As Your Culture Goes, So Goes Your Company. Society tolerates behaviors inimical to the wellbeing of your company.
By Grant Cardone •
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Every great company requires a foundation, and the foundation of a company is its culture. I've known this for a long time, that's why I spend much energy making sure the culture at my companies match who I am. It's my company, so I want to drive the culture. If you fail to shape the culture in your business, then society will do it for you.
Just establishing culture, your foundation, is not enough because as your company grows -- like a garden -- you will get weeds coming up. If you don't take care of the weeds, they will take over. Maintaining your company culture is a continual process.
At 10XGrowthCon 2017 JJ Jackintelle discussed four society influences that will influence your company:
1. A decline in civility.
What does this mean? You walk into a store and people aren't even nice anymore, so you must demand your people to be friendly because many people don't think they need to be anymore. Demand a nice culture. I want people in my company to be civil. That means helping each other. When they go to the coffee pot, I want asking "Can I get you a cup of coffee?"
I want my people to be empathetic when people have issues. I want them to cover for people. Society does not speak of that. People think it's okay to be not nice, but it will ruin your company. It will eat at your culture, and eventually, put you out of business.
Related: Good Manners Are a Career and Business Necessity
2. A rise in entitlements.
Stop all entitlement immediately! Nip it the instant it comes up. If I hear about somebody being entitled in my company, I will go find them. If I feel or I hear somebody feeling entitled, I will go square up with them and, no matter who it is, let them know that you earn everything in my company. There is no entitlement.
Related: 5 Scientific Suggestions for Curbing an Employee's Sense of Entitlement
3. Normalization of "immortality."
With social media, your employee's friends, all these unemployed people, all these people that are okay with procrastination, or what I call "Normalized immortality", you will be dealing with the idea of immortality. Do you know what that means? It means, "I don't need to get it done today, it's going to be fine. I'm going to live forever. I don't need to do this now. I'm immortal." Today, we don't do immortal, we do today. Normalized mortality is making those calls tomorrow. Understand that society is influencing this.
Related: 11 Ways to Beat Procrastination
4. Scapegoating successful people.
Never scapegoat successful people. Their success didn't just happen. You get in the car with them, you listen when they're talking, you go to lunch with them. I don't care what their background was or where they came from, or what their education was. Don't let the people in your company tear down successful people.
These four society-driven behaviors are considerable and persistent threats to your organization, its health and its culture. You can't just look at your culture once. You've got to regularly change the way you do things, the way you look at things and the way you run your business.
JJ Jackintelle said to the audience: "I assure you that Grant Cardone's Company 10 years ago could not have put the 10XGrowthCon together, they could not have handled the load of this unbelievable conference. He didn't have the infrastructure, the foundation to do it. But when he decided to do it, he knew the company's culture, the foundation, was there. He walked in, said,
'Guys, here's what we're going do. We're going throw a conference. We're going have 10,000 people.'
And he knew he had the right people that believed in his vision, that understood his mission, and didn't say, 'What do you guys think? Think it's a good idea?' No. They were on board right away because he had the right people there. And he knew he wasn't going to do that if the foundation wouldn't support it, that'd be stupidity."
He was right. Your company culture is your foundation, and this is true for any company in any industry. As a CEO, think about yourself as an architect. How big you're going to build your building, how many floors you're going to put on your building, how much it can withstand? You can try to lay it onto a foundation, but it's not ready. This is why every business owner must get their culture defined and activate it as soon as possible. It's what great companies are built upon.
