EP17 - When Everything Is on Fire, Culture Stops Being a Nice Word

Every team can look good when times are good.

When there is money in the bank, clients are happy, the roadmap is clear, and nobody is really under pressure, most teams can perform reasonably well. Meetings happen, people are polite, targets are discussed, and from the outside, it can all look quite solid.

But that is not really where you see the team. You see the team when things are on fire.

When the business is struggling. When the founder is struggling. When decisions need to be made without perfect information. When people are tired, nervous, or unsure about what happens next.

That is where culture becomes visible. Culture is not what you write on a website. It is what happens when there is pressure.

A lot of leaders talk about motivation as if it is something you inject into a team. A speech, an offsite, a nice message in Slack, maybe a bit of positive energy. And yes, communication matters. Of course it does.

But if the foundation is wrong, those things will not carry the team very far.

Motivation under pressure starts much earlier. It starts with who you have brought into the team. It starts with the mindset you have built together. It starts with the way you have communicated from the get-go.

If you have been transparent only when things were easy, people will feel that. If you suddenly ask for trust in a crisis, even though you did not build trust beforehand, that is a hard sell.

People are not stupid. They see when the business is struggling. They see when you are struggling as a leader. They see when things are not going according to plan.

The question is whether they still believe in the direction.

So that is why the North Star matters. Not as a corporate sentence somewhere in a deck, but as something the team actually understands. Where are we going? Why are we doing this? What are we trying to build together?

If that is clear, people can handle more pressure than we sometimes think.

A good team does not need perfect conditions. It needs honesty, direction, and the feeling that we are in this together.

Hiring only for skills is risky. Skill matters, obviously. But when everything is on fire, you quickly find out whether someone is only there for the comfortable version of the company, or whether they are willing to help build through the messy part as well.

That does not mean you should romanticize struggle. I do not believe in making things hard just for the sake of it. Pressure is not a leadership strategy. Chaos is not a culture.

But every company, especially a growing one, will hit moments when things are unclear. The plan breaks. The market changes. A client leaves. Funding takes longer than expected. A key person is tired or uncertain.

In those moments, the leader’s job is not to pretend there is no fire. The job is to be clear about the fire, keep the direction visible, and make sure the team knows why it still matters to move forward.

That requires transparency. It requires trust. It requires having picked people who not only want the good times. And it requires a culture that was built before the crisis arrived.

When the pressure comes, you cannot suddenly create culture from nothing. You can only rely on what was already there. So the real question for leaders is not only, “How do I motivate my team when everything is on fire?”

The better question is, “What have I built before the fire started?” If the culture and mindset are good, the team has a much better chance of surviving. And not only survive, but join you in the endeavor.

Even when it is messy. Even when it is uncomfortable. Even when everything is on fire.

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Timecode:

00:00 Motivation in Crisis

00:04 Culture as Foundation

00:12 Pressure Tests Teams

00:24 Choosing the Right People

00:29 Transparency and North Star

00:39 Rallying Through the Fire

Links:

Uniprisma: https://uniprisma.com/

Meijer & Co.: https://meijerandco.com/

Personal Website: https://www.thijmenmeijer.com/

Transcript:

So how do I keep, my team motivated when everything is on fire? it goes back to culture again. So if your culture, and mindset is good, the team will survive. 

If the culture is in that way, set properly. every team can work fine if, times are good, but if times are bad and you know, things are on fire, you would see when there's a crack, basically. How to manage the team, well, or how to motivate them.

it's purely about that you have picked the right team members. they see that you're struggling. They see that the business struggling or personally, and again, when you have done things transparently from the get go, and you have that right North star, goal, 

The team will be motivated to join you in this endeavor, even though if everything was on fire.