Culture as a Competitive Advantage: 3 Tips for Sustainable Success

                                         

For an entrepreneur, one of the most difficult things to do is admit how little control you have.

Let’s face it - you have almost no control over the demands of your customers, the intensity of your competition or the ever-increasing pace of technological changes. Even your employees seem harder to keep than before.

So, if the world is increasingly volatile, and if products, processes and people only create short-term competitive advantages, what should an entrepreneur focus on to produce sustainable success?

Culture.

"To make customers happy, we have to make sure our employees are happy first.” – Tony Hsieh, Zappos

                             

Corporate culture is sometimes the only aspect of the company that doesn’t have external dependencies. Technology changes. People come and go. Markets evolve. But a strong company culture can be a solitary constant, paving the way for a sustainable competitive advantage.

Here are three tips to keep in mind when it comes to building and maintaining an enduring corporate culture.

It’s not about you.

Being a leader has very little to do with creating culture, but you could quickly destroy it.

As a CEO, a big part of your job is to hire talented, humble people, and guide and support the team in the direction that you think you need to go. But the culture isn’t about you, and if it’s going to be sustainable, it can’t be led by a single person. It has to be driven by the entire organization. Everyone, from our customer care representatives to our executives, contributes to the culture equally. All it takes is one entitled leader creating one negative change in attitude to upset years of work in establishing a cooperative, employee-centric culture.

So while you can’t single-handedly create a strong culture, you need to do everything you can to support it.
                              
                                  

Success is a lousy teacher, and spreadsheets lie.

One of the quickest paths to losing is too much success.

Often, when a company starts to do well, the team can become convinced more success is inevitable. People will point to success as proof that there’s no reason to change. I can’t think of any business that is successful today that will be successful doing the same thing 10 years from now. If your culture doesn’t encourage people to think about what needs to change to continue to succeed, it’s almost certain you will fail at some point.

There’s so much talk about data and analysis these days, but I think spreadsheets and statistics are the biggest liars in the history of business. While small organizations might understand their business well enough to see past reductive, poorly structured analysis, as companies grow, they can become to dependent on spreadsheets - blindly using them as tools to prove points without understanding the most important drivers and variables.

Your past success is only sustainable if the course ahead is not taken for granted, and if you have good decision-makers, who are able to analyze data and are given permission to tinker with success. If you consistently trust your spreadsheets more than your people, you’re in trouble.

                                  

Plan a sustainable culture.

Culture doesn’t become scalable and sustainable by accident. As companies grow, they often lose their way and lose the connections that were so important to them. Connections that were easy to make and maintain because everyone knew and worked with everyone else. But as your business grows, you have to invest in culture. It has to be intentional. It has to take up some of your time, just like sales and marketing.

Building a strong culture might just be the only way to sustainably succeed in a constantly changing world.