Corporate Culture Could Be Your Achilles Heel

by ray stasieczko August 03, 2024

In this article, I will share my thoughts on corporate culture and the dangers of any corporate culture that weighs that culture on the side of internal customers over external customers.

Here are my thoughts:

We once thought having a golf green in our breakroom defined our culture. Obviously, that was crazy thinking.

There is a lot of emphasis on corporate culture, and many need to remember that its intention is to improve the interactions between corporations and those they serve.

Over the last decade, there has been a great movement regarding corporate culture. Honestly, it seems most of the actions were based on appeasing internal customers over providing exceptional services to external customers.

Don't get me wrong, I believe as most. Organizations must take care of their employees, and we all have heard the phrase "happy employees make happy customers." Unfortunately, as industries go through disruption, the cultures they built might, in fact, get in the way or cause fear of taking the needed action based on a focus on maintaining a culture over maintaining relevance.

When organizations build a cultural foundation, they can easily forget the importance of ensuring an agitation ingredient when pouring the concrete. Concrete alone isn't enough for long-standing structures. The concrete looks pretty, and the rebar doesn't, but without the rebar, the concrete foundation will crack and fail.

Corporate cultures based on personality assimilation will doom themselves. Assimilated personalities will always become environments filled with, yes, men and women.

Those leading organizations only surround by folks who came into the organization based on a consensus of existing employees, and that consensus was based on the applicant's personality quickly assimilating into the comfort zone of the organization; LOOK OUT!

This approach is disastrous. It will never build teams that can disrupt any marketplace. Because the fact is, they can't even disrupt themselves.

Corporate culture can easily hijack the great intentions of needed disruption. Leaders who spent decades building teams obsessed with consensus-based decisions will always procrastinate needed shifts, especially if those needed shifts threaten the playground components of their corporate culture.

As any industry declines and is pressured by consolidation, the corporations within that industry who have built cultures based on internal customers will see dramatic dysfunctions as these organizations are inexperienced in disruptions.

Again, those who can't disrupt themselves will never disrupt a marketplace and will fall victim to a marketplace disruption.

The current situation within the print industry is a massive disruption to the realities once taken for granted. Many of the industry's employees will see shifting sands as things consolidate and innovation lessens the need for the industry's core deliverable, print.

These shifting sands will cause the industry's leaders to evaluate selling the enterprise or adapting to the new realities of where the enterprise's customers are going.

Those leaders who decide to sell will find that matching cultures is easier said than done in press releases. In reality, the new owners will have different cultures, and by default, the cultures that came with the acquisition will be eliminated regardless of the jargon in the press release. Don't be fooled; there is no blending of cultures in acquisitions; the buyer's culture is the dominant and winning culture.

Those leaders in the print industry who have spent the last plus decades building teams based on assimilating personalities or teams so insecure about changes to any of the culture's perks will actually sabotage any threats that could expose their insecurities. In other words, these types of folks would never hire anyone they perceive as smarter or bolder than they see themselves.

My warning to all the industry's actors, whether leaders or rank and file: Don't fall into the trap of thinking corporate culture is about internal customers more than external customers.

Those leaders who understand attention to external customers through the mindsets of teams built on foundations of accountability, teams built by collections of personalities, teams that can easily disrupt themselves, will always defeat those teams built on foundations of personality assimilations, feeding a consensus to comfort.

Go out and shake shit up! Because disruption will, in fact, shake shit up, and disruptors don't wait on consensus.

"Status Quo is the killer of all that will be invented."

Ray Stasieczko

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