Obviously Words Matter, Context Matters, Even Word Order Matters

Last week I wrote about renaming the customer-facing functions and aligning tightly with the customer and sales leaders to form the MACS group (Marketing, Accounts, Customer, Sales). This week, my partner in the DEEP (DEsign, Engineering, Product) group, Shailesh Hegde, wrote about his experience aligning as teams and a company in this post Alignment Is Easier to Say than Do. Management moves and emotions spread naturally.

It's making a big difference in how we interact and react to each other. There still is some need to differentiate between departments, so I started saying MACS Marketing or MACS Sales, which brings us together before defining a subgroup. This reminded me of how people referred to themselves in my first company, Dentsu, where I worked at the headquarters office in Tokyo in my first job out of graduate school decades ago. The header image is the logo from back then. I wore that logo on a pin on my lapel, and people would approach and ask about working there. It was the #2 place in Japan to work at the time.

Japanese people usually identify outside in, so my colleagues would introduce themselves like this: I am Dentsu's 7th Sales Division Manager Newton Erik. It is a lot of words and does not roll off the tongue, but the listener sure gets a lot of context. Company, division, function, family name, given name. I as an American would have said "I am Erik Newton, a manager at Dentsu." Given name, family name, function, company (and no group, oops). Almost the same? No, really different, and decades later I can understand how.

In Japan company was the majority of our professional identity, and we referred to the company first. Every time we introduced ourselves, we reminded ourselves how important the company and thereby our team was. The company's success provided us all our livelihoods and the money to take care of ourselves and our families.

In the US, we refer to ourselves first. It's the way Americans are wired. We have a constitution that defines our unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are steeped in the individual protections of the Bill of Rights. Unchecked, that can lead to selfish, self-centered behavior.

Words matter, context matters, and even word order matters. Each time we communicate we get a chance to remind our listener what matters to us and how we intend to proceed. That's why we aggregated the divisions into additions at Hubilo. And we love how it changes the dialogue and teamwork.

At Hubilo our number one culture code or value is "Hubilo first." It is probably used by many companies and can be an empty slogan for some. What it means to me is that we push ourselves to think more broadly about what is best for the company, for the customers, our investors, for our group, and for ourselves. If MACS Sales or MACS Customer can make better use of budget that is entrusted to my care, great, let's do that. It's useless to succeed as an individual and fail as a group.

I keep the Hubilo culture codes in a frame on my desk, and I talk about them every day. They will play a big role in how we evaluate performance on the MACS team and build Hubilo's growth and success.

Add a comment below on how you balance teamwork, identity, and autonomy in your org or group.