It’s quite amazing how a jumbo crisis brings out the wisdom that has been dormant just below the surface. I track articles on company culture because of my personal and professional interest in the subject. In this current crisis, the number of articles has zoomed into the stratosphere.
This is good news. It means that people are doing what knowledge workers do best—think. And what they’re thinking about is how to motivate and mobilize people who’ve had a bucket of fear dumped on their heads.
Conscious development of company culture means you have to think about it, plan it, put it in place and measure how well you’re doing it.
You can be a nice, fair, smart person. You can hire nice, fair, smart people. You can work together day in and day out. You can have successes in your business.
Then a crisis hits. What happens now? How engaged is everyone to create solutions, to adapt to the crisis? The solutions are bound to feel unfair to someone, because they appear fairer to someone else. Niceties and smartness become relative. Informal cliques become coalitions and before you know it your company becomes fragmented into opposing views that have very little chance of reconciling.
When a culture is superficial, a crisis sandblasts the veneer off and it exposes the natural human tendency of self-preservation. Social interaction is a learned behavior, whereas self-preservation is a natural behavior. The first tendency of self-preservation is to seek allies. That means associating and identifying with others who represent your same plight and point of view. If the foundation of your company culture isn’t established consciously and spoken regularly, then the coalitions will rise up.
All the talk about innovation and new business models is obviously needed. The degree of established company culture determines whether any good comes from that talk.
This is the perfect time to focus on your culture. It has to come first, or at least in tandem with the other changes you’ll inevitably have to make.
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