Survive or succeed in these tough times? It’s Your Call!
What is the test that we need to pass? The right test during these tough times is not how you survive but how you succeed. How to have your best years ever amidst this crisis, stay strong, and emerge stronger and faster. Not as a predator, but with principles and purpose intact.
Survival vs. success marks a critical difference in thinking. If your goal is to survive, you’re going to hunker down, stay in your lane, flinch when you should punch, and despair about where you’re starting from, causing you to make decisions that will keep you there. If your goal is to succeed, you’re going to try new things, inspire necessary confidence in others, and focus on where you want to end up, causing you to make decisions designed to lead you there.
Is this lunacy when facing such a trembly business environment and an uncertain future? Not if you plan to stick around: Concentrate only on your survival, and you threaten it. The most effective strategists are steely eyed pragmatists who are also able to suspend reality as needed to reach a breakthrough plan. This is the mindset required for you to pivot to the real problem that your company must solve in order to succeed: How do we get others to pass the test for us?
Respect who will conquer the test. You can’t pass this success test just because you’ve decided to. Three groups will decide it for you: your manager culture, your employee culture, and your customer culture. We’re not just talking about a bunch of managers, employees, and customers. When these groups of people formed relationships with your company, they became cultures. And became far more resistant to standard methods of corporate influence.
Your company’s response to these tough times may be to pursue a strategy of innovation, renovation, or exfoliation, but a successful strategy isn’t planned well; it is implemented well. Anyone who considers culture to be soft stuff is clinically insane; it is the stuff of hardcore business results. If your three cultures want something to happen for your company, it’s going to happen; if they don’t, it won’t. Their power to save you and serve you is stunning, including in tough times — especially in tough times. For this to happen, they need to be transformed into protective evangelists for you. There has never been a more important time to understand how a culture really works and how to get yours to really work for you.
“Culture” is the most overused, yet often least understood, concept in business, so let’s start with an accurate definition. A culture is created whenever a group of people share the same living circumstances and so band together to share beliefs about the rules of survival and emotional prosperity. In the enterprise, those common living circumstances translate to, “How do we survive, working in this company, on this team, for this manager? And then, knowing that we’re going to be okay, how do we get rewarded emotionally and avoid punishment?”
What a culture believes about “the way things are around here” is just the currency of your culture. A culture is a self-protective organism that obsessively collects that information, validates it, and shares it privately amongst itself. It is the construct for caring and sharing by those united through common circumstances or cause.
Because it exists to protect itself, an employee culture places a premium on the known and is made anxious by the unknown. Your culture’s antennae are working constantly, seeking information. Its credibility detector is nearly infallible; its perceptions are alarmingly accurate; and its memory is elephantine. A culture can’t be bluffed, bribed, or bullied into sustainably believing or doing anything. You can’t tell your employee culture what to believe, nor stop it from existing.
Your manager culture operates the same way for the same self-protective purpose, but since many of the rules of survival and emotional prosperity, and the sources of information, are different for managers, it’s distinct from your general employee culture.
Your customers also have a common dependent relationship with your company, and this has formed them into a culture. Here too, your customer culture is an independent organism, operating in the same way as your employee and manager cultures, for the same reason, and with the same extraordinary power to help you or choose not to.
Oh, and there’s this: Your customers are generally employees somewhere themselves, and they’ll decide to protect or reject your company based in part on how they perceive you treat people just like them. This will be based on the legitimate enthusiasm your culture shows for your products, pricing, and policies. As employees themselves, your customer culture knows that it would never show that type of enthusiasm unless it was treated with deep respect.
