Have we made things too easy?

Recently, my husband and I have been playing pickleball.?While I'm just getting started, I've learned it's a game of unpredictability and emergencies.?You can affect a point by hitting a good shot, but you don't really know what kind of shot will come back. Sometimes, your best effort comes up short. Other times, you get a lucky bounce and win points you shouldn't.?All you can do is position?yourself for success, and play out each point – there isn’t a three-step process that will guarantee success.?

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What's this got to do with HR? Quite a bit.?You have to stay on your toes in pickleball, and boy, does the ever-changing dynamics of people in organizations keep me on my toes.

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Human beings crave certainty. We want to know that if we follow a prescribed formula, we'll get a certain result.?Marketers, communications experts, and others looking to grab your attention are quick to tout the “3 quick ways to _____” or “A 10-point checklist to ______.” The psychological hack used here appeals to our brain’s need to simplify, often in groups of three, to promote information retention.

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We all want to prescribed method for how to do something. It would be a lot easier if there was a playbook for raising my kids, or a manual for dealing with every tricky employee relations issue. But, there’s not! And we haven’t necessarily been set up for success based on the hand holding we received in school, especially college, where many of us received a syllabus with the breakdown of what to do each week, when things are due, the details of what’s expected, and how assignments will be graded.

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Often, company leadership and HR professionals ask for an easy, step-by-step way to integrate culture into their organization. It’s not that easy and it certainly can’t be successful by applying a template used at another company with a different culture, people, challenges, goals, market conditions, and more. It’s nuanced and takes an understanding of the companies, history, where the company is going, and so many other factors that are specific to an organization. Add on top of that the different perspectives, cultures, experiences, and approaches each person brings to the organization and our tendency to resist change or things outside our comfort zone. There’s not a one size fits all. It takes finding a balance of pushing the company to try new things and celebrating the ways things are. It takes calling out team members when they are attempting to make decisions not in alignment with the culture, while also finding the soft edges where it seems safe to evolve the culture to meet the new opportunities, ways of working, and changing landscape.

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So, while I can describe what’s worked at organizations I’ve supported with examples, blueprints and mental models, it’s going to take some time to figure out what works best for your organization.?It might be that through trial and error you figure out what doesn’t work. But, use these experiences to build a culture of innovation and resilience using strong change management techniques (described in other posts with details on where to go to learn these techniques.) Then, when you do figure out what works, make sure you document and institutionalize these things. Be mindful that the way you integrate culture this year might be different from the way that you integrate culture in five years. It’s important to be flexible, preserving the core of your organization and its purpose and values over time, trying new things as the world around us changes.?