3 Steps to Maintain Organizational Ethos and Build Resilience
Part 2 of 6 of the Organizational Resilience blog series.
Our framework is based on academic research as well as our in-house interviews with leaders across a wide range of industries (e.g., tech, medical, non-profit) by LifeLabs Learning's Impact Lead Joie Lim, M.S., who is developing specialized expertise in Organizational Resilience.
Successful leaders from across companies and industries all say the same thing: maintaining your mission, vision, and values is essential for organizational resilience. When hardship hits (and, unfortunately, it will), ethos maintenance helps your company continue to achieve objectives, retain top talent, and keep employees engaged.
“Most people are purpose-driven, if you don’t have a compelling mission or vision, it’s very difficult to engage and withstand uncertain times.”
As we explored in part 1 of this series, the first pillar of organizational resilience is ethos maintenance. Resilient organizations maintain their core mission and values in the face of change. Their purpose grounds them during hardship, becoming the cornerstone of how they catalyze resilience in their people, systems, and culture.
Understand your organizational ethos
First, let’s talk about what organizational ethos is. Humanitarian researchers describe it as the “code of conduct and principles that guide the behavior of employees and the management in an organization.” Basically, it’s your company’s unique character, your shared culture, your guiding beliefs.
Company mission and values serve as the blueprint of the code of conduct in resilient organizations – employees walk the walk and talk the talk. However, many organizations’ ethos aren’t aligned with their mission or values. Some might even contradict them (Donald Sull, 2022)!
When adversity strikes, these companies are unable to rally employees toward their mission, vision, and values because they’re too weak to hold on to. These companies are likely to experience extreme resistance to change during times of volatility. They’ll face an increase in conflict, siloing, disengagement, and attrition.
Take 3 key steps to maintain your organizational ethos
How can you consistently maintain your company ethos so it’s strong enough to weather a storm?
Reinforce your company’s mission, vision, and values in every system.
Anchor decisions in your organization’s ethos.
Role model values consistently in the places it matters most.
Let’s dive deeper into each of these…
1. Reinforce your company’s mission, vision, and values in every system.
From the recruitment process to the exit interview, it should be clear to employees, candidates, customers, and stakeholders what type of ethos your company has.
For example:
At LifeLabs Learning, giving and receiving feedback is an important behavior we expect of all Labmates. The first time a Labmate receives feedback is during their first interview, after a skill assessment. From the start, they know feedback is not only important, it’s expected.
“It’s most effective when you integrate [the mission, vision, and values] into the fiber and DNA of the company – you have to see it at every touch point (job posts, benefits, how you interact with your customers). Your mission, vision, and values are your true Northstar in how you run your business.”
Reinforce your company's ethos through these systems:
Interviewing & Hiring
Onboarding
Performance Enablement (e.g., performance reviews, feedback tools, 1-1’s, career development, etc.)
Strategic Planning
Decision Making
Meetings
>> How strongly do your systems reinforce the ethos you want employees to abide by?
If your team can’t remember your mission, vision, and values, they can’t align their actions with them.
PRO TIP: Reiterate your mission statement, vision, and values in team meetings with gamification. For example, create a competition of who can name your 5 company values the fastest in chat, or who can fill in the blanks of your mission statement.
2. Anchor decisions in your organization’s ethos.
When there are rapid changes in the workforce, decisions have the most room for error, bias, and consequences. Resilient organizations use their ethos as a guiding principle for the decisions they make in the most critical moments (and in everyday moments).
For example:
Consider a company that has done everything possible to avoid layoffs, but is forced to acknowledge it’s bleeding more cash than it can keep up with. Faced with inevitable layoffs, as a resilient organization it can use its values to guide the options it provides employees, message delivery, the process itself, and how the company moves forward.
Upholding a company’s ethos during this time is not only important for doing as little damage as possible, but perhaps more importantly, for building the strength to “bounce back” after the damage is done. For example, the way CEO Brian Chesky laid off 25% of Airbnb’s workforce was based on the company’s ethos of being human-centered. What was anticipated as Airbnb’s downfall resulted in the company having one of the largest IPOs of 2020.
3. Role model values consistently in the places that matter most.
Ben Horowitz's book What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture says a lot in the title alone about the impact of our behaviors in the workplace. You can display your values on every possible surface area (digital or physical), but those values are obsolete if most employees behave in direct contradiction with what you say is important.
Leaders can set the bar by modeling company values in their actions.
For example:
Many companies come to LifeLabs Learning to build a stronger feedback culture, where folks feel comfortable giving and receiving regular feedback that is performance-changing and brain-friendly. Although culture needs to start at the top, these companies often choose to focus their training solely on frontline managers or individual contributors. They exclude executives due to time constraints, lack of buy-in, low budget, or the like. This is alarming! If the CEO gives blurry feedback or avoids it altogether, why should anyone else do anything differently? The person in the highest seat has set the standard.
Help leaders role model desired behaviors with these tips:
Include them in manager/leadership training so leaders are using shared vocabulary
Regularly prompt them to share their commitments to organizational values in all-hands spaces
Increase face-time opportunities through office hours, listening tours, fireside chats, etc.
Create executive book clubs to share learning extractions on culture-aligned books
>> On a scale of 1-10, how well do your leaders role model the organization’s values? What would increase your score by 1 point?
Look out for part 3 on goal adaptation
Maintaining your organizational ethos is the foundation for long-term resilience. Stay tuned for part 3, covering the second organizational resilience pillar, goal adaptation, and exploring how you can meet changing demands, while still achieving your original objectives.
>> Want to speak to a LifeLabs Learning consultant about bringing resiliency skills into your organization? Reach out to us here!
