Lever II – What
A Conscious Culture
Wake up. True change demands action, not passive acceptance. There is deep beauty in being strong, in being fearless. There are no mountains high enough. Be awake. Be mindful. Create the life you want to live and live that life, not the ones other people want you to conform to. Be the change. With each action, each thought, each word, each intention.
— Angela Davis
I WAS IN MAINE THIS SUMMER, visiting a lifelong friend and her daughter. My friend likes to take naps. During one of them I took her daughter and mine to a local thrift store, left them there, and took myself out on an ice cream date. Ice cream store culture is familiar to me – I grew up eating and working in one on Cape Cod (the infamous 4 Seas Ice Cream.) The shop I found on this recent day took me right back to that summer job.
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Organizational culture is like the air we breathe. We don’t always feel its presence until it changes.
It was cool inside. On the walls hung family portraits, and it smelled like sweet, fresh, homemade ice cream. Even more than those material similarities, what I noticed was the culture of the business. The layout was a bit confusing, so when I entered, I stood around, unsure if they waited on the tables or if I ought to order from the register. White I was hovering the owner caught my eye and asked, “Would you like to enjoy a treat here or take one with you?” He was inviting, efficient, and kind. I told him two scoops of the double chocolate for here would delight me. The chocolate was on the other side of the store, so he asked an employee to get it. She seemed willing and happy, and double-checked my order politely. I was caught by the ease and efficiency of these two. What I felt was the carefree bliss of a child, out of school for the summer, spending her precious pennies on an ice cream cone. As I sat and enjoyed my cone, I continued to watch this little team. It was clear that the way they did things carried the energetic ease that I felt.
Maybe you’ve had a customer experience like this one – you enter a store and can immediately feel something about it. Sometimes those experiences are negative, maybe a sales-person is too pushy or a customer service agent a bit impatient, or maybe those experiences are positive, like the one I described. We call this feeling at work “culture” and it defines, simply, how we do things here.
Organizational culture is like the air we breathe. We don’t always feel its presence until it changes. It encompasses the way that things are done at an organization, and it impacts the feeling of a workspace, for customers and employees, in a big way, for two key reasons. First, organizational culture determines an organization’s ability to sustain its health over time via performance and results, and second, it shows employees and customers what the experience of working with that organization is like, whether the employees bring their best to their work. Culture is easy to break but hard to fix.
I’d like to start by addressing four factors that invariably create an unhealthy work culture. Notice if any of these traits are true of your organization, because they can point to some things that need to change.
Four Surefire Ways to Mess Up Your Culture
• Espouse one set of values while practicing another. You can have pretty, glossy values statements posted all over your organization’s walls, in the employee manual, and tattooed on every leader, but if your organization’s day-to-day practices fail to match these values, your employees and your costumers will notice. Your company will no longer be trusted. Take the manufacturing company that advertised a safe working environment but hadn’t updated their safety procedures to match their new equipment. This company’s actions didn’t match their stated values. Instead of feeling safe, employees got the message that what this company really valued were the increases in production that resulted from the new machinery. Act in accordance with your values, every time.
• Tolerate employees who fail to practice the organization’s stated values. Leaders don’t always initiate company culture, but they certainly contribute. I can’t tell you how often we’ve discovered pockets of managers within organizations who completely undermined the stated cultural values. Their employees knew it, their customers knew it, and even the managers involved knew it.
One organization that I worked with claimed in posters on the walls that their culture was one of “inclusion and relentless communication.” Yet this same company continuously rewarded a senior VP who almost always failed to involve his team, communicate accurate information, and practice partnership with any of his colleagues. No matter what the organization said about how they did things, this leader didn’t model it, and the employees’ faith and confidence in the culture was fragile.
Deal with your managers who haven’t bought in to the company culture. Hold them accountable and recognize (through compensation, training, or other means) the importance of their roles in creating company culture. Expect them to contribute positively and to embody the organizational culture in their everyday actions. If they can’t or won’t support the culture, replace them with someone who can and will.
• Have two cultures: One for customers and one for employees. Employee experiences are customer experiences. I had an experience with an airline attendant that showed what happens in an organization that fails to connect the dots between how they treat their employees and how they treat their customers.
My booked flight had been canceled, so I went to the customer service desk to get another booking. The agent, to quote her more or less, said, “Ma’am, I totally understand what I can do to fix this problem and get you where you want to go, but I’m not authorized to do those things. I suggest that you call the 1-800 number to see if the agent you reach has the authority to fix this for you.”
This agent clearly knew that treating me well as a customer mattered and that solving problems was her job. She wanted to help me, and she knew that her company promise was to help me. But the level of authority she was given limited her ability to help. The dissonance was astounding, and I felt bad for her, bad for me, and bad for the airline, which that day lost my trust as a costumer.
Treat your customers and your employees consistently.
• Assume that company culture will take care of itself. As I mentioned earlier, organizational culture appears as this nebulous, “felt” quality of an organization. As such, it can be easy for leaders to think that if they put the right ingredients into their organizations, a healthy culture will emerge. A company I worked with once had implemented some suggestions they had received about culture, including having beer kegs at work on Fridays and doing personality tests on all its employees. However, they failed to regularly discuss and demonstrate the qualitative elements of the culture they valued (informal professionalism, self-knowledge, work hard/play hard) in their day-to-day work, so employees found the leadership behavior to be inauthentic and rote.
Company culture is something that can be measured, learned, taught, and changed. I’ve often been called into an organization that’s transitioning from founder to growth stage, but the culture isn’t transitioning. Most companies start because someone has an idea or an invention, and they assemble an organization to bring it to the marketplace. The company forms itself around the personality habits and quirks of the founder, who is often more inventor than leader. Over time the culture of how they do things grows to emulate and reinforce how that founder or leader liked to do things. This may work in the early stages, but as people join the company the resultant accidental culture often becomes problematic. A founder who values innovation, for example, may not encourage a culture of consistency. A founder who rules by hierarchy alone may not encourage collaboration.
Deliberately deciding how you want to do things in your organization ensures that the culture you end up with serves your goals and mission. Culture is difficult to build, which is why it needs dedicated focus.
These four, sure-fire ways to mess up your company culture all have something in common. They each show a dissonance between the underlying beliefs of an organization and the day-to-day practices of an organization. Edgar Schein (1985), a noted theorist of organizational culture, has a taxonomy of terms that are quite helpful in diagnosing where these dissonances might occur.
In Schein’s framework, the most surface level of culture manifests itself in what he calls the artifacts of a company: things that can be seen and felt by an observer, such as facilities, offices, rewards and recognition, titles, policies, attire, slogans, creeds, and published mission/vision statements. Much press has been created in the past 20 years about company perks that all boil down to artifacts: on-site day care, coffee lounges, dry cleaning services, or nap rooms. While these perks seem meaningful to employees initially, research suggests that, in time, these external perks are less important than intrinsic rewards, such as success in a role, rich and fun connections with other people, feeling part of something important, and learning. “Nearly nine out of ten, or 86 percent, of Millennials (those between the ages of 22 and 37) would consider taking a pay cut to work at a company whose mission and values align with their own, according to LinkedIn’s latest workplace culture report,” according to CNBC (Meija 2018). While these perks are nice, company culture – that felt presence of an organization – runs much deeper.
Schein called the second level of organizational culture the professed values. Unlike a mission statement, these are the values expressed through the behaviors of the organization’s members. In an organization with healthy culture, professed values and the written company values are often similar. The professed values often lurk unnoticed, but they’re apparent in the way that an organization works. Whether implicit or explicit, those values become evident to employees during their work.
Underneath and informing the professed values are what Schein calls the tacit assumptions of the people in an organization. Team members, often unconsciously, tailor their actions to their tacit assumptions. These assumptions are sometimes called the unwritten rules of a company, and they explain why there can be paradoxical behaviors within the organization.
It’s often the tension between professed values and tacit assumptions that makes orientation and assimilation to a new company a slow and arduous process for new employees. During this time they are unwittingly working out the differences between what is professed and what is done, which informs the employees’ beliefs about what matters.
As an antidote to the negative examples above, here are three stories that showcase organizational cultures whose three levels are synchronized. In particular, look for these four elements: 1) leaders leading their organization’s culture in addition to the mechanics of the business, 2) values at the center, 3) integrity between how things are discussed with employees and how things are done with customers and clients, and 4) transparency, with purpose and no secrets.
• Story One: Good Customer Service. On a recent flight an error was made in my itinerary and I ended up in somebody else’s seat on a full plane. I was told to get off the plane, which was the last flight of the day, and walk back inside to the desk where they would remedy the situation. When I got to the desk, I was told the plane I’d just been on had left and that I would have to travel home the next day. I was unhappy about this. The representative who was helping me quickly noticed my agitation and made a call to the plane. She grabbed my paperwork, spoke privately to a colleague, and walked me back down the people carrier. In 10 minutes, I went from feeling annoyed and angry to feeling supported, seen, and cared for by the airline. I could see that the woman helping me was gratified at having been able to give me the assistance she did. She was able to do so because she was comfortable seeking assistance from a higher-up because she knew it was for my benefit as a customer.
• Story Two: Support and Appreciation. Years ago, I applied for a line of credit for my business. The first bank I approached was a large chain where we had all six of our family accounts. I was told that I needed my husband to co-sign for a business line of credit, even though he was uninvolved in the business. I declined because my husband had absolutely no affiliation with my business, and walked down the street to a then-new local bank. The manager invited me to a small room and asked how he could help. I told him my story, and he listened, making notes. I walked out with my first robust line of credit and a new bank, feeling supported, valued, and appreciated. The manager was clearly motivated to meet my needs, which was his mission. He had a solution, and he knew how to access it. He was empowered, had clear authority, understood how to get something done quickly, and empathized with what I needed as a future (and now very loyal) customer.
• Story Three: Collaboration, Information Sharing, and Empathy. A client of mine recently suffered a small car accident on her way to work. She was on her way to an important meeting and called her boss to say she was delayed because her car needed to be towed. Her boss immediately expressed concern for her welfare. “Was she hurt?” “Did she need help?” And then her boss provided reassurance that the meeting would be covered by her colleagues. Because of their team approach, my client wasn’t the only person in the know, and the meeting went off flawlessly. Collaboration, information sharing, and empathy were not only company values but actual company practices. When an emergency arose, the company was prepared to handle it.
These successes weren’t caused by employees’ stand-up desks, free movie passes, nap breaks, unlimited coffee supply, or other surface elements of culture. The people involved acted the way they did because they had been trained, encouraged, and indoctrinated into a culture that manifested its values, such as customer focus, accountability, team orientation, and problem solving. These employees understood, consciously or not, the central tenets of the organizations they worked for and knew how to do their work according to these tenets.
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Rather than focusing time and money on surface elements of company culture, leaders of Bravespace workplaces invest their resources in the development of people practices that sustain healthy culture.
Rather than focusing time and money on surface elements of company culture, leaders of Bravespace workplaces invest their resources on developing the people practices that sustain healthy culture. Usually this means spending time and money on training, communication, management, and leadership development. Instilling confidence and belief in the core values of an organization, and helping people to connect the dots between these values and the things they do every day, is what drives strong company culture. Here’s how to do it:
• Study your culture. As the felt quality of an organization, culture often lurks under the surface and takes explicit searching out. Remember that culture is driven by the beliefs, values, and assumptions held by the people who work there. These beliefs, values, and assumptions drive behavior. Look for symbols, rituals, actions, and behaviors, and ask what those tangible practices reveal about a company’s culture. This process should reveal both the natural strengths and weaknesses of the company.
Leadership teams who take the time to either measure their culture with a valid assessment tool, asking employees how they do things, or otherwise openly discuss the beliefs, values, and assumptions that drive behavior in their organization, can realistically assess the often invisible and ignored dimensions of culture that matter.
• Talk about culture. Whether you measure or simply try to name your culture, it’s important to engage every employee, to find out what they feel and notice about how the company does things. Since culture is a product of the shared beliefs and assumptions of employees, discussion about culture at all levels helps an organization to more specifically connect the dots between what they do today and how they want to be tomorrow. Dissonance between espoused beliefs and values and those in practice becomes a potent lever for change. It’s essential that all employees be engaged in these conversations, rather than just the team at the top, since change will require all employees to begin to think differently in order to act differently.
• Take focused action to change. Interestingly, most companies we work with want to start here, at this final step. Before change can happen, you need to know the root causes and the culture that exists. Revisit the previous steps.
Pick one to three things at a time to change that will make a difference in your organization’s culture. Focus allows all employees to practice new ways of doing things. Trying to consciously rewire tacit assumptions may not always work at first, but highlighting key practices and behaviors that express those assumptions does.
Here’s how one group of leaders does it. During their reflection, this team found that employees were often keeping silent as a result of pervasive low trust. The leaders wanted to grow the trust that existed in their workplace and create a less fearful culture. Together they committed to bring more heart-based work to how they accomplished things together, as well as how they led their teams. In working to build their new leadership team, they have successfully been able to target specific ways to walk their talk and create vulnerability-based trust at all levels. People can engage in ideological debate that’s healthy and constructive, which increases performance and job satisfaction.
Culture is the lifeblood of every organization.
For example, the leaders now start team meetings with a quick check-in on how people are feeling. They consciously share with one another the problems or challenges they’re facing, and the mistakes they’ve made. They also make it a point to share with the employees the reasons behind the decisions that have been made, practicing the transparency that leads to trust.
This team bravely examined their culture, talked to all their employees about their specific ideas and hopes, and were then poised and ready to act.
Culture is the lifeblood of every organization. It derives from the assumptions we make and the beliefs we hold, and it drives our actions. Bravespace workplace leaders consciously create a culture that mirrors and matches their values. Use the ideas below for action in your organization.
Next, in Chapter 10, we’ll examine Lever 3 for creating a Bravespace workplace, Where/When – Purposeful Design.
ACTIONS FOR CREATING BRAVESPACE WORKPLACES
A Conscious Culture
For Leaders or Business Owners
• Study your culture and put it into words.
• Measure your culture; there are a variety of effective tools in the marketplace.
• Share the results with employees and talk about what it means to them.
• Consider yourself a cultural petri dish: whatever grows inside of you will grow in your company. Do what you say you want done. Show up. Be real.
• Expect your leaders to walk the talk, and hold them accountable when they do things that are inconsistent with the culture.
• Share how you deal with your vendors and partners. Watch how they do things, and make sure that their culture and yours align.
For Employees
• Participate in culture assessments and be honest.
• Consider yourself a cultural ambassador: spread the word.
• Speak up when you see people acting in ways that undermine the culture.
• Think about what you do to contribute to your company’s cultural health.
For Human Resources or People Development (if they exist in your company)
• Find the right tool(s) so that your organization can measure regularly.
• Make it your job to keep culture in front of the leadership.
• Don’t think that you own the culture – it’s not yours alone.
• Examine how what you do represents your company’s culture.
• Make yourself more a cultural steward than a compliance officer.