Cultivating Resilience and Success
The Vital Role of Culture in Entrepreneurship
Regarding entrepreneurship, people often think about hustling first and putting every bit of energy into one specific focus. It's like that when you start your own business, but is that a basis for a stable foundation?
It comes down to personal preferences, habits, and wishes. But there's an essential aspect to the efficiency of your business, which is the cultural aspect, especially when you have employees working with you.
You need to transform from a hustling individual to a leader into someone who motivates others instead of pushing oneself forward. You need to transition into a supporter. Otherwise, you might miss creating a culture that will carry your business through the hard times to come.
How the cultural aspect influences your business
Culture is the very foundation of your company's success. Unfortunately, I realized that quite late in my career. Most areas in your company, like people working in a team or teams working together, are highly influenced by the company's culture.
Do you want to onboard and integrate new people to extend your teams?
Do you have severe unforeseen problems, and you need to react instantly?
Do you need to overcome workload spikes, even if you already have too much to do?
Those are only a few possible questions, which are highly influenced by how people work together and if they are willing to do so.
Suppose you have fostered a positive and beneficial working culture where individuals feel welcome, not afraid to ask questions and admit shortcomings. In that case, you will experience that those questions asked earlier are answered positively. Because your employees will be "on your team."
How a toxic culture harms your business
But, if you have a toxic environment where finger-pointing, elitism of seniors, and isolation dominate the daily working culture, then most of the energy of your employees goes into self-preservation or just surviving the day.
This happens because we are all humans and like to dwell and work in an environment where we are supported, welcomed, and valued. Humans will always prioritize their foundational needs over the group's needs.
Example:
Instead of putting energy into finding a solution that solves a team problem, which results in a beneficial feature for the clients, the employee will put their efforts into pleasing condescending superiors or trying to avoid becoming the main topic for "failing" in the next team meeting. This wastes energy and leads to a downward spiral if nothing is done against those things.
In this scenario, the employee's basic needs are not met, preventing them from performing at their full potential.
What can we, leaders or entrepreneurs, do to avoid that toxicity?
The answer is simple: it's about fostering a culture-first approach. This can be a challenge, but it is essential not to ignore culture as an unnecessary thing to consider.
Ask yourself questions like:
Are my employees happy to join their team in the morning?
Are my teams learning and making real progress?
Are problems solved by helping colleagues without you ordering them to?
Do your employees see the problems of the company as theirs?
If the answer is "no," you might have a severe problem.
Cultural Aspects around your business or the families.
Never see employees as assets of your company. Every employee is a human being with needs, a family, and a very own future that isn't yours.
Younger employees focus on their careers, while more mature ones center their lives around their families. Older generations are often concerned about keeping their jobs.
This is part of your problem as well when you are an employer. So taking care of it, up to a certain degree, isn’t the worst idea!
My employees aren't treating our company as it would be "theirs"!
Many entrepreneur colleagues complain that employees aren't treating their companies as they would be "theirs." But simultaneously, they force the employees to put their needs second.
I never saw a single example where that ended up in a good situation.
If you want to have your employees on your "side" you need to respect these fundamental aspects:
Employees don't belong to you, nor should they act like that.
When you hire a human being, you hire a human with needs, problems, and dreams. You need to respect those, not change them.
Work and family are both important things for us in life. But work is there to support families, so act accordingly.
Conclusion for today
In my first years, culture was a small thing for me. I still see that cultural aspects are a low priority in most companies today.
Yet, most problems I experienced when working with other companies or on my own could have been solved by fostering intrinsic motivation.
I see a big issue when I read about questions in Leadership Groups like "How can I improve the performance of my team?". Instead of looking at the root cause of why a team of professionals isn't performing, leaders are looking into new metrics to implement or new "agile" systems to mitigate a cultural problem.
Why do I say cultural problem? Because if a team doesn't perform and doesn't seem to find the reason for that, they might not have the motivation to do so! Metrics or Scrum won't help you solve that!
Master your communication skills and have some empathy; that’s often enough to solve even technical problems in a company because if your employees want solutions, they will find those!
Adrian