Company culture is something that rarely gets the attention it deserves from the people that create it, the leaders. Why is that? I often try to “feel” the culture as I meet with clients, even if the problem they are requesting help with is seemingly unrelated. Culture is the basis of many of the problems and issues that businesses face. I believe the reason most leaders don’t want to look at their company culture is because it is a direct reflection of both their strengths and their weaknesses. It is a mirror of their personality. Looking too closely at their culture forces them to look too closely at themselves.
Failing to focus on the culture of your business leaves unlimited potential untapped. This is the root of much of the water cooler gossip, the whispering behind your back, and the reason for average or higher turnover rates. Think about it this way, if you were the employee, and you had to report to work in a cold, uninviting environment every day, how long would you stay, and how hard would you work while you were there? That cold feeling they may experience is your culture. You can’t put your hands on it, but it exists in every company.
Let me share an example. Not too long ago, I worked as an employee for a company. I was making better money than I ever had made before. I was using a lot of my experience to run multi-million dollar projects. I was doing the work of a project manager, except I didn’t have enough authority to act on my own. I like to think quickly and move fast, but I had to explain and justify mundane details of each and every day. I had the ability to do a lot more work than I was doing, but when I asked for more to do I was ignored. I watched the owner struggling to keep up with his workload. I knew I could help and offered to do so, and I was ignored. The whole time I worked there, I kept pushing to do more, was not given more to do, and I was subjected on a daily basis to an owner that complained about how everything would fall apart without him. He would say that nobody worked as hard as he did while he worked 100-hour weeks. He rarely delegated tasks. When he did, the tasks that were delegated were extremely simple and unchallenging, to the point, at times, of being insulting to those that were on the receiving end. It was almost as if he were saying, this is all I think you are capable of. The running joke at the company is “having the surgery done”, the lobotomy, so you would stop thinking and just do what you were told. My “surgery” didn’t work, so I left the company, feeling as though my talent had been wasted. A lot of other talent exists within that company that is wasted on a daily basis.
Please start to reread the last paragraph. Did you notice how quickly it turned negative? That is how powerful culture is. By the time you finished the first half of the paragraph, I would bet that you forgot that I was making better money than I ever had made before. In fact, that really didn’t matter at all, because I was obviously unhappy with the environment in which I was working. This particular owner was very secure financially and pays all of his employees very well. If I had said I was unhappy and asked for more money, I probably would have received it. Instead, I told him I was unhappy and I asked for more responsibility, and didn’t receive it. This owner failed to recognize the needs of an employee (me) that presented those needs bluntly. He has never had a problem with throwing money at a problem, but that will not fix culture.
In the example above, even the owner is unhappy. He continues to nurture a culture that is absolutely dependent on him. At the same time, he is burdened by the amount of things he has to get done to keep things moving. Meanwhile, his employees are miserable because they are not allowed to think or act on their own. If they do, they are second-guessed and soon made to regret taking any initiative at all.
As a business owner, or manager, you are faced with a lot of daily tasks that make it easy to postpone attention to your culture. In actuality, it is emotionally easier not to face it too, because that would force you to look at your own weaknesses very hard and possibly lead you to try to change who you are and how you act. But not facing the problem is only amplifying it.
More than likely, you will need outside help. This is because when you look around you within your company, they are all trapped inside the very box that you have built. It is possible that there will be one or two people with the guts to tell you (their boss) what they think is wrong and how they suggest your team fixes it. In most cases, that is the equivalent of throwing rocks inside a glass house. Many employees will dodge the real issues because they don’t want to upset their balance or their income source. They would rather wait until they can’t stand it anymore, then find another job and hope they are happier there. But if they do speak up, be careful, because your culture may be such that you hear them, but don’t listen. It is imperative that you allow yourself to be criticized. Only then can you start to break the problem down into manageable pieces in order to put things back together again.
Don’t take the criticism personally. By allowing your employees to open up and share their opinions and contribute to the success of your company, you empower them and make them feel needed. It also helps your business to gain a life of its own that can inspire everybody to do more. Synergy is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “the combined action of 2 or more [people] to achieve an effect greater than that which is individually capable”. Which would you rather be, an individual working and struggling to succeed, or the leader of a synergistic organization with a life all it’s own that carries it’s members to a satisfying and rewarding life?