Your Culture is Your Fault

I was recently with the leadership team of a proud company that had a big challenge. They had been experiencing declining sales and profitability. The senior leadership team understood the gravity of their situation, but they couldn’t get the mid-level managers and the frontline employees to see a need to change their day-to-day habits.

Like many companies, the culture of the organization had become stale. The employees had a lackadaisical, “So what?” kind of attitude: “So what if this order is not shipped on time? So what if the customer complains?”

As we set about making our goals for the coming year, one of the top priorities was, “Transform our company culture to one where ALL employees know THEY are in charge of making customers happy.”

There were some heated conversations as we discussed what it would take to achieve this transformation. As soon as one person insisted that certain operational changes must take place, someone else would disagree and say the solution was something else. The atmosphere in the room became thick with frustration and confusion.

Finally, someone said, “Hey! We are over-complicating our business. It’s not as hard as we’re making it out to be. Basically, we buy a product, then do some things to that product, and resell it to our customers. And to our customers, the basics count. If we do what we say and ship it on time, the customer is happy and he buys from us again.”

Everyone agreed that failure to deliver the basics was the reason for their decline, and that if they didn’t do something, all would be lost. They weren’t delivering the basics because their culture didn’t value the basics.

And it was their fault. The senior leaders sitting in the room – it was their fault.

Culture Starts at the Top

Culture is everything, and when it gets lost, or stuck, the cause is at the top. Many leadership teams get trapped into blaming the employees in their company for their own failures: “They don’t get it. They don’t embrace our values. They have lost sight of the basics.”

Becoming a great leadership team means taking ownership of the issues you have created so you can take ownership of solving them. You and your senior leaders must:

1. OWN it yourselves
2. COMMUNICATE it incessantly
3. EXPECT it from every person in your organization
4. LIVE the message by example

That’s what it takes to drive the culture you want to build beyond your senior leadership team. Transforming a culture is a deliberate act, and one that must be executed by the top leaders. When an entire leadership team makes the decision to support one another completely, honestly, and with the greater good of everyone in mind, it can become an unstoppable transformative force.

This post originally appeared on the DeWitt Blog on April 23, 2018.