The Equation of Accountability for an Employee Culture
As of this writing, we’re still in what medical and financial forecasts estimate as to the first phase of the pandemic, and its rolling impact on companies and economies. But now is the time to get ahead of the biggest looming threat to the commitment of your internal cultures. When the newness of this crisis wears away, it will be replaced by deep emotional weariness, numbness in your manager and employee cultures caused by instability that has become chronic, human connection that has become electronic, and uncontrollable circumstances that are writing a new story of lives and careers.
It is difficult for the human brain to sustain opposing emotions. Likewise, the human organism that is a culture can’t maintain a regular state of both exhaustion and exuberance, paralysis and productivity, or helplessness and hope. The antidote to your internal culture’s weariness is energy. In the face of continuing difficulties, a key source of that energy comes from taking on problems as a perk, not as a punishment, in the belief that the pursuit of solutions confirms its ingenuity, unity, tenacity, and exclusivity. This is the only way to achieve escape velocity for your culture, allowing it to move past the relentless pull of fatigue.
When a culture is allowed to blame external circumstances for internal performance, aggressive and innovative responses depart, and a culture marked by victimization, apathy, and detachment takes its place. This infestation is insidious and once entrenched is hard to exorcise — it will haunt company performance long after this crisis has passed. What you need instead is a culture that willingly holds itself equally responsible for its vulnerabilities as it does for its victories: Yes, this crisis happened to us. What happens now is up to us.
To create this kind of cultural belief system, your company has to first adopt a solution bias, constantly modeled and reinforced, including right from the top. This is in the form of an equation of accountability, where the single acceptable explanation for good or poor business performance is: This is what we did or didn’t do = this is what happened. Look at the pandemic and its economic impact like you would any serious competitor to your success. If you want to be them, focus on their strengths. If you want to beat them, focus on your own. Your culture’s embrace of this accountability is your own strength.
So, no more vesting Acts of God, forces of nature, or world events with the power to dictate what happens to your company. If you want to steer away from an undesirable fate, your culture has to refuse to believe such a fate is inevitable.
Creating a culture that welcomes the opportunity to solve problems isn’t about feeding it with the incentive to achieve success in the midst of difficulties; it’s about your culture feeding itself. Your culture’s hunger for a positive identity in a negative environment — “We’re at our best when things are at their worst” — will help cause it to transmogrify danger into determination, complexity into a challenge, and silos into solidarity. Crunch, chomp, slurp.
Of course, your culture won’t always be able to resolve the nutso problems brought on by present-day conditions. But it doesn’t need to in order to consider problem-solving to be a perk and so continue to pursue success. Great problem-solving cultures are stoked by taking on difficulties for the high that comes from the solution attempt — they get knocked back by obstacles and get right back up, grinning like loons in the face of the latest enemy to achievement: “You’ll get us once, but not twice. Okay, twice, but not three times. Okay, 37 times, but not 38. We don’t bow down to problems; we don’t pass them off; we don’t make excuses.”
Stan Slap is a renowned thought leader in how to achieve maximum commitment from manager, employee, and customer cultures. He wrote the New York Times, Wall St. Journal, and USA Today bestselling books on business culture, Bury My Heart at Conference Room B: The Unbeatable Impact of Truly Committed Managers and Under the Hood: Fire Up and Fine Tune Your Employee Culture. He is the CEO of the international consulting company called, by a remarkable coincidence, SLAP. To learn how SLAP can help your company achieve maximum results, please visit slapcompany.com or email: results@slapcompany.com.
