“Rivers are easiest to cross at their source.” – Publilius Syrus
The high-performing raging jerk in your organization was once only a mildly impatient colleague who got away with his (or her) occasional snippy comments.
Bad behavior is easier to deal with early on.
The culture you want for your organization is years away.
It will take you months to develop the projects necessary to support the culture change.
But your next email, your next conversation, your next hallway encounter is only a minute away. Give it your complete attention. And then focus on the next minute. And then on the minute after that.
My grandfather used to say that “it’s with pennies that we make dollars.” Each action is building the culture. Make sure you are building the culture you want.
This post is the fourth in a series devoted to my reading notes (and thoughts) on the essays contained in The Culture Book, Volume 1. This “essay” is in the form of interviews of employees at WP Engine, a WordPress platform. Most of my notes are direct quotes from employees.
Everyone is responsible for culture. We all protect it like a dragon hoards its gold. We embrace it sacredly with every new hire, with every strategic decision. Culture is often the sole reason why we make a hire pass.
We have a culture budget. The largest portion is spent on company outings, happy hours and team meals. Nothing cements the bonds of a work friendship like good conversation and a beverage in a comfortable setting. The events with the most impact are certainly those that include more than one team, location, or department.
We like to ensure that our metric of success is directly tied to the beneficiary of our work. Nearly everything we do at work is for the benefit of others. All opportunities and all challenges have another person at the other end. Focusing on the needs of people first provides us wisdom, it provides us heart. We want to make sure that we never refer to Marketing as Marketing. Marketing is Lisa and Ryan and John.
Weekly cultural meetings are key to ensuring all offices remain in sync.
Find the things that matter, that are foundational to your organization, and talk about them all the time. Bring them up as often as you can. When you do this, the things that really matter become part of the company’s DNA.
Make culture about people. Do not make culture about culture.
You want to change the culture of your organization but senior leadership ignores you? Try a level lower.
Even at that level they won’t give you the time of day? Find a small business unit who is willing to try.
No luck there either? Start with your own team.
Don’t have one? Be the change.
No matter the circumstances, you control your mind and behavior. Start the culture change where you can.
Plateaus are a fact of life.
When working to improve their corporate culture, many leaders will face a plateau from the start. It will feel like they are walking in the plains with no mount or even hill in sight.
They ought to keep walking.
This post is the third in a series devoted to my reading notes (and thoughts) on the essays contained in The Culture Book, Volume 1. This essay is by Patty McCord, former Chief Talent Officer at Netflix.
Trying to build a culture by relying on values is a waste of time. Start with behaviors and demonstrate what you are looking for. Setting clear, concise priorities is one behavior critical to culture success. When words don’t match the actions (behaviors), you know you have a problem,
Hire for learning skills. Hire smart people who know how to learn. (Learning objectives do more for performance than performance objectives.) Companies that learn well have deliberate practices and rhythms around reflection. Leaders must insist that teams pause and reflect in order to maximize learning. Learning needs to be a prized behavior.
Companies need the ability to talk about hard things productively. It’s not enough to ask employees to speak up; managers need to know how to listen up.
90% of culture is paying attention to it. What you do every day and how you do it reflects your culture as it is.
This post is the second in a series devoted to my reading notes and thoughts on the essays contained in The Culture Book, Volume 1. This essay is by the team at Buffer, a social media management platform.
Radical transparency means that we proactively default to transparency. We don’t ask “Can we be transparent about this?” Instead, we ask “What could go wrong if we are transparent about this?” Calendars, financial data, statistics, etc. are shared with all employees. And a big chunk of that is also shared with the public.
Generally, transparency builds trust, which leads to better communication and teamwork, which leads to a better work environment, happier employees, and better results. Transparency with the public can also be very good for your brand and recruiting the right people.
We share our financial data with employees and the public because we believe that the dollars we spend tell a story about what we value.
When we can’t be transparent about something, we are very transparent about why we can’t be.
Some caveats about transparency:
For radical transparency to work, it has to be part of the culture:
This post is the first in a series devoted to my reading notes and thoughts on the essays contained in The Culture Book, Volume 1. The first essay is by Kim Malone Scott, author of Radical Candor.
Your ability to build trust with your direct reports determines the quality of your team culture. Good relationships with your direct reports affect the relationships they have with theirs. An organization’s culture is built one supervisor at a time, starting at the top.
Managers have 3 responsibilities:
How a manager fulfills these responsibilities will affect her relationships. And vice-versa. Do it well, and you build trust. Neglect it, and you destroy trust.
To practice radical candor you need to Care Personally and Challenge Directly. You must be willing to have uncomfortable conversations. Giving criticism, saying the hard things, is the duty of a leader and necessary for building a great culture. And remember that you can’t control other people’s emotions. Some will get emotional. The leader’s job is to meet emotion with compassion, to react with kindness.
And it’s a two-way street. Leaders create the space for direct reports to Challenge Directly as well. If direct reports believe it’s risky to share bad news, they’ll only share good news – or worse, make it up. When you invite criticism, remember not to get mad. Instead, get curious. Don’t run away from the discomfort. Try to understand how you can get better. Listen. And then, reward the candor by thanking your direct reports, by telling them what you will do about it, and by actually doing it.
There are so many definitions of corporate culture floating around that anyone should be excused for not being able to properly define it.
One of my favorite definitions goes like this: How things are really done around here. It’s simple, intuitive, and it highlights the sad reality that in many organizations we often say one thing and do another.
Today I ran across another definition that may be slightly superior: The behaviors we allow or tolerate in the workplace. It has all the benefits of the prior definition and adds an element of responsibility (or blame) on all employees. Anyone who tolerates bad behavior is partly responsible for the culture they live in.
Many E&C professionals are being asked by their C-suite how to change the culture of their organization. These leaders feel that culture is amorphous, random and magical. By defining culture as “the behaviors that the C-suite tolerates”, it should instantly create in their mind the path they need to take.
Whether they take it is another story.
Culture is simply an outcome of our processes.
Put another way, culture is an outcome of our habits.
Nearly 2,000 years ago, Epictetus would recommend that we break our bad habits by simply abstaining from the behavior for one day, then try for two days, and so forth until we’ve built a chain of days. And then the goal was not to break that chain.
Most leaders have a weakness that affects the culture. It could be a short temper, telling inappropriate jokes, a lack of transparency, procrastination, condescension, or worse. The way out is to resolve to correct these behaviors for one day, and then again the next day. To build a chain and then not to break it. As that chain grows stronger, so does the culture.
Hat tip to Ryan Holiday and today’s entry in The Daily Stoic.
The Ethical Leader 