In testing times, it’s your culture that pulls you through.

Company cultures are being tested right now with COVID-19 tearing through the very thing culture needs to thrive: contact. Our cultures are diluted by what we can achieve remotely and by our home cultures, in our roles as parents, flat-mates, children etc. And yet, it’s when we’re in crisis, that our cultures become so vital in binding us, informing our next steps and often getting us through the worst things.

A few months back we completed a Rocket Booster Challenge to redefine our culture, given we’d doubled in size. We ran exercises looking back at who we had become and setting standards that current and future resident businesses should expect. In one night, we landed a new Launchpad Code:

Hustle and Love are very un-BP words, but they feel right for Launchpad. We operate in a different world from the giant corporate; we need to duck and weave, to experiment and fail, to seek forgiveness after the event — and to rely on intuition and experience, than solely on process or ‘always done like that’. Similarly, we balance our edge and impatience with care for the individual. We are direct in our feedback with each other because we want each other to become our very best.

Like now.

I’m so glad we invested the time those months back in defining our Code, because now we really need it.

The Code in a world of COVID-19

We are applying our Code in how we work together remotely, with care and energy. Our residents are hustling to adapt to a new world: where customers’ revenues have halved overnight, and where mobility is severely constrained. But as every hustler knows, where there is change there is opportunity.

Start-ups are more vulnerable now than ever, with so much uncertainty, fear and stasis. Lifelines disappear overnight, buyers become distracted by their own problems, the future becomes about surviving the month. Or the week.

And this is where our Code comes in again. Because this is how we show we’re different. This is how we show we’re here for start-ups — and that we’re worthy members of the ecosystem.

I promise it was completely unintentional, but the first letters of our Code spell out HELP. Which is good because we’re all about helping our resident businesses. But now HELP takes on a new meaning.

It did for Illai Gescheit, one of our Entrepreneurs in Residence, who’s helping build one of our low carbon businesses VYVE. He put together a Google form and a note on LinkedIn offering to help start-ups in need. With BP’s resources and connections, he said, we may be able to help.

Having worked for 16 years in BP, I couldn’t imagine a more terrifying idea (except that I actually loved the idea because I’ve worked 16 months in Launchpad). Opening ourselves up, we’ll be inundated! What’s the process for handling the volume? Isn’t there some GDPR implication? Is a Google form secure?

But this is HELP in action. And it’s helping start-ups. We haven’t been inundated. No-one is begging for money. But we’ve had a dozen start-ups come to us for help — and we’re trying to do just that.

Culture = Brand

As head of marketing for Launchpad, my job is to build our brand within the start-up ecosystem. I’ve done this kind of thing before — fancy events, cool videos, a bit of press, sponsoring a few things.

Except now I know that building the Launchpad brand is more about reflecting our culture externally. By demonstrating who we are — in good times and bad. By genuinely being there for all start-ups, not just our own.

Brand is just the external expression of internal culture. It sounds pretty naïve to admit this, but until I worked in Launchpad, I don’t think I’d realised this.

Here are a few tips about culture and brand co-development I’m learning:

1. You’ve got to start with some kind of values or code — you can always evolve them as you evolve. Challenge yourself to do it in one night like we did

2. Test each value for how it could show up externally — in other words could it bring value to your customer or help you understand his or her needs better?

3. Be honest with yourself as you keep testing those values — make sure you’re really living up to them with your teams at work and at home

4. Live your values — use them in your retros, your recognition programmes, recruitment; make them come alive — and you’ll be surprised how your internal stories feed your external communications

5. No customer or employee judges a company by how it performs in the good times — use this testing period to become your very best self. Reach out to your ecosystem and help.

Drop me a line or contact me on LinkedIn, if like me, you’re interested in brands and culture.