Corporate Culture is Either Past Focused or Present Focused – Create a Positive Future for Your Company: Sandler Training

 

 

 

Written by Hamish Knox; President of Sandler in Calgary, Canada

Creating accountable, sales focused organizations in Calgary

 

 

Your corporate culture is the behavior you approve implicitly or explicitly. That behavior is either rooted in the past or in the present, the latter of which creates a positive future.

Below are two corporate cultures and the behaviors they approve, guess which is past focused and which is present focused.

1. Organization 1’s culture is one of blame, excuses, denial and enabling
2. Organization 2’s culture is one of ownership, responsibility, accountability and encouragement

You probably picked organization 1’s culture as that being rooted in the past. The reason they are rooted in the past is found in Transactional Analysis.

David Sandler based his system on the concepts of Transactional Analysis, which gives us the tools to observe another’s behavior and understand if they are working from the past (Critical Parent and Adapted Child (pleaser) scripts) or if they are operating from the present (Natural Child and Adult). Another way of framing this concept is past-focused cultures heavily engage the amygdala and present-focused cultures engage the pre-frontal cortex in their brain.

Most corporate cultures won’t be all past focused or all present focused, but if you sense your corporate culture may be more past focused you’ll see and hear it in how your people interact.

Using Organization 1’s culture below are what you might observe from a past focused culture.

• Blame – “if (other department, external vendor, client/prospect) did what they said they would do, I would have got my tasks done.”
• Excuses – “look, I can’t create a sales plan for this year. The market will tell us what it’s willing to bear.”
• Denial – “we’ve always done it this way and I don’t see a reason to change.
• Enabling – Manager to direct report, “oh, let me do that for you.”

To shift your culture to present focused, celebrate small victories; give your people permission to ask questions about your existing processes and procedures that are solution-oriented; hold yourself and your people accountable to doing what you said you would by when you said you would; and encourage your people to develop and grow so you don’t create learned helplessness.

Until next time… go lead.

 

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