Individualism in Culture - The Human Side of Transformation
We are living in the midst of what we call the iGeneration. The applification and individualization of everything. Google decomposed computing stacks, Apple built addictive devices, Amazon made a ubiquitous cloud, Facebook became the bulletin board for all; and they collectively created our world of “connected isolationism”. We are currently learning to live within this era, and address several ramifications of this new world order like increased anxiety, vulnerabilities of connected young children, and the impact of foreign influence in setting our daily perspective. Yet, with all these challenges, there are so many things that have improved. One of those is the significant increase in the empowerment of the interconnected individual.
In our new world, we are living in an interweave of connections that allow us to build our identities and connect through a mesh of diverse groups. We are learning the power and problems of the digital era, and what digital individualism means. In many ways this has made its way into the corporate environment, but primarily through organic, and unplanned ways. I mentioned in the first article of this series “culture is reality”, and in the fourth that no matter what you “think”, your culture is the one you’re living in. Culture is what happens when making other plans, and individualism is working in your culture now.
THE FUNGUS AMONG US
Most companies have been composed of top down structures that were designed to support the industrial factory, then were electrified, computerized, and altered to support an internationally flat world. Now they are further changing to be more agile, fluid, and diverse. Within our evolving intended culture, there are already layers of individualism at play. We would be hard pressed to find a company free from it, or to stop the rise of the individual in our companies. This, like all disruptive trends, requires us to rethink our plan.
For the individual, the line that exists between personal and corporate have blurred to an indeterminate state. Every company has workers who conduct both work and personal activities during “work hours”, often within the same day, hour or moment. Yes this could be a bubble popping game while waiting on a printout, a check of their social while doing email, or it could be scheduling a board meeting for a local non-profit they participate in. This is all irrespective of location. It can be in a corporate office, airport, or coffee shop. We should reconsider the phrase “office hours”. The era of being “on the clock” or off it has evaporated.
I myself was an early adopter of this type of work. I was a traveling technician and business man my whole career, in corporate offices, in customer plants, at home, in planes, etc. The line between personal and business blended early for me. I was a blended worker at least a decade or more before this became “a thing”. For me, it meant that I never quit working. I had to set up boundaries to ensure I retained a balance. I had to remember to include my family and community, and that required I do some of that while I was at work. The efficiency of it was stellar. I have always been highly productive. To be honest, some of my worst corporate reviews were referencing that I did too much, went too fast, I needed to slow down (and allow others to catch up). That’s a different story, but I mention it because the blended worker is not necessarily an unproductive worker. Of course we are not dealing with a mass of homogeneous work-bots fashioned from my work ethic either. We’re dealing with that messy and diverse group called humanity; and the individuals present in your culture will be successful or not, based on their evolving (sometimes revolving) relationship they have with your company.
I am sure there are many of you reading that have framed this in a generational context. Yes, the post millennial workforce has grown up within this individualized world, and they have a natural affinity to the conceptual frame of the connected isolated individual. They have additionally built a series of defense mechanisms that balance this new world for them. They deftly operate, digitally and individualistically, with an unconscious fluidity that confuses and amazes the older working generations. The Boomers often, and some of the Gen-Xers, look on slightly baffled. We especially scratch our heads when we see a group of young professionals walking into their work wearing animal themed onesies. It feels to us that this is a master class in “screwing around”. Yet, there is a new working world order unfolding before us. I think its difference, doesn’t mean unprofitable or unproductive. It's just different, and individualized.
There is a great deal of thoughtful coverage of the gig economy, the virtual worker, and the post millennial workforce. Though I don’t agree with a fair amount of that coverage, I do not want to spend time on that here. Instead, I want to use the situation as the gravity for the conversation that I am about to engage you in. This simply stated, is how a company approaches the individual is no longer a discussion of if, or when. It is really a discussion of how bad are you messing it up now, and what you can do to gain more control of your corporate symphony of the individuals.
It really is that, isn’t it. Companies are becoming orchestras; and good leaders are becoming the conductors. Great companies figure out how to get the truest notes from the musician, and weave it all in harmony of a well orchestrated classic. This analogy feels good, but it is actually quite wrong. Orchestras use musical scores, most orchestras are made up of brilliantly talented, overqualified performers, who cram their talent into small, sometimes menial roles for the betterment of the group. This analogy is actually a great fit for the traditional corporate culture, not the new one based on individualism. One reason I jumped from the corporate plane, and landed in the startup community, was the fact that I was tired of playing half notes in the middle register. I could solo, I could be experimental, I could improvise. That’s really it, the new corporate culture, that is waist-deep infected by individualism, is really going towards improvisational jazz (or hip-hop). The individual will fractionally take more and more of the influence and the conductor becomes of questionable value, if not completely irrelevant. Personal creativity, exploration, and collaboration become the edge, and then the institution.
What if all corporate culture started from the individual, and then worked out? What if there were no overwrought processes, no polished brass quotes from the founders, just a disconnected series of derived tasks, alignments, and outcomes that were the product of enabling each individual within the company? Certainly if this was done, there would be shared space, and a similar interweave that we earlier discussed. As with music, there are also governing rules that lead to sweet harmonies, or blue-notes if not followed, but imagine that much of what we would see as corporate, as being envisioned and derived from the collective individual.
I will assume here that the increased individual empathy and enablement of each worker would create a happier, included, energized, creative, and more productive worker. This concept, I suspect, will be quite disturbing to some. We like to think with our employee surveys, training and empowerment conferences that we’ve truly enabled the individual in our companies, but we haven’t. To me enabling corporate individualism as a cultural asset feels radically novel. I am proposing starting over and to focus on the individual, then see what follows. Since this is a conceptually new, there are many questions we could explore to determine if any part of this is a good idea. I would like to reduce our potential list to two topics. One: “Would workers be better workers in this model?” and two: “Would companies be better companies?”.
TREES GROW UP
What can we do to establish the effect that individualism would have on the well-being of the average worker? And then, whether mentally healthy, lower stressed workers actually have a positive impact on corporate products and earnings? To make a proper case, it would take longer than most of you reading, have time to read. For the sake of brevity, you will have to excuse my selective biases in picking the few stories that I will reference to make an initial case for corporate individualism.
In 2015 the University of Warwick found that happier employees are 12% more productive, this was in part because happier people are more engaged and work harder. Add to that, Microsoft recently reduced the office hours of their employees by 20%, and the results from the experience are quoted to have increased “sales per employee” nearly 40%. The implication is their improved lives made them more effective workers. I struggle with the size of impact of this study, but even if the results were cut in half, they would feel significant.
Our team at SMS also did a study last year of the creative worker, and found that work conditions were highly impactful to the general well-being of the worker. We also found that people who didn’t feel effective, scored higher for things like anxiety and neuroticism. We also found that the times when workers “go big” and try to accomplish new things, their stress levels increase. This could be an unavoidably human response; or it could be a factor that often the company and culture do not support self-advancement. Let’s be honest, anecdotally we all know the later is true in most corporations. Self-advancement often feels like arrogance, revolt, or sedition. We have talked throughout the series about how culture is the armor of the corporate status quo. This supports the idea that self-advancement is often seen as a negative, and personal fears may be warranted..
We also know that internal investments in employee recognition are low cost, high value activities. Showing appreciation for a job well done, makes that specific individual feel good. However, there’s two sharp sides to that sword. Have you ever worked in one of the corporate roles that are shadowed by others? You go to the weekly meeting, you watch the adulation, and praise be laid upon your peers, but never you? This is the problem with recognition in general. Inevitably recognition often goes to the quarterback, homecoming queen, or the firemen who saved the children in the burning building. It is a form of hero worship, and hero worship has a negative impact on the masses. To net it out, hero worship dullifies the masses to expect heroic effort by others, and to expect less from themselves. This is anti-individualism thinking. We are not artificially cleaving our heroes from the normal workers. We are enabling the individual, all individuals equally. This just got a lot harder, didn’t it?
My second micro thesis was to question whether companies would be better by enacting corporate individualism. For me that means that much of what today we call management, seems ill fitted to a roots up model? So how do we feel about companies with no managers? That’s crazy! It will never work! The company Valve didn’t think so. Here’s an Inc. article about Valve and their unmanaged business. I have read previous pieces about this company, and this specific article is light on stats; but let’s highlight that Valve believes their environment created more loyal, productive workers who developed more creative solutions. In my fourth article in this series, I mention the idea of leadership staging curated collaboration as a cultural tool. I called this approach “environmental curation”. This may be a viable path for a new era of leadership. Finding ways to stage corporate environments, like gardens that we cultivate. If you’ve ever gardened, you know that the seeds themselves are super intelligent. They themselves have all the magic within them. All we do as gardeners is manipulate the conditions, and provide support when nature doesn’t. If we’re honest, unmanaged companies, and cultivated corporate cultures do not sound so crazy. Valve was an early adopter of the “individual out” model, and at least for them it has been successful. To me, their model feels like a corporate version of the gig economy, right? I have often wondered if in the future, corporations look more like economies, or governments. Where people travel and work in an unrestricted manner, but that there is a concept of constituency, and traveler. That domain, trade, and product would be managed more like industry or trade regulations, than we see in the B2B/B2C world we currently live in. If this is a future state, finding a free and equitable stance for the individual within the corporation will be an important step towards it.
Today, we’re not solving for these sci fi corporate landscapes, it's much easier to conceptualize next steps. For me it’s one fact and one question. The fact is that Individualism is alive and [un]well in your business; and I ask you, what will you do to enable it?
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