Babystep 9: The Culture of a Healthy Foundation
Belonging. Trust. Purpose. Clarity. Accountability.
What are these five ideas?
This is the foundation of your business’s culture. Any business that is lacking these five components will see less success than the businesses that cultivate these.
Why?
Let’s start with belonging.
It’s no secret that human brains desire to belong.
A call center in India began to give out hoodies to its employees with their last name and the company logo printed on it. Compared to other call centers in India, their employees accepted the job offer at twice the rate and ended up staying longer.
What does this mean? It’s important for people not to feel like a number. They need to know, “You matter to us, you’re a part of this company.” Even more specifically, “We’re a special group and you belong in this group.”
An employee may strongly dislike the actual job, but if they feel like they belong to something, they will find enjoyment in it.
The companies that do a horrific job at this make employees feel as if they’re expendable and are only important as long as they’re useful. Your employees should believe that you’re not looking to get rid of them.
How you fire people and how you speak about them after they’ve left the company, will also either discourage or encourage belonging in your business.
Fire your employees with honor. Once you’ve given the employee multiple opportunities to change their behavior and you still haven’t seen results, they are well aware of why you’re letting them go. At that point, there’s no reason to pile on the shame and pain and you can even tell them what you’ve appreciated about them.
If employees see you do that, they will know that your business actually cares about people.
Note that it doesn’t mean people aren’t fired from time to time—because you’re still a healthy organization that keeps people accountable to high standards.
And once that employee is gone, if you continue to talk about them with honor and respect, people will continue to feel connected and that sense of belonging.
Coffee shops especially cannot ignore belonging. In a place where employees aren’t being paid incredible salaries, the work environment is especially important.
Moving onto trust.
We’ve been taught that first you must trust someone before you can be vulnerable with them. But we want to challenge that and say that vulnerability is necessary for trust. We’ve been shown that you shouldn’t show your weaknesses but in reality, our brains don’t trust people that pretend like they don’t have any weaknesses.
That’s why vulnerability must precede trust. And who will be vulnerable first? It must be the leader. And once the leader is vulnerable, there is trust, which creates more vulnerability, and the cycle reinforces itself.
The basic immune system of a company is this continuous improvement cycle that is founded on feedback that comes from vulnerability and trust.
In unhealthy companies, it’s the exact opposite. It's a cover-your-butt kind of culture and no one wants to admit their mistakes. When mistakes are found, then there’s a culture of punishment, a culture of shame, and everyone’s dodging and hiding and blaming other people. Instead of blame shifting, it should be safe to make a mistake.
If people don’t admit problems, then you’ll never find solutions and it will slow down the growth of your business exponentially.
Foundational element number three is purpose.
This isn’t always an altruistic, save the world, kind of idea. Purpose can also mean that your employees believe that their work matters for their team and for the company. Ideally, your employees see their purpose in both their team/company, and in the world. But purpose can also be making a good living wage to take care of their family or finding purpose in the work itself.
People need purpose to thrive.
Clarity.
People function best with clarity.
Humans are weird in the way that something can be totally obvious to everyone in the room, but if it’s not stated, people will still have doubts.
“It seems like this person is consistently letting others down.” Or, “We’re good at this and we’re not good at this.” Healthy teams, state what they see and they name the elephants in the room. From good behavior to bad behavior, they name everything.
Humans also desire environments where what they see is lining up with what they hear and everything seems to be in agreement. Confusion strikes when people are being told one thing and they’re seeing something else. They will begin to ask, “Is this behavior okay? Or are we pretending it’s okay?”
This will instantly demotivate your team. Motivation is directly proportional to clarity.
People need to have clarity around: how things will be done, how it will be evaluated, what are the next steps and what are the deliverables.
Accountability can often be a scary word but it’s only scary if there’s no foundation of vulnerability/trust and belonging.
When there’s trust, vulnerability and belonging in a team, people will often keep themselves accountable. Healthy cultures create an environment where people know not to shrug off responsibility. They either get it done or they communicate.
Unhealthy teams will lead to accountability that only comes from the outside; like from the management team or the higher ups.
Accountability is necessary for both staying on track and for your organization’s growth.
These are the five components of foundational culture that are necessary for every organization. There’s no doubt that organizations that lack these components will always struggle to compete with the teams that have them.
Whatever problem your business runs into, if you have these five components, you will be able to discern the correct solution and move forward in confidence.
You can purchase SCI’s, “From Your Coffee Shop Dream, To Your Dream Coffee Shop” book here.
With SCI’s book, you’ll walk out these steps through the fictional, but all too relatable, story of Claire Wallace as she journeys toward her dream coffee shop.