CULTURE KILLERS: The Emperor’s New Clothes
The Emperor’s New Clothes
Sometimes the truth is hard to swallow and risks are larger and scarier than anyone wants to admit. How a company identifies issues and risks can determine how it responds to challenging situations and whether it ultimately succeeds. This edition of CULTURE KILLERS focuses on the importance of creating an environment where everyone can think about and share what could go wrong - and the devastating results that happen when people start keeping their suspicions to themselves.
All organizations have challenges. Small companies and Fortune 100 companies alike face real issues and even existential threats. While there is no one right way to tackle challenging situations, companies that are best positioned to do it well do a few things consistently:
They establish forums for open conversation. These forums allow for top down, bottom up, cross team, intra team conversations, giving employees a channel to bring up concerns.
They use data. Quantifiable information from all parts of the business exists, is accessible, and is credible.
They meet challenges head on. Using all the information available, they make informed decisions to address issues.
But what happens when this is not the case? What happens when conversation is stifled? When leaders can’t access data or refuse to acknowledge it? When challenges are avoided and leaders refuse to address problems head on?
Trust evaporates. Teams get nervous when they think leaders are avoiding hard questions. They assume the worst when issues are constantly swept under the rug, and trust is extremely hard to build once broken.
Noise grows. Without an opportunity for candid, honest conversations and for people to raise legitimate challenges, they start having those conversations elsewhere.
Everything becomes political. Elephants take over rooms. When challenges are not discussed and addressed, people spend their time and energy figuring out who is preventing the most important conversations from happening.
Simply put, when companies do not have the right processes in place that enable them to identify and evaluate issues, they will never be able to do so. And that is a very dangerous place at any company, but especially in an early stage startup that will unquestionably face challenges on the road to success. It leads to one of the most devastating CULTURE KILLERS of them all: The Emperor’s New Clothes.
Remember the old story of the vain emperor who is conned by two tailors who make beautiful clothing that is invisible to stupid people? Turns out the fabric is actually invisible. But no one is willing to say it, because no one else is willing to say it. The more people refuse to state the obvious, the more everyone worries that they are wrong about the obvious problem.
This story was written 200 years ago, and yet we still see it come to life today.
Providing employees with structures, tools, and forums that allow for honest discussions, effective evaluation of risks, and healthy disagreement is critical. Never assume that these conversations are happening organically, because they may not be.
Instead, ask hard questions about the company strategy and get input from across the team. Look at your operations and make sure that employees do have a time and place to safely - without fear of retribution - bring up concerns, challenges, and general worries, and the data they need to support their views. Have a two-way dialogue. Don’t be the Emperor.
More about the CULTURE KILLER Series
Every founder wants their company to be known for its culture. Every employee wants to work in a place that they love. To succeed, every startup needs a Culture that Works.
Culture is so much more than a list of random perks. It results from how a company implements its strategy across its organization, how it runs its business every day, and how it manages its people. Culture is hard to build and fragile once established.
Around every corner is a CULTURE KILLER that can derail you and your company. In this series, we’re sharing some of our favorite examples and discussing the bigger underlying issues that are easily missed but must be fixed.
