The Hard Truth About Culture: Why It's Difficult to Get Right and Essential for Success
Last month we discussed finding the right fit and joining or building the right team.? A critical piece in that journey is culture.? Are you building or joining a company with the right cultural foundations?? Moreover, what are the right cultural foundations?? Why is it so important??
Many don’t like discussing the topic; to some it seems tacit, ephemeral, even tacky.? Why does the subject make some people so uncomfortable???
I’ll be honest, I hesitated to dedicate an article to it. Would I elicit some of the aforementioned reactions?? Would that be off putting, implicit or disinteresting? The fact I questioned it at all compelled me to address it.?
Perspective can be everything.? While it’s painful to observe or be part of an organization with poor culture, I feel fortunate to have seen the full spectrum in my career.? From total dysfunctional resentment to teams so in sync they act instantaneously in unison and with nearly imperceptible communication cues. There’s nothing worse than the former, nothing better than the latter.?
Let’s start with a few ‘givens’ that many people miss:?
Every organization has a culture - Some leadership teams don’t prioritize or address culture at all.? They find it unimportant, uninteresting, or not impactful. Some would rather not make the time investment or pretend their company won't develop one if it’s not built. In any case, omitting or not appreciating its importance is a critical mistake.?
It’s omnipresent - Underemphasizing culture is a fatal misstep because it’s everywhere.? It’s in every process meeting, client pitch, planning session, and roadmap review. It can be described as the feeling, attitudes, and actions every employee takes.?
Take the moment you walk through the front doors of the office in the morning, what feeling do you get? Anxious? Excited? Inspired? Bored?? They’re all valid. Whatever you feel and how you act, that’s your culture.?
It significantly impacts outcomes - Because your culture is everywhere, it’s reflected in every outcome and every decision. It’s a flair, bendt, signature, and lens in each action every employee takes.? It ultimately results in an adjustment factor behind every action. Depending on whether the culture is good or bad, it can severely bend the arrow up or down on the trajectory of our outcomes.?
All cultures have the same basic ingredients - How many quippy idioms have you heard? How many acronyms? People make lists and industry relevant mottos, and they should. It makes culture docs more relevant and personalized. But all organizational cultures boil down to the same basic foundations:?
It’s infectious - Human beings have a herd mentality.? We live in cities, people follow fashion trends, we use the same buzzwords, this is how reputations develop.? The vector of your culture becomes a positive feedback loop, a self-fulfilling prophecy; it's important that the arrow points up, not down.
It’s always changing - Don’t lull yourself to sleep with this one.? Cultivating a positive culture is hard, it takes time and is extremely rewarding or punishing depending on how it takes shape.
In either case, it's easy to focus on it for a period, see the results, then get complacent.? Conditions change, people come and go, and the company develops and matures.? Your culture will change with it.?
It’s imperative to know this, embrace it, and constantly be mindful, attentive, and committed to driving good culture into your organization.?
All these dynamics exist regardless of how they’re addressed or how they’re articulated.? Where on the continuum do you fall??
Appreciating culture and leveraging it are two different things; there are many ways to inculcate a winning culture.? Whether it’s a sports team or a startup, here are a few of my favorites:?
Your culture isn’t a document, statement, or hashtag, it’s a lifestyle - How many times have you simply read the culture statement aloud but failed to utilize it regularly to your advantage?
Values should be treated as focus questions, written into playbooks, policies, and remits. They need to be reinforced every day not by reading them or as a footnote on an email signature, but threaded through the very way an organization operates.?
Empower your organizational and individual decision-making with your culture - I could make this paragraph its own article, and later this year I will. In brevity, finding ways to unlock decision-making in your organization at every level will supercharge the speed at which it moves and reinforce your cultural foundation.?
When a teammate asks “What should we do about [issue]?” try responding with a question: “What’s in line with our culture and values?”, or maybe reference one, and let them make the call.? I guarantee the result will vector up your culture of Belonging, Ownership, and Purpose.
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By pushing decision-making as far down in the organization as possible, it will increase the velocity of output and reinvest commitment to the team!
Be vulnerable - This is probably the single most difficult element on an individual level to exude, but it’s critical.
One of my favorite early career mentors summed it up the best “Nobody wakes up in the morning, looks at themselves in the mirror, and says ‘Let’s get out there and screw this up today’”.? We all want to succeed, to impress, to gain approval.?As a result, we often put up a shield, a wall we try to hide behind.
Being vulnerable is unnatural, uncomfortable, and yet study after study shows it’s the single most important driver of trust. Trust in turn unlocks belonging, removes a fear of failure, supercharges experimentation, risk-taking, and ultimately innovation and excellence.? That’s how organizations win.?
Have a shared vision - A mission statement for the organization. This point seems implicit, yet it is so often missed or poorly executed.
A crisp, clearly defined, and properly emphasized vision has a focusing and halo effect on teams.? It reminds everyone what the North Star is and provides a motivation to get there.? It encourages and enables actions and decisions at the smallest level and wrinkle of the workday that can occur decisively and without doubt.? It provides the motivation to get things done instead of wallowing in hesitation.?
How do you know if you have a winning culture?? It’s easy to tell if you’re at the tapered ends of the bell curve, but there are lots of teams in the middle.?
Not everyone gets there. The truth is that exceptional culture is very difficult to achieve.? If you’re not sure you’ve seen it, then you definitely haven’t.??
If you need a sanity check, a rubric, or a litmus test when asking yourself if you’re part of a winning culture, I’d invite you to reference the core ingredients we listed above; Belonging, Ownership, and Purpose. Here are a few to get you started.?
Belonging cues - Do teammates make lots of eye contact, smile at each other, and have routinely positive gestures towards each other?? Do they physically lean towards each other in team meetings?? How many inside jokes do they have??
This all may seem unimportant but it’s the nuance of human interaction that provides insight as to whether people feel they belong.? If they don’t, they won’t feel comfortable to take risks, innovate, or openly collaborate with the rest of the team.
Ownership cues - Not everything goes right all the time.? More telling than when a company has success is when one has failure.? Does someone proactively communicate, take ownership, triage & recommend next steps?? Or are people looking to pass the buck, casually dismiss it, or worse yet completely ignore it??
Possibly my favorite is the ownership of physical space.? An office, practice field, or warehouse isn’t the product, services, or outcome of an organization, but almost all have them.? How well is that space maintained?? Do teammates or employees take personal ownership of it? Can you find a Director or VP picking up a stray piece of trash when nobody is looking? It's nuance, but matters immensely.
Purpose cues - Purpose is the amalgamation of both vision and drive.? It’s easy for a founding team to have purpose, but how well does that permeate through an entire organization?? It can be hard to tell.?
Ask if you have a push or a pull model for tactical progress.? Is work triaged and assigned (pull) by a manager, or is it identified and proactively completed (push)?? The best email you can get from a co-worker or teammate is simply a notification; “There was issue X, we did Y, and Z was the result”.? No request for permission, no ask for help, just good communication on the what. This won't always be possible, but the more instances we see the better.??
Culture is hard.? It’s hard to talk about, it’s hard to quantify, and it’s hard to get right.? It’s possibly the most misunderstood dynamic of any organization, sports team, or business.? But it’s also the secret sauce and the critical component that can make or break the ultimate outcome of that team.?
Culture is omnipotent, it’s the foundation on which you build successful teams, which is why I wrote about it first.? We’ll reference it in every article throughout the year, especially next month. I’m excited to dive into Decision Making & Communication with you!?
What's Next? Agenda: