Human beings are biologically engineered for social interaction. Our internal chemical feedback loop encourages us to work together and come up with creative solutions to solve problems. Humans long for purpose. They desire a place where they belong, somewhere where they can be seen and heard. Somewhere where they matter. This has become less and less common as humans have become more and more industrialized. Employees are often treated like numbers on a spreadsheet or parts in a machine. If a part breaks, management will discard the old part and replace it with a new one quickly. This culture biologically puts people on the defensive at work. Humans instinctively, like all other animals, will do whatever it takes to preserve oneself. This was a great trait to have in the wild and led to countless evolutions, but in the modern world, this primitive instinct rips working environments apart, sours relationships, and leads to toxicity. What then do human beings need from a working culture in order to meet their biological needs and perform to their highest capabilities?
Human abstraction
Industrialization and now the computer age has led to the abstraction of the workplace. At an alarming rate, managers and executives no longer view their staff as people and rather numbers on a spreadsheet. If the company is going through hard times and the books need to be balanced, most executive’s first instinct is to start a wave of layoffs. This ripples through the fabric of the company and pierces the security and belonging people need to feel as a productive member on a team. It puts people on the defensive creating a culture of pervasive self-preservation. In this fight or flight-like state, employees feel stressed for their jobs and security at all times. This often affects their quality of work and their relationships with the people they’re working with. When this inevitably leads to a lack of production, executives often double down on what started the problem in the first place, layoffs!
The role of oxytocin and how its missing in today’s workforce
In an abstract environment where fight or flight is triggered, cortisol levels are high amongst employees and things can get off the rails quickly. What an environment like this fails to do is stimulate the release of oxytocin which is a hormone that is responsible for empathy and sense of belonging. In the book, Leaders Eat Last, by Simon Sinek, Sinek describes the role of this key hormone and how employers and executives can go about stimulating it in their company. When the employee base feels like they matter and belong to a culture where they play a vital role, the release of this hormone spikes employee satisfaction, a sense of loyalty to the company, and a collaborative purpose to work with fellow employees to do the best job they possibly can. The key is to GENUINELY CARE for the well-being of your people. This is how great leaders become great. Make your employees feel valued and it’ll do wonders for everyone involved.
Establishing trust as a leader
In the book, Leaders Eat Last, author Simon Sinek talks in detail about “circles of safety”, in the workplace. When people feel like they’re outside this circle, they view threats internally from the company in the form of layoffs and micromanagement. Like history tells us about great empires, they almost exclusively collapse from within! The same goes for the modern day version of this at a smaller scale within companies. The key to avoiding this is to create circles of safety by establishing trust between all branches of leadership and everyone within the company. In a position of leadership, trust can be shown in many different ways. Giving employees reign to make decisions and provide honest feedback for the company without fear of punishment makes everyone’s voices heard. If a leader really cares about the people they are leading, they will use the feedback of their people to guide their decisions rather than shut them out. If a culture is established by a leader where there is punishment for speaking up about feedback that might be negative, even if the feedback is constructive, people will stop giving feedback at all. Even if something is going horribly wrong and everyone in the company notices it besides leadership, no one will speak up out of fear they will be punished! See how this can lead to a massive implosion?
Therefore, an important rule in establishing a great culture is to accept feedback from your people and use it in your decision making as a leader. As Andrew Carnegie, one of the greatest leaders in American History once said about himself when referring to what he wanted engraved on his tombstone, “Here lies one who knew how to get around him, men who were cleverer than himself.”
Put your people first
Our modern corporate culture is built around balancing books and maintaining profit margins. This approach has no regard for the human element of a business. When a company needs to shed expenses, the first thing it does is look at layoffs. The leadership team views this as necessary and it doesn’t affect them because there is a clear disconnect between them and their people. This puts people on edge. They know when things that are out of their control happen such as a downturn in the economy, their job could be on the line. This puts them in a constant state of paralysis by virtue of fear that handicaps them from doing their best possible work. A strong culture preserves their people’s jobs even during hard economic conditions. Putting your people first in this way will dissolve potential fear and tension that most employees feel under modern circumstances. They know that they will be assessed based on their effort and performance rather than things that are out of their control which in turn leads to a higher level of accountability amongst employees to the quality of their work. A culture of collaboration takes hold rather than one of self preservation. When leaders can see past the immediate needs of cutting costs and look deeper into the long term effects of the company morale, they’ll see the tradeoff is a simple one to make in terms of long term sustainability. Oftentimes when a culture is strong, a company might be able to weather economic storms by having loyal, committed, and empowered employees come up with strategies internally to navigate it or make some voluntary sacrifices for the greater good of the company. This is the type of environment you NEED to create!
Have a goal deeper than just making money
Abstraction in regards to your people is not the only area where abstraction falls short of the mark. It also wreaks havoc in goal setting and company vision as well if you let it. The biggest abstraction you can have when it comes to goal setting is a goal or goals that are solely monetary in nature. These types of goals are out of your control and don’t build on the vision of the company. They are a result that comes from serving a greater purpose. Take my real estate wholesale company, Guerilla Investments, for example. We subscribe to a goal setting philosophy called The 12 Week Year where we take the approach of setting company goals every 12 weeks rather than the traditional annual approach. The first time we did this, almost all of our goals were monetary. They did nothing to advance the vision of our company, were out of our control, and actually hurt our business! We have since learned that creating goals around the vision that drives our company is much more emotionally triggering to buy into than a monetary one. Our goals now center around pouring into our team effort and resources to make them the best real estate team we can possibly be. Our goal is not to close deals, but to solve as many problems as possible for people who need our solutions. We even went as far as to refer to our callers as “problem solvers” rather than cold callers because it establishes the identity that aligns with our vision and purpose we want people to buy into. With this newfound vision and purpose driving our goals, we have never been as emotionally charged as we are now. Money is a lag indicator to show us that we are doing the right things in our company. It is purely a form of validation that we are doing what we set out to do! From this, we gather our KPIs and use those to determine how many problems we need to solve to produce X revenue so we can fine tune our processes and make sure we’re reaching as many people as possible that need our help. If you take anything away from this entire blog post LET IT BE THIS SECTION! Your goals have to be DEEPER THAN MONEY. Without purpose, you and your team will have no clear direction. There will be no reason driving what you do everyday. Businesses like this cannot sustain for very long.
The key to successfully creating a great culture for your business is to eliminate abstraction as a leader. This goes from how you view your people all the way to how your company sets goals. Put your people first and allow them to reach their potential within the company without fear of being punished due to circumstances beyond their control. This type of culture breeds loyalty, leadership within the ranks, and innovation within!