Is Your “Great Culture” All Sizzle and No Steak?

Or maybe all hat and no cattle?

I get it. It’s the age of social media.?Everyone on every platform is living their best life, all the time, with no FOMO and just the slightest (!) shortage of patience for the different-thinking fools who are screwing everything up. ?Taking it all in with a Costco-sized serving of salt is just basic media literacy. But it’s fouling up our ability to converse intelligently about many topics, not least of which is organizational culture.?

I don’t want to name names, but there’s this one social media platform that focuses on business and networking. You know, Linking professionals? Maybe you’ve heard of it. Anyhoo, since it’s where people go to talk about work, the my-best-life phenomenon manifests there as things like new roles, amazing conferences, terrific leadership, humble(bragged) recognition, end-all expertise, and – most important for our topic of the moment – outstanding organizations.

“So fortunate to be part of the collaborative culture at Pop-Corp.”

“Leadership at Pop-Corp really gets it.”

“At Pop-Corp we all just know we work better together.”

You’ve probably seen tons of stuff like this too.?On one level, I love it. Having worked on corporate culture in general and management culture in particular for two decades, I feel like I have a more complete understanding than most of the tangible ways in which the right kind of culture benefits both employer and employee. It does my heart good to see people recognizing the importance of culture and talking about companies that do it well. And I’m cheering for Pop-Corp, wherever they may be.

But… it’s just that… I’m not exactly clear on what many of these posts are talking about.?Often, I’m not sure they are either. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to cast doubt on the veracity of their positive experiences.?Perhaps, given the social media my-best-life phenomenon, I should. But setting that aside and taking the posts at face value, so often the greatness being described seems… nebulous and un-quantifiable… heavy on form but light on substance… like a whole lot of je ne sais quoi with no quoi anywhere to be found.

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Does that mean it’s not happening??No.?Are these people lying? ?Almost definitely not. All experiences are valid for the individual having them. But while overgeneralized promotion does help drive awareness of the importance of getting culture right, it can muddy the waters around how to actually do it.?With so many leaders and advisors rightly interested in making culture better even as what it is and how to change it remain elusive, this plethora of reverse vaguebooking adds some problematic logical leaps to an already chaotic arena.

First, it accepts objective reporting on subjective concepts. ?Can we really trust people to recognize and report objectively on the quality of organizational culture in the abstract? Personally, I’m not sold on the idea that every claim of “my company is getting it right” can be taken factually.?So-and-so from Pop-Corp says their company’s culture is really good. Other leaders and influencers believe it, and suddenly everyone is trying to copy what Pop-Corp is doing. But if the people giving the rave reviews and the people trying to improve things don’t share the same definition of “good,” then I may hate what you love, and/or rail against the very thing you think is an improvement. It’s a recipe for confusion, frustration, and wasted effort – especially when you think about differences between companies, and the scale at which culture initiatives attempt to make changes.

Second, it confuses opinion with fact.?Sometimes we do agree on what’s “good,” at least in vague terms: collaboration is better than infighting, transparency is better than secrecy, and so forth. But that doesn’t mean that because someone thinks Pop-Corp is, say, collaborative or transparent, that it actually is.?Maybe I’m pushing rope here – after all, our social-media-infused, survey-happy business culture has deeply conflated objective truth with big-crowd consensus .?But even so, if you were considering open-heart surgery, I think you’d prefer to sort through the diverging opinions of three conflicting cardiologists rather than base your course of action on the nearly unanimous vote of five thousand laypeople.?Rarely do posts or surveys about culture make reference to any expertise behind the opinions. When they do, it’s most often in a sort of “I’ve been around and seen a lot” kind of way. Experience helps, to be sure, but with it comes the question of context. “It’s the cleanest sewer I’ve fallen down yet” sounds like a comic strip punch line, but “it’s the most effective management team I’ve ever worked for” seems surprisingly credible.?How can we be sure they’re that different?

Third, it confuses goodness with happiness. ?If we can’t ask people whether culture is “good,” and we can’t trust them to accurately recognize what’s happening inside it, surely we can suss out cultural goodness by noticing how happy people are, right? ?Not so fast.?Culture does increase satisfaction, but that doesn’t mean it appears in satisfaction survey scores. ?(Poof. Brain exploded? Sorry. Bear with me here.) The most flexible, inclusive, productive cultures – those with elements like clear expectations, firm accountability, employees feeling heard, and similarly positive Gallup Q-12-ish characteristics – do produce engagement and satisfaction over the long term. But, they can be tremendously frustrating and unsatisfying in the short term. To wit: holding me accountable to clear goals and making it known that you’ll listen to my opinions wins the long-term engagement marathon, but giving me latitude with vague, easy objectives and promising that you won’t listen to the distasteful opinions of my coworkers takes the short-term satisfaction cake – almost every time. ?That’s why reports of satisfaction are difficult to interpret. (Still stuck on bulk feedback? Try running a satisfaction survey at a cult, or reading some fake five-star reviews from your favorite auto dealership or Amazon product .) In life, happiness may be everything; in crowdsourced, digitized, semi-anonymous feedback, it doesn’t always mean much.

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As we continue to extol the unquantifiable virtues of culture as invisible phenomena, we make it awfully easy to confuse cause with effect, truth with opinion, and form with substance. Culture isn’t all in the eye of the beholder! We’re talking about a set of systemically habituated behaviors that dictate how the entity is run, day in and day out. It’s a topic that has been studied over decades. Right and wrong answers exist, but they look confusingly different in different contexts to anyone not ultra-clear on what they’re observing.?And there’s no guarantee people can perceive culture accurately. It doesn’t appear just because people think or say it’s there (let's stop acting as though good culture works like Beetlejuice , for heaven’s sake!), and it doesn’t correlate with happiness or popularity.

Which leaves us… where, exactly? For starters, in need of less social media humblebragging and more analytical thinking.?You can talk to a management culture guy like me, and get a bunch of specialized, highly flexible resources on how to run a company . You can talk to a DE&I expert and drill down on that particular area of culture – though I’d argue that links back to management culture too .?And for any other specific area you can think of, you can probably find a few experts with some information that might help.?My personal bias is to lean toward information that adapts to different contexts and takes a decidedly un-survey-based approach to measurement, and to make sure your management culture is adaptable enough to allow anything else you’re planning to succeed .?But whatever you do, please, please, let’s stop all the highfalutin and highly nonspecific glamorizing, and start talking about what’s actually going on. That’s the only way we’ll ever get better at it.

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