The Objective of Culture - The Human Side of Transformation

This is the third in several complementary articles that I am writing on building creative cultures in corporations. This is done as part of Share More Stories (SMS) work on “The Human Side of Transformation”. 

In the first two articles we discussed a deeper and expanded definition of culture, then we talked through the blended events over the last 150 years that have led us to this moment in corporate culture. In this article we will focus on considering the few objectives of culture that may not have made it within the covers of the business books you’ve read. It's a great question to ask up front. What should culture be? Not your specific culture, but what are the valuable attributes of culture to consider when planning change?

PROTECT THIS HOUSE

Metaphorically we could look at culture as armor. A structure designed to protect the vital organs. If so, then an objective of culture is to determine what precious things need cultivation and protection. There are many things that companies value, and a number of those things are measured, managed, and resourced. However, there are likely other valuable attributes of a company’s culture that are not only unprotected, but may even be threatened from the stronger forces at work.  

If I were to perform an exhaustive survey of American businesses, I believe I could predict this outcome. I believe my survey would prove that the overwhelming majority of corporations are inept at “soft-skills”. In many ways soft-skills are “counter-culture”. In my first article we discussed “What is Culture?”, and noted that there are natural biases which tend to shape cultures over time. Yet, there is a power and competitive advantage that would be awarded to any company who learns more about, and enables their people. In July of 2019, SMS reported on the anxiety that creative workers feel at work. This anxiety isn’t mandatory, and could be addressed by enabling workers, through teaching, how to trust, how to heal, how to accept failure, and how enable creativity; yet most company cultures are not developed to foster this type of alignment between and with workers. In the 2nd article on “Touring the Past”, we discussed that we are experiencing a significant inflection point that is changing the make up, output and strategy of how we define “how” within corporations. Including the reinvention of how labor is applied within the enterprise. This may be the corporate improvement battleground of our decade. Let’s hear it for 2020! So, first on our list of objectives needs to be the ability to empathize, understand, and connect with workers in order remove the hidden barriers to your success. What other objectives should we consider?

ORGANIZATIONS ARE LIKE ONIONS

Shrek said it best “Ogres are like onions...Ogres have layers.” However, the objective of culture change projects are often thinly defined. More like a billboard than an onion, internal corporate initiatives come from a top down intuition, or maybe a trending metric, that launches a wave of work based primarily on an experienced hunch. Companies are made up of thousands of employees, yet the start, and often the full intent, of an initiative is formulated in some version of a vacuum. What is missing is the layers. Organizations are also like ogres and onions, there are layers of competencies, experiences, perspectives, attitudes, connections, and knowledge that flows throughout. What diagnostic mechanisms can companies apply to better understand the layers that will affect their change efforts? If you agree with my early statement that understanding is the first critical step in change, then what approach will you take to understand your workforce, and their authentic place in the change?

A key objective of culture should be execution, and to codify the chain of value throughout the organization. We’ve all been part of internal campaigns to improve culture with the intent to be more creative, diverse, happy, healthy, customer-centric. It is surprising how often these programs are staged with nothing more than a slogan to comprise its execution. Good success planning for culture change is not a tagline, a philosophical statement, or a bullet list; it's a linked logic chain of valued objectives that both improve the environment, and are valued by someone within the culture. We’ve established that company culture is a deep, all encompassing, and a indirect manifestation of the company’s activity. Leaders will often pull a concept from their high paid consultants and then work it top down. Or, an initiative team is assigned, holding whiteboard sessions, building out plans based primarily on the ideas of 6-10 people from the organization. These approaches are not detrimental to success, but alone do not create a systemic process to identify the value chain, that connects, and creates value, for the entire organization. 

Let me provide a hypothetical example to highlight the dynamics. Let’s create an at-home care services company called “Care, Inc.” The unique in-demand product that Care has developed is a process that provides the most caring and empathetic caregivers for their services. They have worked the internal processes, hiring, rewards, and training to ensure a consistent and valuable services product. The executives at Care, realize they have an aging workforce and decide they need to significantly increase the ratio of young to old workers in their business. They did some initial research work, and realized that young people feel their culture/business is too old school, stodgy, boring, and not a place that they prefer to work. Loaded with this new insight, the company sets off on a year long campaign to become a hip youthful place to work!  

Given your vantage point, you can probably see the potential pitfalls. Care has an in-demand, market differentiated product that isn’t made of plastic, it’s made of people, process, with an established sense of place. Updating the culture is not a bad idea, but it is important to understand the chain of value for everyone to ensure what is derived is a net positive outcome. It is also important to link these things, so when the COO asks why you are spending $5,000 on a “listening picnic” for a large sample of the care-givers, that the money and effort are tied to the results she/he valued associated with the effort (e.g. reduced cost of labor). The chain keeps everyone’s memory fresh and efforts aligned. If the organization values the change, trusts the people and process, then there is a much higher chance for success.

IN[TRO]SPECTION TIME

In some scenarios, company employee relations could be likened to peeling a grape with a hammer. The company-employee relationship is not a meeting of equals. However, I believe an enabled creative workforce is in large part, an effort to establish more balance in this managed relationship of company to worker. 

In our studies in 2019 of effects of trust and authenticity, and the rise of the creative worker, we learned some of the recipe components to better understand the attitudes of humans; and how companies can work to improve their connections. Adding to that my experience in group dynamics and culture change, here are some of the most critical attitudes to consider for the betterment of our workers and consumers. 

• Shared Wisdom - Our world is changed every day by the power of small groups who find shared wisdom together. When a group of people come together in a manner where personal defenses are lowered, trust is established, and an open connectedness is jointly felt, the group is transformed into a collaborative unit. This type of group can be a strong source for creativity. The team at SMS calls this the power of shared wisdom. Humans have a primitive and innate skill for connecting in small groups, and we are very effective in them. To optimize around shared wisdom, refine your skills at inclusion. More than alignment, inclusion is the feeling of belonging. Inclusion is manifested by groups who feel trusted, show up authentically, have an agreed alignment level, and feel there is a shared purpose between them.
• The Gate of Trust - Trust is a measurement we use to determine how we will engage in a given situation. Simplified, “Someone that trusts an environment, will be more authentic within that environment”. Whether a brand is trying to engage a consumer, a parent is trying to connect to a teenager, or a company connecting with its employees, the desired authenticity of a connection starts by each member evaluating the existence of trust. In concept this is easy, but in practice it is so easy to get wrong. Consider an “anonymous survey” by the company emailed to you by your manager, with unusually soft language. These can be interpreted as feeling more like police interrogations without your lawyer present. In my experience, few trust the word “anonymous” in these surveys. Bringing this example up to concept level, the sponsor’s motive is a key feature in the evaluation of trust. How can you best state your intent, and is your intent appropriate? Additionally, pace of activity can also negatively impact trust. If someone says they want to know you better or understand how you are feeling, but do so through an efficient and organized way that feels mechanical (e.g. performance review), it is often not trusted by the recipient. When trust is not established, you will get a great response, very likely exactly what you wanted to hear, and primarily inauthentic. Inauthentic responses are tragic. Why? They took the effort to collect, they established a lack of trust with someone who mattered to you, they gave you inaccurate guidance which you may then invest wrongly in, leaving you further from your established goals, with less money, and less connected than where you started.
• Healing Helps - I don’t believe I have ever read a business book that talked about “healing”, but I am here to tell you healing can be a necessary step in culture change. This somewhat surprising insight is something we came across in our recent work. Admittedly it is still more of an intuitive hunch, than a quantitatively proven principle, it seems to hold water when considering our own personal experiences in corporations. I will state it as such. “In some cases, in order for workers to learn, to engage, and to trust many people need to first heal. For example, imagine a young student who is having troubles in school, because of trauma experienced outside the school. We can envision this in our traditional views of victimization, but it is quite prevalent, in corporate, consumer and civic environments. Scar tissue can make a seasoned employee very valuable, but there are many known and unknown scars we all walk around with that may also be negatively affecting our culture and businesses. In our study of workers, anxiety scores were high, especially those who are trying to scale to new heights or competencies. Some report these attempts at growth don’t always feel welcome and supported. Additionally many feel they have to hide their true self at work, repressing their natural personality and energies. Over many years these things can build into invisible burdens that are working right beside your KPIs and Gantt charts. Consider where there is past damage, and what may need to be released within your culture to move on. Apply this thinking at the individual, group, and corporate level.
• Diversity drives good change - a decade ago the launch of diversity and inclusion programs (D&I) were met with skepticism within many corporate environments. There were many questions asked like “What was their purpose?”, “How does that make money?”, “If we can spend on that, why not my project?”. However as it has had chance to prove its value, D&I may be a shining light example for the rise of soft-skills in corporate environments, and D&I has done a valued job of demonstrating the value diversity can have. During my original coffee conversation with Noah and David, David said that D&I has had a big impact. He has seen what the influence of changing just one person in a group can have on affecting outcome. He’s right, traditionally US enterprise has been dominated by white males, while representing a group of employees and customers who were, and are growingly diverse. Luckily there now exist many examples that diversity will to improve a product through better representation; but until recently corporate cultures fought diversity as difference from the standard. Companies should consider that they are working with a workforce and consumer base who appreciate the results diversity brings to the table. To increase the power of D&I in your business, consider several axises when considering group make up like gender, race, pronouns, social-economic, domain, age, geo and general identity. Additionally apply your learning to how you engage your consumers in relation to your brand. 
• Establish Familiarity - We’ve heard the old term “boys’ club” as a derogatory reference to power cliques. There is a fair amount we could talk about them, and their damage to inclusivity and shared equity; but I want to just focus on one aspect the boy’s club from its power position, while temporarily disregarding its earned negativity. Though they are only inclusive to “boys”, they do possess a powerful mechanism. This mechanism can be abstracted and applied to enable your culture, so let’s talk about it. Boys’ clubs provide value to their members including shared wisdom, feeling of belonging, shared norms, and they revolve around comradery generated through activity, aka familiarity. Members spend time together, share space together, play golf or tennis together. It becomes a powerful experience, and changes members' behavior. Instead of discussing something at work, often members will choose to wait to engage in a conversation, until they are back together at the club. They become an operating unit of sorts. This is interesting in that often this connection spans the individual companies to a conglomerate of partnerships and business networks. This approach over the years evolved and extended to no less than create the blended definition of a gentleman. Any gentleman could travel from one town or state to another, and be welcomed as a guest in another powerful (inclusive to them) network. In contemporary times this scheme rightfully has a negative connotation. It is obvious the negative impact to women, people of color or anyone who wasn’t affluent enough to belong. This collective gentlemen’s network was the impenetrable castle wall built on familiarity, shared purpose, and class. Boys’ clubs exist because everyone inside the castle agrees with the overt and understated circumstances. In this way it is also a great analogy for the danger of powerful organizational constructs. Win-lose scenarios have been proven to be less optimal in functioning economies, especially when the resource we are extracting is “creativity”. Win-lose is usually bested by more expansive win-win strategies. So let us not adopt too much from the boys’ club example, other than the power of familiarity and shared norms. The learnings from this are that familiarity is powerful, and helps to establish group norms. It is also important to stage win-win environments that create familiarity across a diverse group of actors.

LET LEADERS...LEARN

Leaders lead. Often it is the corporate leadership that initiates, assigns, and runs culture change. However, it is important to also realize that progress may be threatening to leadership. When defining objectives, note that the process of exploring culture change, and authentic feedback from employees and customers, could feel threatening to leadership. We discussed how culture removes risk, establishes power, and reinforces similarity. Good authentic culture change is going to attack that status quo. It is going to make those who lead, control and manage consciously and subconsciously uncomfortable. This further supports the value chain concept discussed above, but it is also important to allow leaders to learn. Formally working with leadership to understand the effects of change and how it will make them feel will go a long way to righting this potential problem. 

DON’T OBJECTIFY CULTURE

Culture change is not a project, and it has no win associated with it. We’ve discussed how culture is an indirect byproduct of corporate activity, and thus it in itself will not deliver a big win directly. It is not a scope that can be tasked out as a launch event. Although planning and execution are important. It is the ongoing outcome of better understanding and results that demonstrate how the company has evolved their goals, inter-dynamics, diversity, training, and personnel. I recommend and applaud companies who choose to work to improve their culture, every company should; but consider that culture is the outcome of all projects, and that culture strategy has to be intertwined with the direct effect of corporate execution. 

Let me give you one last example. Consider a brand who wants to create a culture that is more customer-centric. They could launch culture campaign internally and amp up the employees around being more customer focused. Or, instead they could develop programs that incrementally puts all of their workers in immersive relationships with their customers, physically meeting them and interacting. Further more the company could spend time with their workers to understand them, how the experience impacted them, capture their ideas that were sparked from the experience, and let them sign up for their next engagement. We won’t evaluate the costs, or chance of success in this example here; but hopefully it demonstrates using direct controllable action, in the course of the company’s work, can improve how connected consumers feel to your brand. This approach would equally have a profound effect on company culture, and creativity. All without streamers, spirit wear, or box lunches.

Thanks for reading and look for future articles on “The Human Side of Transformation”.

"The Human Side of Transformation" Links:

1) What is Culture

2) Touring the Past

3) The Objective of Culture

4) Influence of Leadership

5) Individualism in Culture

6) Moment of Shared Wisdom

7) Virtualizing Culture

8) Freedoms and Boundaries