Day 91 — Management series 4/7: “Culture”
How do you enhance performance of your team? How do you make sure the team can function well when you’re on vacation? Here’s my quick answer for you: By building a great culture. A great culture guides people of what to do, when to do, whether there’s someone overseeing or not; a great culture also brings people together and work together. In today’s article in Management series, I’m going to share my knowledge around organization culture in the following structure:
- What is culture
- Why is culture important
- How to enhance culture
“With the right people, culture, and values, you can accomplish great things. “ — Tricia Griffith
What is culture
What is culture? Some says, culture is what you do when no one is looking. From a command and control standpoint, that seems to make sense. On the other hand, according to Harvard Business Review, unlike common belief that culture as a unifying force that brings people together to work productively, “culture is something people use, often strategically, to achieve goals”.
To me, culture is not only how people do things, but also how people interact with each other; As HBR pointed out, “it can also provide a basis upon which people contest and counter certain ideas and values while accepting other values associated with a particular cultural context.” In other words, are people genuinely helping each other? Or they’re just using each other? Do they care about each other? Or they create alliance simply for common interest, or their own interest?
The truth is, there’s only so much one person can hide themselves from others. When there’s pressure, deadline, scarcity, or urgency, people show their true color, in a way which exposes who they really are. This phenomenon can also apply to organization culture. People might seem nice on a surface level, but when it comes to promotion, raise, or even just a high priority project, you get to know how people really think or care about each other, and what they would do to each other.
That being said, a good culture serves as a morale compass in group thinking to help guide individuals for their best behaviors. A good culture also makes people believe in the team value and feel comfortable and motivated to contribute more because of the predictable social recognition as a reward.
Why is culture important
Why is culture important? I think a better question should be: What would it be if we don’t have a good culture? What are some damage could happen, things we would lose, if the culture is bad?
Impact of Toxic Culture
In the HBR article “Keep Your Company’s Toxic Culture from Infecting Your Team”, it indicates that the impact of a toxic culture: A non-inclusive environment makes people feel that they can’t bring their full selves to work, their productivity and team morale is low, and they could even quit the jobs because of it; A hyper-competitive environment that pressure people to work too hard and not providing work/life balance, could easily cause compromised intelligence, poor decision making, and ultimately a hit to the bottom line. When people feel pressure to overwork, employees start to show burnout, illness, even death out of exhaustion in some cases.
Effect from a Good Culture
On the bright side, good culture really helps team performance and create better outcomes for the firm; and that’s probably one of the most common questions that senior leaders ask themselves how to achieve. Luckily, we have a clear answer: Google spent 2 years studying 180 teams, and the most successful ones shared 5 traits, and 3 out of 5 of them are indicators of a good culture:
- Meaning: The work has personal significance to each member.
- Impact: The group believes their work is purposeful and positively impacts the greater good.
- Psychological Safety: A culture where managers provide air cover and create safe zones so employees can let down their guard.
What is means to the team is that everyone feels safe to take risks, voice their opinions, and ask judgment-free questions. As a result. people don’t feel fear of seeming incompetent, they don’t feel the need to hold back questions or ideas, and that’s where great product direction is set, innovative ideas are generated, people feel excited, team morale is boosted, execution can be done well.
“The culture of a workplace — an organization’s values, norms and practices — has a huge impact on our happiness and success.“ — Adam Grant
Great talents choose great culture
A lot of companies are playing “finite game”, trying to gain competitive edge against the competition and “win” in EPS, ROE, ROA, EBITDA, etc. It makes sense from a tradition business school training standpoint. Short term, quantifiable results are what shareholders care about. However, if you look at the top companies on Fortune 100 list in the past decade, the companies that are growing fast and continue to scale are the companies who emphasize on intrinsic value: company culture, instead of focusing on numbers and quarterly earning.
In the book “Start with Why”, author Simon Sinek pointed out that leading companies play “Infinite Game” by focusing on “doing the right things”, so that they can attract top talents who also want to do the right things. Simon described “Infinite Game” as focusing on great intrinsic value, fostering the right culture, instead of chasing artificial market ranking (e.g. #1 in this sector in 2017). It’s not hard to imagine that top talents want to be in an environment that has a good culture, where they can work comfortably without worrying about political attack or social traps.
Good companies know the importance of culture, and invest heavily in it for keeping great talents, staying competitive in the knowledge worker market, hence naturally produce better results than their competitors. That being said, when company culture is not one of the top priorities of an organization, when demonstrating quarterly performance is more important than mid/long term result from investing in people, skillful talents naturally leave the company to find a better place with better culture.
With that said, how can we foster a good culture, so that we can attract top talents, and people are encouraged to share their great ideas, and toxic employee feel obliged to demonstrate their best behaviors? Let’s take a look in the following part: Building/Enhancing culture.
How to build/ enhance culture
The process of creating a good culture is quite similar to plant a tree. In the very beginning, with all the effort you put in, you don’t see much results. However, throughout time, with consistent effort, the little twig will grow in to a strong, tall and reliable tree. With that said, here are some simple guideline we can follow to build a good culture:
For the people, by the people
Culture is created by a group of people who’s involved in the organization. The way the think, feel, say, do, and interact with each other, form the culture of the organization. Therefore, in order to really makes it work, the first step is to identify the enthusiasts who has strong interest in driving better culture, and provide them a platform to voice their opinion and share their thoughts.
After the platform is setup, the next step, according to HBR, is to Form a coalition: “Once you’ve done the ground work, it’s time to agree to make lasting changes to your team culture. With one or two others (possibly including your boss), plan a series of meetings where people have an opportunity to talk about what’s important to them at work, what they want and need.”
Foster great culture
Although culture change is more effective to be driven by the staff instead of top-down approach from the high up, as leaders, we can also do something about it, so that people feel comfortable making positive changes. For example, leaders can create platforms for people to voice their opinion, share their values, and exchange inspirations and ideas, so that the positive momentum can keep going. For example, at Instagram, they implement the idea of “Design visits”: their culture carrier will travel to different places to understand local culture, and share their values and best practices both to the local teams, but also bring it back to the HQ to consider formalize the great ritual or values they learned.
“The role of a creative leader is not to have all the ideas; it’s to create a culture where everyone can have ideas and feel that they’re valued.” — Sir. Ken Robinson
Fix bad culture
Given culture is truly driven by the individuals, we’ll need to first identify those toxic individuals in order to fix a toxic culture. When we think about corporate culture, according to the book “The Secret Handshake”, there are 4 types of people in terms of political aptitude:
- Purist — believes in getting ahead through hard work.
- Team Player — believes in getting ahead by working well with others and participating primarily in politics that advance the goals of the group.
- Street Fighter — believes the best way to get ahead is through the use of rough tactics.
- Maneuverer — believes in getting ahead by playing political games in a skillful, unobtrusive manner.
It might seem obvious that first we need to work on the problem that “Street Fighter” creates. When they use “difficult tactics” to pressure other people to get what they want, and the bad behaviors are allowed by the management team, it just clearly shows that the management team doesn’t prioritize team culture. There needs to be clear measure to stop these corporate bullies.
Next, we’ll need to evaluate the impact from “Maneuverer’s” game. If they’re making unjust career progress compare to others due to their skillful manipulation, it will drive away highly competent team members, especially the “Purist”, who puts heart and soul into work and didn’t get rewarded in a fair way.
Last but not lease, recognizing and rewarding Team Player’s effort will bring immediate effect, especially in a highly collaborative environment, where inter-dependency is the key to success. This approach not only shows how management team cares about team culture, but also give everyone a clear indication that it’s not a place for street fighter, maneuverer to progress with their toxic tactics.
Extreme Measure
Creating/ maintaining a good culture takes time and effort. If a team/ organization cannot organically, democratically encourage the good behaviors and reduce toxic tactics from happening, then eliminating the bad apples is necessary to foster a good culture. For example, When a Google engineer wrote a sexist manifesto, Google fired the person because the company wants to protect the good culture in respect of diversity. After UBER faced accusations of a culture of sexism and sexual harassment, UBER’s original founder and CEO Travis was outed from the company.
“How do you stay ahead of ever-rising customer expectations? There’s no single way to do it — it’s a combination of many things. But high standards (widely deployed and at all levels of detail) are certainly a big part of it.” — Jeff Bezos
Conclusion
- Culture is more than slogan, culture is the guideline of how individual behaves, and how behaviors are rewarded or condemned.
- Team culture determines their performance. High performing team thrives because of the good team culture.
- To create a good culture, start with finding and help the enthusiast, and take clear measure on handling the bad apples.
Have you seen some effective way to build a great culture? What are their secrets? I’m eager to learn from you.
ABC. Always be clappin’.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author. They do not represent current or previous client or employer views.
