I’ve been getting lots of graduation cards over the past few weeks. It’s pretty exciting to those seniors, having the accomplishment of completing high school. Many will begin a career and the next stage of their life and many will go on to college. But none of them are finished. The interesting thing is that most people like to finish things. They want an end-date and then they want to move on to the next thing. It’s good to finish high school or college, it’s good to finish reading a book and it’s good for the 2-hour meeting to end. What’s sad is the high school kid that thinks the diploma is the end and he is finished. This is the same kid, 25 years later, who is still living at home with mom, making minimum wage and talking about the glory days when he caught that touchdown in the big game that hardly anyone remembers. He’s stuck in time and he can’t move forward. What’s worse, he stopped… he graduated… He may have started trade school but he stopped. He may have started on the ground floor of a promising career, but he stopped. He never had a plan and a process to follow. He kept jumping from the latest, greatest idea that popped into his head and it’s lead him to the basement of his mom’s house.
Sadly, this is exactly what many leaders do to this day. They keep stopping. They don’t have a plan and a process to follow or they become reactionary instead of proactive. They keep jumping from one idea to another. They’re program driven. In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins calls this person “The Fox”. What ends up happening is this leader turns into the guy, living in his mom’s basement, who keeps talking about the glory days that hardly anyone remembers.
We believe the Advocate Culture is the plan and process most organizations should follow. It’s a process and you should never want to graduate from it. The culture should define your organization. When it comes to adopting an advocate culture, you can’t make the mistake of many by putting an end-date to it. Also understand that a weak leader can destroy a developed culture very quickly or keep it from being implemented.
What is an Advocate Culture? It’s a corporate culture where the best customers are singing your praises to others. It’s a culture where departments in your organization are singing the praises of other departments and the organization to the people they know. It’s a culture where the focus is on the best customers and the best employees. The corporate vision, every action taken and the advocate culture should line up and work together. The culture defines you. It’s your DNA. It’s not something you would ever graduate from. It’s something you want to keep developing and protecting.
