of thought. And you see misses in the products and services that are built because they’re built by people who aren’t actually the target audience. It’s like when I see, you know, groups of people who develop products for a group they are not, it totally misses the mark. So we want to make sure that you have diversity in both of those categories. Individually, underneath all companies is people, and underneath all customers is people. They sort of are the common thread between what makes up an organization.