Culture > Process
Continuously evolve your processes
Culture is the stuff people do without noticing it, and it reveals itself from the values and attitudes of people.
So what are the values and attitudes you want to shape, and how do you operationalize a set of desired cultural artifacts within your organization?
That’s what I will briefly cover in this article.
It’s important to continuously create culture, not just consume it. Otherwise, it becomes an engine detached from the interests of the individual (or small groups, teams or other affinity groups) that perpetuates a pattern — made by others — to prevail, which may not allow you, the individual, to claim your best self. That said, to have a truly innovative enterprise, organizations must co-create a culture collectively. That means a workplace where employees know their ideas are valued and believe it is safe to express and act on those ideas and to learn from failure, and where leaders reinforce this state of mind by involving employees in decisions that matter to them.
An organization (enterprise/company) is a human system, an aggregation of cultural values. That is the most important thing to understand (at least, when reading through the rest of this article). Culture never exists separately from the social or the behavioral or the intentional dimensions (see Wilber’s AQAL Matrix, Figure 1, above) of existence. And so, because we are talking about culture and organizational processes, it is important to remember everything is interdependent, and we must maintain a holistic view of the enterprise if, for example, we hope to increase profits and market share.
We begin with the self, because you have to improve yourself before an approximation toward a change of culture can occur. That means to have influence among others, you must adapt, evolve and be trusted.
Let’s start by looking at Carol Dweck’s Two Mindsets model, below.
Dweck’s research has uncovered that individuals who maintain a growth mindset develop greater self-awareness, can more effectively advance their career, and generate a positive influence across an organization, no matter its scale.
Consider having your team members periodically fill out the four columns below, and review them together. This template, developed by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey, should help them track and reflect on their development.
Work on yourself first. Work on developing your skills and personal growth. That is a requirement before the following concepts can be effectively applied in an organization.
We want an organization with leadership that trusts and empowers teams. To do that, employees should be competent and trustworthy (this goes both ways), and managers need to find better ways to staff, coach and get the most out of the team-level objectives.
Moving up a level
Let’s take a look at John Shook’s model, below. Arguments can go both ways regarding the effectiveness of the old and the new models. I think there is, like in many theories, a bit of a fallacy here. At the end of the day, these things are really just scalar, not binary. There are trade-offs; there are no right or wrong answers here.
That said, Shook’s model is rather helpful in the context of understanding how to influence organizational culture, in that it is easier to leverage environmental (external) artifacts to influence change than to effectively reprogram everyone’s “operating system” (minds) directly.
So, what is the optimal way of changing the behaviors of individuals to influence a culture for the better?
Focusing on technology as a service (TaaS) organizations (and IT), I will pull on research that has implications for people working in similar environments, such as software product development, and continue to point to well-received research that demonstrates how changing processes is a great first step to influencing organizational culture.
Research from Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations by Nicole Forsgren PhD, Jez Humble and Gene Kim (a book I highly recommend), as seen below, is one model I have found that clearly explains how to drive enterprise-level transformation for TaaS organizations. Take a look at the overall research program map.
I also recommend reading Google’s longitudinal research on teams here.
Think you cannot have it all? See proof here.
Here are three more leadership development model templates you, as a product leader, can use to get started on this long organizational transmigration:
- Product management is a nebulous role. The fact that most recruiting processes are not well oiled machines and contain loads of bias does not help in this matter. Additionally, not everyone can afford to run and be part of trial hires. I have found from direct experience being on both sides, i.e., the interviewer and interviewee, that not a lot of companies know how to properly evaluate the roles they are hiring for, and this is especially true for product managers and product leaders. Companies that render well structured product cases that test for strategy, leadership, and technical abilities and knowledge and employ carefully constructed take home exercises that candidates are invited to present for the team or group they are interviewing with are usually very good product companies. That said, I have found that something still missing is the inability to tailor the interview for each candidate. This is not something only small companies or only large companies can do. Regardless of your organization’s size, you can scale the bespoke product interview. To do so, see the post phone screen evaluation below:
- The questions in the survey below are a psychometric way of measuring the topological health of your organization. For example, send it to the product development organization regularly, especially after enough changes have been implemented so you can keep a pulse on their effects and if those decisions are helping or hurting organizational and/or noncommercial performance.
- The next template is specific to product leaders. This assessment template can help you coach and develop talent. If you are outside the discipline of product management, you should still be able to take away things you can apply to your specific function, such as the value of communicating success criteria, and defining the roles and responsibilities across your teams clearly and at each level. That said, this template assists in communicating to your product team what success looks like. I do caution that using the following coaching plan only in the context of annual performance reviews will lead to over-indexing on the individual and away from a focus on evaluating the individual as a unit of a team (assuming you have formed teams around products. If not, fix that ASAP). Instead, actively manage talent via the 1-on-1 meeting. Annual reviews are generally for the benefit of HR compliance and allocating compensation, not individual growth to enhance team performance. This is not to say that your 1-on-1 meetings are not proxies to ensure great builders are fairly considered for, say, retention/follow-on grants, to have a chance to acquire more equity in what they help build. Product teams should be responsible for lagging indicator KPIs (revenue metric) and be put on a variable comp plan based on how well their defined UX outcomes lead to business impact metrics. This has the effect on teams to reduce scope, which leads to shipping faster and thus learning more quickly. We want people to feel the costs of their choices, the gravity of the decisions they make.
At the beginning of this article, I asked two questions: What are the values and attitudes we want to shape, and how do we achieve a set of desired cultural artifacts? Hopefully, it is now a bit clearer how a performance-oriented culture can be driven by transformational leadership and the subsequent constructs those changes influence thereafter— and that the artifacts are not only the practices and principles of establishing a proper software and team architecture pairing for the business. It is also the individual qualities of the employees and leaders of the organization that must undergo continuous improvement, where everyone embraces learning how to learn, where they are focusing on personal development and where they work hard to track individual growth actively.
A few key qualities and activities of transformational and servant leaders:
Servant leader:
- Honesty and humility, the willingness to persevere and work hard, and a constant openness to learning.
- Share power and promote transparency and accountability.
- You intellectually stimulate, inspire, and support people. The key to success is helping others become successful, to get teams to do their best work by removing roadblocks, and putting systems in place to cut out busywork. You prevent teams from spending too much time discussing and talking in circles and getting nowhere by fixing broken team dynamics.
- Eyes on hands-off; however, you can step in and coach to reduce gaps in knowledge while being adaptive to the needs of individuals (you keep people at the edge of the learning zone without overwhelming them or leaving them in the comfort zone by not pushing at all).
Transformational leader:
- Understand the importance and economic costs of your decisions.
- You are conceptual but also understand the details of the business and can calibrate resources to focus teams on coherent actions.
- You work to maintain the coherence of the product strategy (if you are a product leader) each quarter (and beyond), as without active maintenance, the line demarcating products become blurred, and coherence is lost. And, if the strategic design becomes obsolete, a product leader’s job is to create a new way of coordinating efforts so the competitive energy is directed outward instead of inward.
- You can reduce the complexity of ambitious goals by knowing what to overlook and connect facts to patterns while making obstacles visible so teams can effectively explore the opportunity space and solve a more simplified problem, which enables them to deal with the critical issues.
- Push as many decisions as possible down to teams closest to the value streams, i.e., you define “what“ to achieve and “why“ while giving teams the freedom to figure out the “how”. This creates a sense of ownership and accountability. You understand alignment is for focus and clarity and demand autonomy at the value stream level so your tactical efforts are adaptable under conditions of uncertainty.
I also touched on just a few things you can do to optimize your organizational culture. There are many other things you need to keep in mind; however, here are just a few key takeaways:
- Culture is a set of actions, not just beliefs.
- What, and how, behaviors gets rewarded at your organization influences the success of your company culture.
- Whom you hire determines your culture more than almost anything else. Start by understanding how to find smart (willing to learn), humble, hard-working (focused and disciplined) and collaborative people.
- Effective inclusion is seeing people for who they are, as individuals.
- Understand how your new employees feel about the culture after a couple of weeks of onboarding.
- Combine and compare your company virtues together to contextualize them, and reinforce the “why” every chance you (company leaders) get so people know what they mean in practice. Listing a bunch of words or phrases (the “what”) that sound good can have unintended negative consequence and/or result in people not interpreting or understanding how to act due to the vagueness of the “instruction(s)”. Your instructions should be specific, emphatic, and unceasing.
That said, I do hope this article helps you get started and interested in digging deeper into the research referenced here, which I believe will support your TaaS organization in achieving greater market share.
At the end of the day, it is good economics and a sound business strategy to adopt these practices. Uncover the opportunities to change processes in your organization to positively influence the behaviors and values of people and their work for the better.
Peter Drucker famously observed that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. However, culture and strategy are not in competition and should actually compliment each other. In fact, you should pick the virtues that will help your organization accomplish its mission.
Check out my other article on organizational transformation here: https://medium.com/@mattlane66/org-design-68df2bbd32f1
Also, consider reading this article:
Here is a poem I like to think can be interpreted about how important it is to have trust within teams:
