How to Combat Creeping Complacency
By leadership author and keynote speaker Ross Shafer
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Today, I want to give you a simple solution for what could be complacency creeping into your company. First, I want to assure you that MOST successful companies battle complacency at some point. So let’s take a little quiz. Do you notice your company isn’t as reactive as it once was? Are your team leaders starting to take shortcuts instead of performing at their normal world-class level. Are leaders complaining about burnout? Do they get distracted every time there is a rumor of a merger or that another company sees you as a takeover target? Are teams breaking off in to factions in defiance of your core goals…OR WORSE, some of your key people actually sabotage workflows to slow things down to their pace.
If you sense this is happening to you, what can you do about it? The solution is really quite simple. Throw your culture in reverse and behave like a new startup company again. The ways a Startup does business is very different from a legacy company. Startups don’t let distractions take away from their goals or their deadlines. The energy of a Startup is quite different than a legacy company. Startups are energized and hungry. If you walk into a startup office there are white boards full of unconventional ideas that smack of fantasy. Notes are posted on walls everywhere. People talk louder. They laugh more. There’s camaraderie. And this next element is shocking. Team members get together outside of work because they are usually friends. There is no question the vibe of a Startup is exciting – it’s enthusiastic because there is a true sense of mission and ownership. If you want to inject that kind of feeling back into your organization, here are three cultural shifts you can make.
ONE: Restore your corporate sense of urgency by reacting to market conditions as soon as you can. Startups launch in beta mode because speed-to-market is so critical. I mean look at the apps on your smart device. You heard about a cool app and you downloaded it. You didn’t perform your due diligence to make sure every single bug had been worked out. No worries. If the app isn’t perfect you knew you’d get updates from the cloud every week or so. These days, perfection is a work in progress.
TWO: Re-examine all of your customer & client complaints because complaints are the first alert to how any organization leaks money. Complaints are especially dangerous in a recommendation economy because complaints can go viral pretty quickly. If a startup gets a complaint they respond immediately because they care about every single customer. They depend upon every single customer to tell their friends.
THREE: Look for sluggish processes. Whether you are a B2C or primarily a B2B company, what steps within the sales, order, and delivery processes are causing customers to leave you. FOUR: take a different approach to risk. Many legacy companies overthink risk to the point that good ideas often come to market too late. Now look, I’m not suggesting you should be reckless. But I AM saying that Startups make bold decisions because they want your market share. And they are willing to be very innovative to get it.
All of the above rests upon how you can get buy-in from your teams to be a more enthusiastic and nimble. You’ve got to bring back the fun – bring back the excitement of being with a fresh-thinking company. If you can pull that off, you’ll feel the energy again. You’ll feel new ideas being proposed again. You might even find yourself having a drink after work with someone on your team for fun…not as an agenda lubricant.
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