Having a great organizational culture is the hallmark of personal branding – on an organization level and individual level, as well.
But how is this culture set in, in an organization, and then uproots on an individual level, too?
While I have mentioned value system is the indicator of how well your company responds internally (to your employees and internal stakeholders), and externally (to your suppliers, customers, partners and market in general), however accepting and responding to bleep-ups – aka – failures, is the radical part to deal with.
Whether you are a start-up or starting up laterally in a company, or chasing your true north in a professional/ business set-up, you need to understand failure better. By better, I mean, debriefing yourself and your company about how you, if not fully correct your course, but tinker and try until you settle in with a path that traverses such detours strategically.
A thriving culture is often – or rather – resultant of massive failures. This doesn’t connote that your leadership is not astute or fairly strategic; it’s often the opposite. Since culture starts from the top [or ideally, for that matter] and then permeates into the whole business unit, a failure-readiness and strategic responsiveness is crucial.
This is where a culture is germinated: of being humble, agile, nimble, and collaborative. When you set up a company and dare to fail [ dare to suck is just too bad to put, though, but sometimes yes], you implicitly allow your employees to embrace their respective vulnerabilities and work more effectively once they learn what worked in specificity, and what didn’t quite shape up in the bigger scheme of things.
Failure underpins how much ‘grit’ is ingrained in your cultural DNA. And that’s the real game-changer: when your employees think creatively/ laterally on how to work out solutions.
A collaborative working environment can be conducive to bringing about a more positive culture. Rather than adopting a hierarchical approach, staff are treated equal. Communication is fluid. Any animosities can be more proactively extinguished and the entire team can work uniformly to the set goals.
That said, you are going to see more failures behind a massive, flamboyant success – given the way new ideas are sprucing up and trying to fit the bill of a viable business model – be it as a startup or a legacy corporation.
It’s your ability to respond to failures that will set the tone of your organization’s success.
Think success. Execute – and fail better, faster. You will eventually build a culture that is built to deliver and keep promises ( as they are more sacred).
On that note, welcome 2018!
