The People Problem

Certainly, organizational culture matters in the matter of brand. People are the atomic structure of culture. Therefore, people substantially matter in the cultivation of brand.

But culture is a slippery thing when we zoom in on its constituent parts, i.e., not genericized people, but the individual persons comprising the culture. No matter how strongly you rate your organizational culture, the reality is that at any given point of time an unfortunate minority of your team is disengaged, disheartened or disenchanted. Forget the reasons why; just accept that human beings are notoriously disorderly.

It stands to reason that when humans get involved, it’s hard to design a brand experience and deliver it exactly according to the blueprint. Despite an organization’s best efforts to set guardrails for employee conduct or script interactions, things will go wrong. And sometimes severely so.

The human variability factor always looms large — moods, personal issues, something said, irritating traffic — whatever can interfere with the most perfectly designed brand experience is loitering somewhere between the heart and the mind.

In short, a brand encounters its biggest challenge from the human variability factor. People are moody, irrational, judgmental, self-interested, conflicted, defensive, sloppy, transactional, mercurial, corruptible, greedy, and needy. We see angels in the mirror while the devil lurks in our DNA.

The best we can do is to know our standards for the brand experience at the critical touchpoints and reverse engineer the controllable aspects of those standards.  For example, SOPs, automated processes, and technology applications may solve for much of the delivered brand experience.

After that, hopefully, organizational culture takes over and can mitigate much of the human variable. That’s where performance management processes, employee engagement programs, and leader/manager training and coaching (among other people-oriented propositions) come in — provided each are fashioned around brand expectations.

But culture rarely rises to a six sigma standard. It’s prudent to operate under the doctrine that anticipated performance predicated solely on people is a matter of faith, while anticipated performance predicated on a proven operating system is a matter of trust. It’s fine to have faith in your people, but it’s better to place trust in well-designed and proven systems.