4 books that will help you grow a thriving culture
Make time for some cultural studies that will optimize the way you work.
I learned long ago that being in the business of nurturing healthy and winning cultures requires a lot of hats. You’re a generalist leading from a place of strength and warmth, with a hefty set of hard and soft skills at your disposal.
But truth be told, if you are an employee of any business, culture is just as much your responsibility as it is everyone else’s. These four books have been some of my best teachers. They will coach you on how to foster healthy, intentional, and inclusive environments. Whether you lead culture, people, or from the seat of an individual contributor in your organization, these authors will expose you to a wide spectrum of useful skills, ideas, and philosophies that will make you better.
1. The Four Stages of Psychological Safety — Timothy R. Clark
If you decide only to read one of the books on this list, make it The Four Stages of Psychological Safety. Timothy R. Clark’s work should be required reading for anyone who is in the business of working with people and cultivating cultures (so that’s pretty much everyone). In less than 150 pages he puts together a practical framework that encompasses the power of diversity and inclusion, why it’s necessary for innovation, and maps out the culture prototype organizations must create to ensure healthy success.
Though highly practical, Clark’s approach also has an intuitive quality that acknowledges the human spirit, what makes our way of being so important, and ensures the best possible outcomes for innovation. Reading this book will challenge you to look inward, and as a leader, it will invite you to hold the tension of building environments that “increase intellectual friction while simultaneously decreasing social friction.” He says it best, “I’m inviting you to change. Change the way you view and treat humanity. The journey I take you on will create both joy and pain. We’re never quite ready for that, so the real question is: Are you willing?”
But truth be told, if you are an employee of any business, culture is just as much your responsibility as it is everyone else’s.
2. Good Strategy Bad Strategy — Richard P. Rumelt
To be an effective culture leader you must be a strategist. One saying often heard is, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” This never sat right with me because the phrase makes the relationship between the two sound antagonistic rather than what it must be — symbiotic. If you’re a culture professional who leads without strategy, you fall into the trap of becoming a ticket taker for superficial experiences and ideas. (Note the other common culture professional’s plea, “Culture isn’t about ping-pong tables and pizza parties.”)
Former Harvard School of Business faculty member Richard Rumelt is an expert in competitive strategy and the nature of competitive advantage. In Good Strategy Bad Strategy, he provides a clear guide to the difference between the two and lays out the necessary elements to put a proper strategy in place. Culture’s purpose is to energize and sustain the behaviors your organization’s strategy requires. So, if you want to be an effective culture leader, embrace the underpinning of why you’re building this specific community, the advantages and disadvantages of your positioning, and then leverage the strengths in your culture to achieve the organization’s mission. In other words, let strategy write the recipe and allow culture to make the meal.
3. The Workshopper Playbook — Jonathan Courtney
Along with being a strategist, culture leaders should be expert facilitators, or as my friends at AJ&Smart would call them, workshoppers. In The Workshopper Playbook, Jonathan Courtney, co-founder of Berlin-based product design and innovation studio, defines a workshopper as “a problem-solving and decision-making expert that can guide a team through a structured step-by-step process that ensures solid outcomes.” I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with the team at AJ&Smart, and their simple idea to choose workshops instead of meetings has altered my way of working.
To effectively build strategies that activate your value system, you can’t just hop from meeting to meeting—talking, spinning, ideating—without structure. But that’s what usually happens. It’s incredibly helpful to have a method that offers guardrails and always ends in action. This playbook can be employed in almost any situation where there is an opportunity or problem to be solved. Plus, it brings teams together in a meaningful and inclusive way.
The team at AJ&Smart believe in this concept so much, they offer the e-book for free.
To effectively build strategies that activate your value system, you can’t just hop from meeting to meeting— talking, spinning, and ideating—without structure.
4. Great Mondays — Josh Levine
I’ve read plenty of books about organizational culture, and while I find much of their information resonant, they can lack useful or applicable tools to put theory into action.
Great Mondays, meanwhile, speaks to the sensibilities of someone who cares about culture, and provides a toolkit. It’s packed with exercises, activities and resources to help you diagnose your organization’s or team’s current culture state. Levine says, “I wrote this to be more than a book –It’s a manifesto.” This book combines innovation methodologies with culture-with-a-capital-C in a practical way that you can employ immediately.
