Build a Sustainable Competitive Advantage

Lenna Nair, former CHRO of Unilever, once said:

“people is the only sustainable competitive edge that a business has because everything else can be matched”.

She is spot on.

Your people make or break your business. They are a key to how you build your sustainable competitive advantage. And the good news is, you have a huge influence on the outcome.

Your influence is linked to how you address such problems as Purpose, Culture and Talent within your business.

We dive into each of these problems in the other videos on the Sustainable Competitive Advantage page. But rather than address them in this video, let’s briefly talk about change, because building your sustainable competitive advantage is going to require change.

Change is something commonly viewed in a negative light. If I asked you how will people react to change, you’d probably say: ‘with resistance’.

What I want you to think about is – do people really hate change?

I don’t think so.

People, just like businesses, are commonly thriving to change. They want to be the best versions they can be. It’s the change process they find challenging.

This is an important distinction. It should help you think a little differently about change, and how you can go about changing things to build your sustainable competitive advantage.

A common way of thinking when it comes to change is that you need to be change ready when changing. You need “buy-in”. This is a concept which makes sense on the surface. However, we propose that there’s a better way.

Never wait to be change ready, because you risk never being ready. Instead, to build your sustainable competitive advantage, get started on change immediately and at the same time get started on being change ready.

This subtly different approach could be your key to change success.

Now, how that works in practice is beyond the scope of this video. So, before ending this video, I want you to know we’re not talking about some radical process that magically makes change easy.

The fact is, the whole change process is seldom easy. Otherwise you and your competitors would have already done it. Rather, I’m saying there is a way to go about change which increases your odds of success and that’s the one we’d love for you to follow.

So, please go ahead and watch the other videos about how to build a sustainable competitive advantage.

Afterwards, when you’re ready, let’s catch up and see how we can help you achieve change success.

Co-Founder of HubSpot, Brian Halligan, said in an article:

“I meet with lots of CEOs who want to pick my brain on the journey from starting to scaling HubSpot as its CEO”.

In that article, he said:

“Treat your culture as your second product”.

He expanded on this by saying:

“We have two products, one we sell to our customers (HubSpot’s CRM) and one we sell to our employees (HubSpot’s culture). Like your product, you need your culture to be unique relative to the competition (for talent) and you want your culture to be very valuable. Like your product, when it is unique and valuable, your company turns into a magnet that attracts and retains terrific talent. And like your product, it’s never done – it needs continued iteration”.

That’s powerful advice.

When we talk about culture, we’re talking about the environment in which your people work, and the influence it has on how they think, act and experience work.

The scientific research we’ve consumed on what type of cultures help produce high performing businesses, suggests developing a high trust, high purpose and high standard culture.

To quote some research:

“Our data show[s] that trust substantially boosts an organization’s performance, employee engagement, retention, and well-being.”

These are elements of your business which contribute to profit maximisation over the short, medium and long-term.

To quote some other research, we compare the outcomes of unwanted cultures and those you would desire.

Beginning quote:

“Dysfunctional cultures can develop stress, distrust, low morale, a lack of sense of ‘team’, a feeling that they aren’t … cared for, a lack of listening, [it can] minimise learning…”;

and we end that piece of the quote there as the list goes on and on.

Quoting another section of that research:

“A productive culture on the other hand inspires, helps to develop openness, builds trust, enhances performance, fosters developmental feedback, gets people to push themselves to be better and do better, boosts self-esteem, inspires a willingness to learn, flex, innovate and be genuine.”

We all no doubt want a productive culture, but:

Is it really that important and how do you get it?

To further the point about the importance of culture, let us take a brief moment to refer to research that looked into what led to the fantastic success of Zappos – an online shoe and clothing shop founded in 1999 and sold to Amazon ten years later for $1.2 billion.

The researched found that there were two key elements which produced Zappos success:

1. Culture; and
2. High performance teams.

So, how did they make their culture?

The research found five drivers that shaped the culture:

1. Committed leaders
2. Practiced core values
3. Customer focused strategy
4. HR practices aligned with the core values
5. Management practices aligned with the core values

Essentially, the culture was not left up to chance. Employees were specifically trained for the culture and leaders led the way.

So, as you’re looking to improve your business and create a sustainable competitive advantage, do continue to keep in mind that committed work on shaping a high trust, high purpose and high standards culture can have a profound, leveraged and positive impact on your success.

We’ll end with these questions:

• Will you have the fortitude to make it happen?
• Do you know how to make it happen?

In that video you just watched, we mentioned some research.

If you’d like the references, simply head on in to the Munro’s Business Academy and you can find them on the Reference page.