Lets discuss Corporate Culture. Hopefully you read that the same way Billy Madison reads Business Ethics. The latest buzz word (concept?) amongst all the pseudo-entrepreneurs out there.
Corporate culture is a plague and is adding nothing to your business except extreme distress for many of your employees.
Lets dissect the concept
What is culture? Well it’s a system beliefs and practices evolved over years of a group of people identifying commonly held ideas, beliefs, and values. Sounds super personal to me, you? Personal as in what identifies you as a person, not necessarily private. You know what doesn’t and shouldn’t identify you as a person? Corporate policy.
Here’s the issue
From what I’ve seen the companies implementing culture (man that hurts my head just in concept) believe it will somehow unify the company and get everyone going in the same direction and this is sort of true. If it becomes dangerous to your household’s stability to go against whatever corporate mandated culture some CEO with absolutely nothing in common with that breadwinner came up with they’re going to go along with it. They’ll despise every second of it but they will go along with it because they need their job.
Somehow this culture thing has been tied in with “good employees” as well. If you’re resistant to the culture, you’re a voice of dissent, then you’re a bad employee and you shall be smote from this realm. That’s just brilliant.
So you’ve created a system, you’ve mandated it throughout the company, whether publicly or just in your head you’ve vilified anyone that is resistant to it. Congratulations, you’ve just created the perfect system for mindless sheep, followers to thrive and hide behind your culture and you have or will eject all the free-thinkers, leaders, and instruments of change.
Is this really what you wanted?
So what are you going to do now? Everyone thinks the same thing (or at least pretends to), does the same thing, avoids pushing back (or forward for that matter) on anything. Great now you have no one to call you on your bullshit or bad ideas. No one to tell you you’re heading off a cliff and they’re the only one who can see it. No one willing to risk their ass to tell you the new workflow management system you’ve come up with with zero staff input has a glaring oversight that will leave an entire department unaccounted for and without work or your new metric only measures whether or not an employee clicks a button that says they did work rather than whether or not they did work, that the system you came up with that generates follow up meetings with already hooked clients from sales never delivers the meetings and so on and on and on.
Any system of management that is opposed to self-examination and scrutiny is tyrannical and will fail under its own hubris. It can only be maintained when control is absolute which does not describe business or staff relations. If no one is allowed to say “wait why are we doing this?” then no one can ever point out a mistake and you will endure every single one until you can endure no more.
Let me know how that works out for you. I know I’ve been ousted more than once on grounds of dissidence. But you know, I was probably just a bad employee, a bad employee that clients love, instills confidence in staff and client with a mere mention of my name, that will work for you happily 60-80 hours a week on salary as long as I’m left alone and not expected to attend a mandatory after-hours happy hour. Your employees don’t want to be your friend, I’m sorry but they don’t. It’s a job, it pays the bills, and they don’t want to be there. Any of them that are pretending to be your friend don’t believe they can get ahead based on their work product.
Speaking of corporate culture, opposition to scrutiny, foolishness, etc. if anyone here is using EOS please let me know. The bridge in NYC is still up for grabs.