Your Culture is a Safety Net

Your culture is a safety net. It’s essentially a permission structure that gives people the courage to act in certain ways because they know that a) certain actions are approved and b) your “net” will catch them if something doesn’t go as planned.

It has nothing to do with all that stuff you’ve written on your website, either. It’s the sum total of the values that you have lived out through your actions.

Actually, it might be more accurate to say that your culture is the sum total of your reactions—sure, actions can play a role, but that presumes that you can really plan everything that happens, and you can’t.

Here are some examples of what I mean when I say that your reactions provide a permission structure to your team:

• How you react when an employee tells you about a mistake they’ve made tells them about a lot of things (empathy, patience, etc.), but mainly it tells them whether or not they can be honest with you in the future. It also tells them whether it makes sense to take risks on your behalf, to step in and take over some things that you can instinctively do better than they can, and everybody knows it.
• How you react to an employee who puts in extra time on a weekend, or who doesn’t get much done at all this afternoon, tells them how much you trust them to get the job done, but to do it in a way that works for them.
• Their reaction to how you push back on a stupid client request signals the value of real work vs. busy work.
• Your reaction to bad news, and how you take it calmly, confirms that you’ll not overreact to something bad that they need to tell you.
• How you talk about an interaction, being fair with a full view of the good and the bad, tells them that they won’t need to sugarcoat things since there’s a good chance you’ll be fair in your assessments.
• How you react to a client who doesn’t treat your team respectfully tells them what behavior is acceptable in the first place, even between team members. It also tells them how comfortable you are in your ability to replace a bad client with a better one.

Your team needs direction, clarity, active management, and protection from distractions. They need you to give sub-optimal employees a little bit of a leash, and then they need you to cut the leash and shove the bad actor out the door to protect the healthy body from that little bit of cancer.

They need you to push back on self-serving employees, essentially saving the company from itself, so that it’ll be healthy enough to provide the jobs that they want without overextended promises.

They need you be really clear in what your firm does and why your firm is unique, too, and they need you to translate that into a plan that drops opportunity into the top of the funnel. They want to be proud of where they work, and nothing says “no pride” than “no marketing plan.”

Business leaders have, sadly enough, become the new parents, and your mission, if you decide to accept it, is to provide the sort of vibrant permission structure that people need to thrive in helping all of you build the sort of firm where there’s a lot of permission to do the right things and very little permission to do the wrong ones.

From time to time I’ll recommend that you take an article topic like this and put it on the agenda at the next leadership meeting. This might be a good one to explore!