The Low Cost / High Value Investment Your Growing Business Needs
Like people, workplaces also have their own character. With people, we call it “vibe” or “personality.” With businesses, we call it culture. In both cases, we can leave it to chance or we can be intentional. When it comes to your company’s culture, intentionality is the better choice. Yet, many business owners consider culture as the concern of HR, at best, or worse, simply give it no thought whatsoever. If either of these sounds familiar, you may be putting your company at risk unnecessarily.
I know what it’s like to be an entrepreneur and wear all the hats. Between financial tasks, paying employees, staying on top of legal and compliance issues, and providing service to clients, curating a culture probably seems like a low priority. In reality, culture design should be an explicit part of your business’ growth strategy and may even be critical to long-term viability.
Whether you have 2 employees or 2,000, your company’s culture is reflected in everything you do: the way you return messages, answer the phone, onboard clients, conduct meetings and interviews and even in your job postings. To better evaluate your current culture, you will need to identify the core values of your business. Ask yourself questions like:
Why did you start your business?
What impact are you hoping to have on your customers’ and clients’ lives? What about your own life?
Why are those impacts important to you? To others? To the world?
What do you want people to think or feel when they hear about your company?
What do you want your company to be known for?
Answer these questions honestly — as you really see things, and not measured by what you believe you should care about. Identifying your values provides a yardstick by which to measure your actions and behaviors and even your policies and procedures. Each move your business makes should be consistent with your values.
Leaders must ask themselves — does this align with who we are as a company? Does it fulfill the company’s purpose?
Considering decisions and actions through the lens of company values can make decisions easier, but only if there is a commitment to honor those values even when it might mean losing a client or letting an employee go. Of course those conversations themselves are difficult and uncomfortable, but the decision to have those conversations sends the message that your values and mission are not just pretty sayings on your website, they truly define who you are as a company.
That kind of internal consistency pays off. Clients, vendors, employees and people in general are adept at sensing artifice and will lose trust in your brand. Once lost, trust can be nearly impossible to rebuild. It can be done; Chipotle did it when an e. coli outbreak threatened it’s reputation and for those of us who are old enough to remember, the makers of Tylenol managed to salvage its reputation after a spate of cyanide poisonings about 30 years ago. But outbreaks and poison aside, a bad rap is easily magnified with the help of hashtags and Yelp. Business owners cannot control what others say but there is no reason to court bad feelings by not living up to your brand’s stated goals — whatever they may be.
Being honest about your values and purpose makes it more likely that your tribe will find you. Sure, some people may self-select away from your business, but those who do were never going to be your best clients. I’ve seen this many times when I practiced law full time. Some clients are all out to slash and burn the other side, while others just want to resolve things quickly and less painfully. As an attorney, I am not the right fit for the first, but with my “let’s find a common ground” approach, I was probably exactly the right attorney for the second.
Seeing your business grow means you are meeting a need in the market and doing it well. One of the best ways to keep the momentum going is to design a company culture that allows you to scale with that same level of service that got you to that point. It does not have to be complicated and it does not have to take a lot of your time. And the time it does take is well worth it.
