I was speaking to a group of CEOs the other day about the importance of the consensus and consistency principles in When Growth Stalls. We agreed that the healthiest companies are those in which internal consensus doesn’t just extend through one or two layers of management, but all the way down to street level.

The extent to which an organization’s core competency is understood and embraced by even the lowest-level employees is the extent to which their everyday decisions will be consistent with it. That usually means good things in the marketplace.

There are a handful of companies that might be held up as examples of this principle, including Southwest Airlines, Ritz-Carlton, Apple and Starbucks. But where Southwest and Ritz have demonstrated an institutionalized culture–as evidenced by uninterrupted continuity beyond the founders’ tenure–the jury is still out on Apple and Starbucks. Both companies drifted when their founders stepped away, requiring them to come back and retake the wheel.

What about your company? When you exit (and one way or another you will), will your organization retain its culture and core competency, or are you unconsciously relying on the power of your own gravitational pull?

It’s a question that set all of us in the room that day to pondering, and not everyone liked the answers they came up with. The good news is that, like most things, becoming aware of the problem is the first step toward doing something about it.