What It Takes to Have a Crisis-Resilient Company Culture

“Only the strong survive,” as they say. While so many factors influence the success, failure, and survival of a company, culture is significant. It should be the reason for an organization’s strength, not its vulnerability. It takes more than a list of individual characteristics. It requires a culture carefully cultivated and reflected in shared experiences, throughout the company, in its entire system. As written before, there’s no such thing as cherry picking adjectives for something as all-encompassing as culture, like a “safety” culture, or a “team-oriented” culture, or even a “crisis-resilient” culture. A whole culture is so much more. It includes “all things that have the power to influence behaviors, interactions, and perception…[that] determine the boundaries of what is acceptable and not acceptable,” as defined in Culture Your Culture: Innovating Experiences @ Work. Look at the patterns of what is rewarded, punished, condoned, or accepted — these are what define a company’s culture. The aim is to embody a set of interconnected key capabilities that makes a company crisis-resilient as a whole — one that rises to the occasion and recovers quickly. These are the conditions that must be in place:

Connected. This is a less obvious, but necessary first choice. A company that is connected internally and to the outside world has access to…