Surviving vs Winning: The difference is consistency
As a company, when life or adversity hits you, it’s crucial to be able to reach within and come out as a survivor. Companies with the survivor’s attitude are usually extremely agile and adept in dealing with continuous change in the market place. They possess this youthful exuberance and energy, and they run on pure adrenaline. They welcome an impossible challenge and usually succeed in overcoming those challenges. They attract talented employees who thrive under pressure. This trait is pretty common in our tech startups.
However, if we are not careful this can become a standard or a culture. What this means is everything becomes life or death, and the immediate emergency always takes higher priority over actually building for the future. It becomes a culture where there are lots of last-minute urgent requests interrupting steady workflows. It’s everyone scrambling to meet deadlines and secure customers, with tiny attention paid to the processes or methods used to get there.
While this flexibility and ability to always survive is great, is this sustainable for growth and expansion? Eventually, without consistency, burnout becomes apparent. The human body is not equipped to sprint a marathon.
In the absence of consistent, disciplined structures and processes, you won’t be able to fully maximize these opportunities but more importantly, it becomes extremely hard to replicate them. It just usually leads to one-hit wonders.
I believe one of the ways to achieve sustained growth as a company is through consistency.
Consistency simply means being the same. It’s ensuring we are building a stable and reliable company, always crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. It starts with the little things. It’s aligning those thousands of daily actions and decisions with the strategic objectives of the company.
Consistency is reinforcing your message and values every single day because behavior doesn’t change in a day or month. You’ve got to repeat yourself forever. You have to be consistent, clear and in their face with the principles you want your people to follow.
After all, is said and done, the point is the ability to find a balance. In our goal to being consistent, let’s not then become too rigid and inflexible that we can’t quickly respond to changes when required.
Being Tenacious or Resilient is not an end state, it’s the committed and passionate pursuit of perfection and the acknowledgment that the journey is the reward, not the destination.
Inspiration gotten from RESULTs by Gary L. Neilson & Bruce A. Pasternack