How To Make Your Culture Tangible, Transparent & Something You Can Manage Like a Product (Part 1 of 3)

If you follow me, I think we all align on the idea that culture is absolutely critical to business performance. And yet it’s often so de-prioritised, misunderstood, genetically modified and manipulated that you lose sight of who you are & how you do your best work together.

This problem is intensified in startups & scaleups for three reasons;

? Lean people teams lack the time & resources to prioritise this

?? Culture evolves and shifts more regularly in startups

? New VP’s & execs often don’t see it as something tangible you can manage

The fact is, culture is tangible, and it can and should be managed like a product.

So we decided to do two things to help ...

?? Launch high utility, action-orientated culture design cohorts to help people leaders map, design, and manage culture like a product (next one in Oct '24- apply here-www.openorg.fyi/the-culture-design-cohort)

?? Launch our On-Demand Culture Support offering, just ￡299/month for the first 10 companies we partner with (We have 6 already!)

More on these below later, but firstly I want to tackle the 'how to' statement in the title of this article...

How To Make Your Culture Tangible, Transparent & Something You Can Manage Like a Product

Here's how... broadly there's 3 steps here...

1. Define your current culture, beyond values.
2. Design your future culture.
3. Manage it like a product.

I'm going to tackle Part 1 in this article, with 2 and 3 following soon. Let's dive in...

1. Define your current culture, beyond values.

If you want to avoid culture being relegated to the league of "too wishy-washy," you must first define what you mean, understand its tangible parts, and create a hard link between culture and business results (e.g., profit, speed, retention, NPS, etc.). Good news: if you do this well, the second part becomes much easier.

The golden rule here is to focus on two words.. 'How We...'

We currently think about culture in 9 broad components within our own Culture OS framework:

For clarity, from an Open Org point of view, I'm talking about:

1. ?? How We Win: Mission, vision, purpose, goal setting
2. ? How We Work: Rituals, location & hours, decision making, co-creation
3. ?? How We Share: Business updates & documentation, finances & decisions
4. ?? How We Communicate: Synchronous vs asynchronous
5. ?? How We Manage & Lead: Manager definitions, team sizes, leadership styles
6. ?? How We Behave: Behaviours & values, Do's & Don'ts
7. ?? How We Grow: How we fail, learn, give & receive feedback
8. ?? How We Differ: Conflict management
9. ?? How We Meet: Meetings, Socials, Offsite's

?? Exercise Idea: Create a rough prototype on a digital whiteboard (e.g. Miro) and ask the rest of the business for some asynchronous feedback & input on helping to create these areas. You want everyone to have the opportunity to contribute, improve, align, and subscribe.

You might even unearth your own components that lie outside of the above framework. Asking for input to help establish these, as well as map outside of them is really powerful.

Once you are comfortable you have the right core components in place, you should invite some reflection & input from folks. This can either be done sync or async, but crucially want folks to be thinking about the following:

• Focus on operational vs emotional. You want to avoid filling a whiteboard full of emotive describing words like 'passionate', 'collaborative', 'awesome'; this simply fans the flames that fuel the 'wishy washy' narrative.
• Try to take it beyond emotions & descriptions..

? Example..'How We' Differ (Today)

• Emotional = Everyone's really nice and we're pretty good at solving issues when they come up. We all just know each other well and that helps to avoid conflict.
• Operational (a.k.a what are the things we actually have in place to help us achieve the emotional layer..) = We exchange personal ReadMe's so that we can better understand each other's approach, communication style etc. We also have co-created a code of conduct or covenant to help guide us on how to handle conflict. 'Disagree & Commit' is a big guiding principle here, so we understand how we should approach conflict & disagreement.

There's 3 very tangible items here that have been embedded & operationalised to help the team solve disagreements & conflict healthily, quickly and create that 'feeling' at the emotional level.

A few things to guide folks here...think about:

• What tooling do we have in place that enables this? And how specifically do we use that tool?
• Documentation & guidance
• Principles
• Embedded Rituals

Spend some time as a team scoping this out. Once you have this down on paper (via some feedback & co-creation) to understand where you are, and what you do today, you can start to design for tomorrow. That will be something i cover in Part 2... (Coming soon)

?? A Quick Word On... Culture Design Cohorts & Open Org 'On-Demand'

?? Our Culture Design Cohorts are 9-week learning (& action-orientated) experiences for startup & scaleup people leaders where we'll help you map, design & start to manage your culture using the framework we have detailed above. Each of the 9 weeks covers a different area on our framework, with interactive learning, sharing & tactical templates & exercises shared for you to take back to your business, all whilst mapping your culture to our framework as you go. If you're interested, at the time of writing we have ~13 spots left for our October Cohort. You can apply here

?? Our On-Demand Culture Support Subscription is is a monthly-rolling membership that gives stretched people teams access to a private peer-network, resources, benchmarking data & monthly culture support sessions with us (Adam & John) so you can do four things:

1. Accelerate execution of People + Culture goals
2. Craft beautiful people experiences & journeys
3. Have a consistent, effective way of managing & nurturing culture as you scale
4. Have an on-demand partner you can utilise for ‘unplanned’ moments that stress-test culture & trust

It’s highly guided, hands-on, and built around an affordable, flexible, monthly rolling membership designed for startups & scaleups; ￡299 / $379 a month. You can read more on that here.

If you think this could be helpful to you, I'd love to chat! Drop me a DM or book in some time via the site!