Development Cultures
What do the Navy SEALs and a middle school writing class have in common with successful organizations? About an unusual productive vision for company culture and research-backed tools to implement it in practice.
A romantic theory
“People come to work in our company to fulfil their purpose for existence (PFE)”. These were the words of Thomas, the fictional protagonist in John Streleckys Big Five for Life. In short, he build his company around the vision that the people enjoy working there, that every day they realize their full potential. That they come to work, not for the sake of earning money but because it is what they want to do with their lives. Because their personal PFE is aligned with the PFE of the company.
Sounds nice, right?
The book goes on to tell a list of anecdotal stories about Thomas and his work. About how they support each other in “Make me better”-Meetings, how they show their gratitude with post it notes, how they take care of their employees and how, despite or because of it all, they still remain profitable.
While the ideas of Strelecky resonated with me, the fairytale character of the book led me to put them somewhere in the back of my mind. I was looking for something more practical, based on working examples and backed with solid psychological research.
Last year, when I started actively pondering what I wanted our own company culture to look like, I came across a rather new breed of cultures; a new animal in the ring. I found them in a series of books, blog posts and videos that all resolved around one theme: development and growth.
Cultures that are about growing, about learning, about iterating, together. Developmental Cultures
Status Quo Happiness
Underlying all developmental cultures is a novel take on psychological well-being, that I quickly want to introduce to give some context. Most commonly, happiness is taken to be a place of comfort, of pleasure, the absence of pain. Not surprisingly, the people in our organizations try to avoid problems in order to stay within the comfort zone. Or as Robert Kegan neatly put it:
In an ordinary organization, most people are doing a second job no one is paying them for (…) Most people are spending time and energy covering up their weaknesses, managing other people’s impressions of them, showing themselves to their best advantage, playing politics, hiding their inadequacies, hiding their uncertainties, hiding their limitations. Hiding.
However, for the kind of growth and progress we want to foster in our culture, this take on happiness and well-being is counterproductive. The underlying ethic we need instead is that growth is desirable. Growth makes us happy, even if it requires hard work, pain and vulnerability. In the long run, it’ll be more rewarding.
Essentially, it is a “new” understanding of happiness. The old, and culturally more supported one is happiness as a state of pleasure, a banishing of pain, suffering and boredom. This is hedonistic happiness.
The understanding of happiness in developmental cultures is one more closely related to the Greeks’ concept of eudaimonia. It takes happiness as a process, as the satisfaction of experiencing one’s own growth, the fulfillment of one’s potential. Carol Dweck calls this the growth mindset in her landmark book Mindset.
The inner process is an essential prerequisite to organizational growth
The Key Elements of Developmental Cultures
Knowing that we need to foster a growth mindset is one thing, getting there is another. In The Culture Code Daniel Coyle compares dozens of examples of high-performing organizations and reveals their common traits. From the Navy SEALs to writing classes in middle school, groups that couldn’t be further apart show remarkable resemblance in a few characteristics.
To further undermine the validity of the findings, An Everyone Culture, a research undertaking led by Harvard psychologist Robert Kegan, happens to contain the exact same principles, albeit with different names.
The following are the three core elements of developmental cultures I took from both of these books and a series of related articles and papers.
A safe learning community
Coyle finds that in all the high-performing cultures he visits, there is a constant stream of low-key signals. Be it the coach, who cares about his players personally and professionally or the colleagues that look out for each other. These signals manifest in body language, physical contact and the words chosen. But they all signal the same thing: Here you are safe. Here you are welcome and appreciated whether you succeed or not. Your value as a human being is not dependent on your results.
A starting point for flourishing is a strong flower bed, a safety net that holds those who fall. For to grow means to risk, to open oneself to new things and eventually that leads to one falling and struggling. In order for true, lasting development to take place, a learning community must be established that supports the ones that try and catches the ones that fail.
In such a community “it is OK to make mistakes but unacceptable not to identify, analyze, and learn from them. Do not feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them!”, as Ray Dalio of Bridgewater puts it.
The safety we talk about here, however, is not to be mistaken with comfort and a soft-cushion, rosy environment, as we shall see.
Coyle outlines a few very clear elements to build such a place, which I’ll not reverberate here. But it ought to be said that humility in the leadership is an essential requirement. A learning community is a place of equality. Nobody is better, nobody is infallible, nobody is invulnerable.
Vulnerability
Now comes the hard part. Just like in building muscles, true personal growth requires pain. And that pain comes from being open, honest and making ourselves vulnerable. It requires us to bring our personal issues, the things we struggle with on the inside, to the office table.
Why, you might ask at this point, should I bring up my personal things in a corporation? Because, in very few cases is the true cause of problems in our corporations of technical or organizational nature. After asking why fives times, you more likely than not end up with a personal issue. The inability of a leader to take responsibility, the lack of honesty, the lack of openness to communicate possible problems up the chain of command. These are things that often sit deep inside of us, that hurt if we’re made aware of them and that, despite the effort, don’t seem to change.
Except, of course, if the whole culture of the organization aims to provide a place for you to experiment and grow.
Robert Kegan, calls this exposition of vulnerability “the edge”. At Bridgewater, an investment firm studied by Kegan et al., everybody has a public record of their so called backhand. The one thing they struggle with personally. Be it that they get angry too quickly, that they rely on their authority too much, that they are influenced by the opinions of others too quickly. To put such things out there, makes you vulnerable. But the culture agrees never to exploit this vulnerability. The idea is: We’re all in this together and we are all here to become better versions of ourselves.
Vulnerability doesn’t come after trust — it precedes it. Leaping into the unknown, when done alongside others, causes the solid ground of trust to materialize beneath our feet. — Daniel Coyle
On that note, using something as your backhand or “edge” that doesn’t actually bother you, will not suffice in the long run. People will notice that you’re just playing them, that you are not really on your edge. That you are afraid of leaving your comfort zone. Eventually, the team will lose trust in the process and especially in your credibility. Vulnerability works only, if everyone is vulnerable. It is not a one-way-street.
Feedback and repeatable practices
Now we have build a safe place to fail and everyone knows what to work on to grow personally and as part of the company. The key to actually progress is then a set of repeatable practices around feedback. For feedback is the mirror we need to see where we stand.
Essentially, every project should be accompanied with a retrospective and/or continuous feedback process similar to the ones in modern Scrum approaches. Pixar, for example, calls these candid reviews of their movie projects BrainTrusts, in the Big 5 they’re called “Make-Me-Better”-Meetings. Whether it is 1-on-1 mentoring partners accross the company, like in the case of NextJump or the PainButton App used at Bridgewater, the idea is always the same: providing honest, differentiated and objective feedback.
Giving good feedback is difficult. It isn’t about methods, like the sandwich, but rather about saying the difficult things. The things that you know might hurt the other person. It’s about putting them out there loud and clear, but in a helpful way.
There’s a lot to say about feedback and where to point it, thus I’ll put that in a separate article. But to give a contrast, it is not about “too many bullet points on the slides” or “you’re always late to meetings” kind of things.
In “An everyone Culture” they call this set of practices “The Groove” and I think that it most perfectly describes the idea. It is important for these things to become a rhythm, repeated in a periodic manner.
Three elements and a lot of work
The Home, The Edge, The Groove. That is what a developmental culture is all about in the words of Robert Kegan. Or a Safe Place, Vulnerability and Repeatable Practices to use the words of Daniel Coyle. You might think that implementing all this is so much additional effort and seems unproductive. Consider two things: One, some of the most successful groups in their field employ these or a very similar set of ideas. And two, on top of it all, they don’t think they are successful despite of their expenditures on culture, but because of them.
“We do not think of our culture as a ‘contributor’ to our business success; we do not think of it as a ‘factor.’ We think of it as, literally, the cause of our success. We are successful because of our culture. We think of the culture as itself our business strategy. Full stop.” — NextJump
I believe the signals are clear. We ought to consider what they have to say.
In the coming months and years, I hope we’ll be able to share more of our personal learnings and examples from implementing these practices within a young startup. What are your thoughts? Have you implemented similar practices or still have doubts?
And, now that you know that I care, do you have feedback?
If you are interested in being part of a developmental culture and are enthusiastic about high-tech timber construction, get in touch with max@modugen.de :)
