Seeds Of Discontent

Are you adding value to your customers?

What are you doing that’s working?

What could you tweak or change?

Questions like this are common in strategy brainstorm sessions. As a business, we review them on a regular basis: the challenge and dichotomy between bringing something new and fresh; and sticking with what’s working. What we look for is the overlap where it does not have to be a choice between “either/or”, but rather an “and” - a way of achieving both those outcomes.

By far our most appreciated free marketing value-add to our clients is our weekly Learning BITES. A few years back we ran a series for a year, which was well received. That fell into the “what’s working” quadrant and we repeated it with similar positive feedback. This year, in keeping with the annual theme, we have been looking at forty-nine challenges that businesses face, broken into seven key areas, each with seven sub-topics.

We have explored negative mindsets to watch out for, strategic mistakes to avoid, customer service challenges, sales headaches. Our latest section follows a similar vein – 7 Threats to Team Culture. 

Your internal culture is directly reflected in the external customer experience. The threat is not just to your team culture but rather your whole business. One of the challenges is how easy it is to ignore the warning signs. The niggles of staff. The seeds of discontent are often small and get overlooked in the busyness of day to day hustle and the unrelenting barrage of the urgent.

But like all seeds, given enough time and the right conditions, they grow! Seeds of discontent grow into the vines of resentment. Left unchecked, discontent takes root; and resentment, blame casting, gossip and silos grow stronger. Like ivy growing unchecked, these vines can completely choke,cover up and crowd out the working parts of your team culture.

Perhaps the greatest fertiliser is a lack of trust. Your team knows when something is wrong but they need to feel safe to point it out. Your job as leader is to create an environment where team members feel so safe that they will not just feel they can point out problems but that they are honor bound to do so. They need to know that you will attack problems not people. They need to know that the sooner each person brings to light a deviation from plan, the less damage it will cause (and often the easier it is to address and solve!)

What rating would you give your team’s trust score? 

How healthy is your culture? 

Do you need to do some weeding?