Five Thoughts on Company Culture

For the past week, Science House has been immersed in corporate culture work as Dr. Simon Sagmeister, our partner from The Culture Institute in Zurich, was in residence working on a client project. This meant we ate a lot of chocolate bunnies. Okay, I did. And it was one, one chocolate bunny, but it was a big one with hazelnuts in it.

Anyway, we covered the walls of the Imagination Room many times over. I took notes all week on things I could share with you about managing and transforming company culture.

Liberty Requires Responsibility.

During a conversation about the balance between freedom and consequences at work, Simon mentioned that Viktor Frankl once proposed a Statue of Responsibility for the West Coast of the United States to counterbalance our Statue of Liberty and remind us that the two concepts go hand in hand, if either is to truly thrive.

"Freedom,” Frankl wrote in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, “is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness. In fact, freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness."

To translate this into terms of company culture, check out this Mashable post about the Five Unwritten Rules for Workplace Etiquette in a Lax Company Culture.

My favorite line is:

Your boss hasn’t given you freedom from work — just the freedom to work however you’re most productive.

The idea of freedom is much easier than the ability to maintain it in a meaningful way. A lot of people are so used to being closely managed that they might not realize how reliant they are on others for direction. If you find yourself managing individuals who slow down or miss things when they aren’t actively managed, help them come up with a method for taking charge of their responsibilities and inspire them to stay on target.

Everything is Context.

How well a cultural trait suits an organization depends on context. It may come as no surprise that organizations want to be more innovative, at least until you dig into what innovation really means to them in their unique context. The crushing grind that comes between the euphoria of an idea and market is one of the house specialties at Science House. There’s usually a lot of analysis and math involved. And clarity. And carefully designed plans. And bold but calculated risks, which are easier to calculate if you actually apply more, guess what? Math.

“Everything turns sour when you have too much of it,” Simon said. “Some organizations need more structure and bureaucracy. Some need speed but they don’t want to compromise quality. It all depends on the context. it’s like body temperature--you don’t want too much or too little. The optimum is always somewhere in the middle. You maximize for the spectrum that is healthy. Flexibility can be healthy or unhealthy. Everything is dangerous if it’s too high or too low.”

Organizations need to be realistic about their strengths and weaknesses, their threats and challenges, their stretch goals and things they just aren’t going to bother with, for whatever reason. Culture is also about what you don’t do.

Creating an Umbrella Culture

Our clients have employees, collaborators and customers around the world--sometimes in almost every single country. This is a wicked problem as shared services are quickly becoming necessary across companies that once divided the creation and execution of services by region. Globally dispersed teams can get a lot done, but getting people aligned across various ideologies, national boundaries, beliefs and customs isn’t a snap. People skills are considered soft only because they are the most difficult and also hard to measure.

The trick is to keep the focus on the shared goal and make sure all of the teams and individuals within understand how to connect their contributions to it. Some of your employees might work in a place where women aren’t respected as leaders. Others will have different ideas about the length and duration of a workday. Some will have trouble getting into work because of outbreaks of warfare, disease or terrorism. You will face barriers of language and vulnerability and a constantly shifting array of regulatory changes. Some of the most exciting projects we’ve got in the works involve hundreds of people in dozens of countries at a time when budgets are tightening.

This isn’t about creating a dull, homogenous monoculture that sits on your people like a grimy factory window. Instead, it’s about polishing the glass so people can see clearly, maybe even for the first time, what it means to contribute to a truly global effort.

The biggest brains don’t always go after the biggest paycheck

Shocking Wall St. bonuses aside, most companies can’t afford to shell out as much as they once did. But it’s okay, because there’s a point at which money ceases to buy happiness. Happiness grows until income hits around $75,000, at which point increases don’t do much for people (although salary level and happiness varies from place to place, which isn’t surprising).

Point is, truly spectacular talent is in high demand. Great people with relevant skills and a modern mindset can work wherever they want. Ask yourself if your company can compete with some of those that attract the best workers. If the answer is no, that’s reason enough to take a serious look at your culture and do something about it.

Interruptions mess with your brain and it takes a long time to recover.

Is that meeting really necessary? Does it have an agenda? Do you know why you were invited? If it’s your meeting, can you tell each person why they were invited and what they are expected to contribute? Did everybody leave with a clear record of action items and responsibilities? The culture of an organization or team dictates how, when and why people interrupt each other.

_________________________________________________________________

Rita J King is the EVP for Business Development at Science House, a cathedral of the imagination in Manhattan focused on the art and science of doing business. She is a strategist who specializes in the development of collaborative culture by making organizational culture visible so it can be measured and transformed. She is a senior advisor to The Culture Institute in Zurich, Switzerland, and a Fellow at the Salzburg Global Forum. She makes Mystery Jars, is the creator of Treasure of the Sirens, writes about the future for Fast Company and invents story architecture, characters and novel technologies for film and TV as a futurist for the Science and Entertainment Exchange. Follow@RitaJKing on Twitter.