I’ve been an entrepreneur for over 20 years now. At almost every stage of the process, I’ve had someone telling me that culture matters. The quote, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” has been a common refrain since I started my first company in 2002.
I always shrugged it off because my companies always had great cultures… until they didn’t. When it happened, it felt like we moved from almost effortless execution on strategy to what I would equate to trying to push a giant blob of Jello. It was one of the most frustrating experiences of my professional career.
Bad leadership symptoms can be squishy
Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with a few senior leaders in the Fortune 500 space who are focused on strengthening leaders in their organization. In each case, their quest to improve leadership in their company came from overarching cultural concerns. The main issues I heard were around communication: “We are too nice to each other.” “Lack of feedback was impacting our business results.” “People thought they were doing a better job than they were.”
Those are soft and squishy symptoms but they lead to hard results. Donald and Charles Sull were recently guests on Brené Brown’s podcast where they talked about their studies in this area. In their two MIT Review papers: Why Every Leader Needs to Worry about Toxic Culture and Toxic Culture is Driving the Great Resignation, they call out that 20% of our workforce has “left a job at some point in their career because of its toxic culture.” They also discovered that “toxic culture is the best predictor of a company experiencing higher employee attrition” during the great resignation. Furthermore, a recent survey done by Microsoft shows that 41% of the global workforce is likely to consider leaving their current employer within the next year. Thanks to the Sull’s, we know that culture is the driving force here.
We are losing people because we can’t have real conversations with them
I guess it isn’t surprising that tough conversation are avoided in the world’s biggest companies. Still, I don’t think it is any different in most of our organizations. For many years, in one of my companies, we talked about an “accountability problem.” The funny thing is, everyone else in the company had it but the speaker. It didn’t matter who the speaker was, including me. We put everyone through Crucial Conversations training, and it helped. At our size, that might have been enough.
In a broader picture, I don’t think that most companies invest a lot of time and energy in leadership development. I’ve seen first-hand the damage a weak and ineffectual leader can wreak on a team and an organization. Sometimes, that weak and ineffectual leader was me! Why? I didn’t prioritize it. It looks, based on the data above, that this is a systemic problem in our businesses right now. I wonder what it is going to take to get the collective leaders of the world, me included, to invest in leadership as seriously as we do other aspects of our business.
Thanks to pine watt for the beautiful photo.