Successful Business? Beware…

In my previous article, I introduced you to the concept of The 4 Dimensions of Culture: Complacent, Compliant, Committed, and Courageous.

Of those, Complacent is the negative dimension, one to actively guard against because it is always present, trying to lull a business or organization into a false sense of security, resting on the laurels of current success.

But while no company ever starts out wanting to end up in the Complacent dimension, it’s such a slow, subtle slide that no one notices that succeeding has been replaced by failing slowly. The Complacent Dimension is always with us. We’ll never reach a place where it could never happen to us.

How Complacency Shows Up

How do you know if your organization has become complacent? Well, there are some clues:

• You rely on the success of past initiatives to carry on indefinitely.
• You haven’t dealt with a major crisis in a while.
• People avoid confrontation, even when it would be appropriate.
• Management offers unrealistically positive messaging that’s just out of line with present reality. 
• Nobody has put forth any new initiatives or ideas recently.
• No one is paying attention to what the competition is doing. 

Complacency can take hold of an organization’s culture without leadership recognizing it or doing anything to stop it. Leaders may be comfortable where they are and reluctant to challenge the status quo, thinking it will continue into the future indefinitely. 

But when you allow complacency to take hold, your competition gets stronger and faster until it is too late to catch up. You lose your better performers and are unable to attract new talent. You lose customers, money, and eventually you lose your business.

Recognizing a Complacent Mindset and Attitude

The primary mindset in a Complacent culture is to cling to what created success. 

Protecting current success is the focus. Everyone is committed to the status quo, although they never actually use that term. 

Instead, they communicate using phrases like Stick to our core business…, Focus on our competitive edge…, or Align with our business philosophy. All of these are just substitutes for Keep doing what we’re doing no matter what. 

These leaders also rely on that same knowledge and experience to navigate through adversity. The problem is adversity usually creates market shifts and changes in customer needs. It demands problems be solved with a different approach.

In a Complacent culture, the underlying attitude is that everything should be de-risked and without confrontation. The goal is to keep things from becoming emotional. 

Unfortunately, passion and true commitment have to be emotionally driven. When confrontation and emotion are taken from the work environment, creativity, innovation, and risk-taking go with them.

As a result, the meaning and relevance have been completely drained from meetings and interactions. The culture becomes one of artificial harmony. There is too much friction around new thinking and creative ideas that break away from the past, so everyone interacts using the same old company-speak, reciting the same tired corporate bumper sticker slogans. Very little healthy debate or conflict remains.

By avoiding unhealthy conflict, the organization becomes a victim of unhealthy peace. Unhealthy peace can be as threatening as unhealthy conflict. In a complacent culture, companies have no intentionality around creating engaging and productive debate. 

Strategy is formed by current knowledge and experience. Everything starts with the question, What do we know about this? rather than, How do we get past what we know to discover what we need to know?

Working in a Complacent Culture 

I’ve personally experienced working within a few Complacent cultures, and let me tell you, it’s no fun. 

Original thought and productive disagreement meet resistance and often get classified as “bad attitudes” and “rebellion” that needs to be quashed.

In one particular company I’ve worked with, if you challenge the status quo, you’re either ignored or branded a loose cannon. Therefore, to avoid that stigma, employees adopt behaviors like never disagreeing with the leadership and making sure to use all of the company’s bumper-sticker language in their daily vernacular. 

The people who get recognized and are given opportunities are the ones who drink the corporate Kool-Aid and never question how the company can get better at serving its clients. 

As a result, employees aim to bend the client’s needs to fit the company’s available solutions, rather than creating solutions to meet the evolving needs of the client. 

I’ve witnessed company cultures go from having a thriving Courageous dimension focused on a very specific purpose to a largely Complacent culture that mind-numbingly executes the status quo.

Every once in a while, the leaders of such an organization push for a higher level of execution on the same tired business model. In doing so, the leaders genuinely feel as if they are challenging everyone to serve the client. 

Unfortunately, it’s not challenging at all. It only serves to help the organization survive a little longer with the same old model. People within the organization create echo chambers for the leaders. They offer up words of agreement, which leaders confuse with alignment. Leadership doesn’t want to hear new ideas; it only wants its biases confirmed.

The Complacent culture is usually steeped in knowledge and experience, thinking that because they know what they already know, they’re going to do everything right. That, by its very nature, looks backward. It is driven by previous success, not current reality. 

That approach may last for a while just based on sheer inertia, but it becomes a situation where dying slowly is interpreted as succeeding.  

When you think things are ok, you’re in the danger zone. 

People rarely think their organization or team is complacent. They may see it in others, but it’s hard to recognize in yourself. That’s why it’s such a threat, and by the time it’s recognized, it can be too late to recover.