Why we work and serve

Yesterday, I met with beautiful people at two of my favorite organizations. I am still on a high today.

My first stop was at Vega Factor. It’s co-founders, Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor, are the brains behind Primed to Perform, a book that has started to revolutionize how organizations are led. Using social science, the authors explain how to measure and improve performance (and ethical) culture. It’s all about the people, all about the employees, and you can feel it as you walk through the halls of Vega Factor: the shiny eyes don’t lie.

And then I visited with Claude Silver at VaynerMedia. Claude is the company’s Chief Heart Officer. It’s an unusual title but there is nothing ordinary about VaynerMedia and its founder Gary Vaynerchuk. Together, Gary and Claude are building a “honey empire”, an organization that will win by doing the right thing and by truly putting people first. They are obsessed with creating a safe work environment because they understand the conditions necessary for employees to do their best work. Claude and Gary extend trust first. They assume positive intent. They believe in the human potential. And in so doing, they are creating a wonderful culture.

I am in awe of these two organizations. One instinctively knows what to do and the other has developed a framework allowing everyone else to build a highly performing and highly ethical organization. They are a gift that we should all gladly accept and share.

Play, purpose and potential

Today is my quarterly “connect meeting” with my boss.

We sit down and discuss how things are going. It is meant to be more than an evaluation of my performance against objectives. The objectives themselves are up for discussion.

More importantly, it is an opportunity for me to reflect on why I go to work, to identify my drivers, and to adjust as necessary. My goals are:

  • To remove inertia at all costs. If I don’t know why I’m doing something, I must stop doing it immediately.
  • To remove economic and emotional pressures to the extent possible. Am I doing something simply because others expect me to do it or because my bonus is tied to the task? When there is no other purpose, this type of work rarely benefits the organization.
  • To maximize my sense of play, purpose and potential. I want to craft a job so exciting that when I go to bed at night I am looking forward to getting up the next morning. A job where I can try things, where failure is considered learning, where I help others and grow in the process.

Come to think of it, these connect meetings are filled with play, purpose and potential.

Programs and culture

When the Ethics & Compliance Initiative (ECI) published the findings of its 2007 National Business Ethics Survey, it identified two drivers reducing ethical risks in organizations: a well-implemented program and a strong ethical culture.

Ten years later, I regularly meet with colleagues working in large national or multinational organizations that do not have an enterprise risk management (ERM) process in place. When I ask them how they identify risks, I get blank stares. “How do you decide what training to provide, what processes to put in place, what controls to enhance?” More blank stares. ERM is the foundation, the starting point of any well-implemented program.

ECI was clear in 2007: a strong ethical culture has a greater influence on reducing risk only when we have a well-implemented program in place.

With the news full of corporate scandals pointing to a bad culture, we all want to work on improving our culture. But perhaps it’s time we go back to basics and work on our programs.

Culture is an outcome of our processes.

Give, then ask.

I believe that the E&C community operates on an open source model.

We freely share with each other our policies, training, communications, audit protocols, investigative and disciplinary guidelines, etc.

We give, give and give again.

Yet I find that we could do more.

How?

By asking.

Too often, we resist the urge to ask for help. Worse, we don’t even think of asking.

And so we reinvent the wheel at a slow pace, repeating mistakes made by others and wasting precious resources.

It’s time to fully leverage the generosity of our community.

Teaching business ethics

Today is an academic day for me. I am presenting at Bentley University in the afternoon and teaching at UConn in the evening.

In many fields of study, the role of the teacher is to impart knowledge on her students. We expect English and math students to learn facts about these topics.

With business ethics, my aim is different. I seek to influence behavior.

I teach to move my students along the ethical leadership spectrum, from ethically unaware (in some situations) to ethical leaders. I teach that culture is an outcome, that it can be measured and improved. I teach about organizational integrity because personal integrity is not enough.

My quizzes and tests cannot measure my success. The real tests will be administered when my students enter the workforce. Will they recognize the ethical dilemma? Will they make the right decision? Will they implement it in a way that inspires others to do the right thing?

I don’t expect for a second that all my students will ace these real-life tests.

I can only hope that some will, some of the times.

And that it’ll make a difference.

Performance tax

The jerk we don’t fire.

The metrics distracting from the real work.

The third approval on an expense requisition.

The sales bonus that’s not in the best interest of the customer.

Communications focused on “what” and “how” but not on “why”.

They all impose a tax.

On our compliance.

On our business.

On our culture.

Joyful work

How we do things matters just as much as what we do.

We must carefully choose what we do if we don’t want to waste time on meaningless activities.

And we must carefully choose how we do these things to maximize our performance. Do our processes allow people to try new things and to fail? Do employees see how their work contributes to the end-result? Is the work allowing colleagues to grow? Are we careful to remove unnecessary emotional and financial pressures? Can people question the process?

It’s not enough to simply question what we do. Of course it feels good when we stop doing something that needn’t be done. But still greater satisfaction comes from joyful work.

This is post 300!

Culture bugs

I often say that culture is an outcome of our processes. I first read about this concept in a 2016 HBR article and it made a deep impact on me.

Today I read about this concept in a Fast Company article featuring Asana, a workplace-productivity management company. Asana received a perfect rating on Glassdoor and is among Glassdoor’s Top 10 Best Places to Work in 2017. The company was also named one of Entrepreneur magazine’s best workplace cultures of 2017.

How did Asana get there? Here’s an extract from the article:

“We decided to treat culture as a product,” Rosenstein says.

He explained that instead of looking at culture as something that “just happens,” he and his cofounder realized that culture was actually something that needed to be carefully designed, tested, debugged, and iterated on, like any other product they released.

This means that representatives from all areas of the company meet regularly to reassess Asana’s values and design new ways to incorporate those values into every process at the company. Once a new process is “shipped,” an intense period of user feedback begins.

“We actively survey people anonymously, and during one-on-ones, we ask what’s working well and what isn’t working well. Based on that information, we go back to the company and say, here’s what we heard, and here’s what we’re doing to do about it,” says Rosenstein.

In fact, every quarter, the entire company takes a full week off from business to road map corporate goals for the future. Many of these goals are business-related, but culture-related reflection is heavily encouraged.

When problems are brought to the table, Rosenstein says that management is quick to address the issues. Asana even has a name for these issues–“culture bugs”–and it seeks to squash them as quickly as bugs in the codebase of any other product.

Many organizations see it as their obligation to offer employee benefits like vacation, health care, retirement, and disability.

But what about offering a great culture?