Bridging the Culture Chasm
Naresh Malik, Founding Partner at CoSuccess
What exactly is company culture? It shows up daily in articles, feeds, and multiple conversations like these:
· Half of tech workers call their work environment ‘toxic’ (Dec 4, 2018 (https://www.bizjournals.com/bizwomen/news/latest-news/2018/12/half-of-tech-workers-call-their-work-environment.html)
· Only 15% of CEOs say their corporate culture is where it needs to be (https://taxandbusinessonline.villanova.edu/resources-business/infographic-business/disengaged-employees-cost-too-much-company-culture-and-collaboration-increase-productivity.html)
· Only 30% of American workers were engaged (https://news.gallup.com/businessjournal/162953/tackle-employees-stagnating-engagement.aspx)
Despite the array of articles and the constant focus on culture at work it’s still hard to get our arms around it. During my career most companies had a cultural change or transformation program costing millions of dollars. However, the results are often intangible in the eyes of employees and difficult to quantify in terms of business impact. And yet, most executives and employees would agree that company culture is an essential part of any organization’s health and success. It’s like the air we breathe to thrive and to excel at work. Most leaders would also agree that it’s hard to measure or manage in any predictable manner as evidenced by the articles above. There are just too many variables. How do we get a better handle on managing culture, so it has a more predictable impact? I believe we need to do 3 things differently.
First, recognize that multiple elements influence culture and focus on the ones that can be managed. One of these is team interactions. But it receives insufficient attention. The reality is that organizations are largely focused on the two extremes: ‘personal development at the individual level’ and the big nebulous cloud of ‘company culture’. The space in between is the culture chasm. This is the space where teams thrive or strive. It’s teams that bridge the chasm between the individual employees and the collective behaviors of the organization. Teams are the essential builds blocks of any organization and its culture. By focusing on team behaviors and interactions we can get our arms around culture more effectively.
Second, empower business leaders with the tools, data and analytics for them to understand team behaviors, how they influence culture, and in turn, success. As the saying goes what gets measured, gets done — or, at least, drives a change in thinking and a level of improvement. This is another element of the culture chasm — the lack of attention to measurable data on team behaviors to bridge the gap between individual performance and the data from employee surveys. The tools for team analytics exist or can be adapted but we need the discipline to use them consistently and to share the data, so teams can recognize themselves in the mirror. Agreed all things can’t be measured precisely, especially when it comes to collective human behaviors but it’s better than just working on a hunch about what makes an effective team.
Third, teams need to measure, track and practice the desired team behaviors as a habitual team health-check. It’s similar to exercising at the gym on a regular basis — waiting until you feel unwell may be too late. We also recognize that exercising 10 hours once a month doesn’t work either. So why do we have one or two-day intensive personal development trainings once a year in the workplace? Instead, it needs to be an integral part of daily working.
We need to look at culture in the workplace with a new lens in order for employees to thrive with the uncertainty, the complexity and the ever-increasing pace of change in today’s world. We first need to build ‘great teams’ before we can build great products and transformational business models. We tend to treat team culture as a soft social science and there are too many variables that are difficult to grasp when we try to fix culture. We can achieve greater business impact if we focus on teams as the building blocks of company culture and place more confidence in the tools and data that provide visibility into team behaviors and performance. We need to build and coach teams more holistically by considering employees’ behavioral preferences as much as their functional skills. We need to enable team leaders with leveraging the diversity of behavioral strengths more effectively and by helping teams be more aware of their collective traits. In addition, we need the discipline to use the tools and metrics on a regular basis as part of our daily business and work habits.
At CoSuccess we are using tools for data insights with our clients to help them bridge the gap between individual engagement, team performance and a healthy company culture. We live the fact that it’s great teams that build great products. It’s time now to empower good teams with tools and data insights to become Great Teams.
About the Author:
Naresh is an experienced business leader accomplished at pulling together high performing teams to build and scale new technology ventures. He has held senior international roles at corporations such as Cisco, IBM, Philips and at Silicon Valley startups. The theme in his career has been one of navigating market transitions with customers, products, partners, technologies and disruptive business models. All his roles required the management of change where success depended on building transformational teams. Naresh has channeled this passion and experience into the founding of CoSuccess with his partners. CoSuccess helps business leaders to enable the true potential of great teams and to build a culture where collaboration is a core organizational capability. Naresh graduated from the University of Oxford and earned his MBA from City University Business School, London.
