Tough Times: Tougher Teams

Imagine a world where human connection becomes completely electronic. We’re actually beginning to see that happen now. 

There will come a time when that deep, spiritual exhaustion wears and descends on a culture. It will begin to blame external circumstances for internal performance. 

When that happens, it becomes a culture of victimization and apathy. It’s going to be so insidious that even when a crisis passes, it’s difficult to get rid of it. 

The key is to recognize this because the culture has got all these problems it’s dealing with. 

Then work on creating a culture that takes its energy from solving problems. And if you need a culture that loves problems, it confirms the culture’s ingenuity, intelligence, and unity to itself.

What is Culture?

A culture comes into existence whenever a group of people shares the same basic living circumstances. They naturally band together and share common beliefs about the rules of survival and emotional prosperity. 

Culture is not the beliefs about the way things are. That’s the currency of the culture. The culture is a self-protective organism created whenever people share the same circumstances, whether you’re in the jungles of Samoa, or you all work in the same industry and the same company on the same team for the same manager. 

It’s a self-protective organism that has its own purpose to protect itself. And it’s not going to protect the company unless it can align protecting itself with protecting the company. To recognize that culture is an organism means that its motives are pure and predictable. Your culture will give you whatever you want. You just have to give it what it wants first. 

Differentiating Managers and Leaders

A manager’s job description is: if it sucks, suck it up. The job is never stated but always implied. The higher you go, the more stoicism is expected of you. 

Now, a lot of people you’re going to look to as leaders are not really leaders. But leadership is not a position. It’s not even initially a process. It’s a purpose before it becomes a process. And a lot of people in leadership positions are based on hierarchy, or have just been given the ability to refer to themselves as leaders. But that’s a different thing. 

Leadership is not position-dependent. They are distributed throughout your company at all levels. A leader’s emotional commitment will translate to your managers taking on company success. And the source of emotional commitment in any human being comes from the ability to live their own deepest values in a relationship or in an environment. 

For more information and resources on creating a culture of leadership, check out The Customer Service Revolution podcast. If you’d like to listen, head over to Episode 035: Tough Times: Tougher Teams.