Should you brainwash your employees?
Onboarding, team culture, and a little-discussed fine line
Remember all those “culture decks”? And then the backlash?
How many leadership books have you read — and tried to put in practice?
Catchphrases? Ways of thinking?
At what point do all of these things become something more… sinister?
Every group of humans — from a 3 person sales team to an entire nation — needs to balance the needs of the individual and the whole. Too much of the former and there’s no common purpose, no forward movement. Too much the latter and you risk alienating your members, or stagnating in groupthink.
There is an unsubtle solution to this nuanced problem, and it’s all the rage at leading companies and their imitators: Make people think that they are the company. Or that the company is them. By combining incentives, too-fun-to-turn-down perks, and a relentless focus on results, they blur the line between what the company wants and what the team members want to do.
Basically: strong arm your employees into signing on to a top-down culture that was designed with the company in mind.
There’s nothing wrong with this from the company’s point of view. Who could complain about a state of the art campus with snacks, fully stocked bars, nap pods etc? And if the implication of all these things is that you need to stay on campus for 12+ hours a day, well, that’s just who we are.
And this behavior spreads in every direction.
Throw wild parties → initiate people into a culture of wild partying → turn them into partiers.
Make people wear silly hats → ???
Unfortunately for these companies, however, there are 2 major problems with this top-down, all-in approach to building a culture.
The first is that your culture risks getting amplified at every step.
This sounds like it would be a good thing, but what actually happens is that only the most outrageous (=most easily repeated and imitated) aspects of your culture are exaggerated.
What’s implicitly understood as reasonable among 5 people does not translate to 5000 people with several levels of management in between them.
This is how fun-loving becomes out of control and sincerity turns to near sociopathy:
“I was trying to help somebody in their career, and they maybe saw that as a sign of weakness from me,” the former executive said [after getting fired]. She cried all the way home on her six-hour flight to Los Angeles, wondering how she would break the news to her pregnant wife.”
“At Netflix, Radical Transparency and Blunt Firings Unsettle the Ranks,” WSJ
So, unsurprisingly, the weakness of this strategy is baked into it from the beginning.
Broadcasting culture = broadcasting its flaws. And, humans being humans, you can guess which one will have the greater impact.
The second is that you create a silent, but real, culture of fear.
Fear kills teams. It means that people spend more time second guessing themselves and looking over their shoulders than actually working. And forget about sharing ideas — that may wind up being excellent.
But if someone on your team feels like they need to hang around after work and have a few drinks, or worse, they’re going to feel uncomfortable.
Do I look like I’m having fun? Who should I talk to? I never liked parties.
These high school dynamics belong in high school. Because they’re going to hurt your team member’s performance, and therefore your whole team’s performance.
By devoting time and resources and brain space to a prescribed company culture, you create clear lines of what is expected of and acceptable in your team. Obviously this can be a good thing. Obviously it can be a bad thing, too.
If you’re not careful, these lines will alienate more than they unify. Push people to extremes rather than bring them together. Hurt your team more than help it.
Brainwashing your team with a heavy-handed, company-first culture will only ever get you so far. And once word gets out, people will avoid you. You’ll be left with a team of people who don’t think for themselves and are ready to ostracize each other for the slightest infraction.
A better way
So no, don’t brainwash your team. Close the slide presentation. Put away the hats. Instead, book a meeting room for some low-productivity hours and prepare a few questions.
First consider what you, the team leader hope to see in your culture. Is it only high performance? Is it openness? Support? Then think what actions can make these goals a reality.
Then accept that you’re only one member of the team.
Maybe you’re the head honcho of the whole company (though you’ll still have clients or a community to serve). Or maybe you need to align your team with the larger organization.
In any case, in order for your team to feel like a team, everyone on it needs to know that their voices matter. Show them that they do by having a conversation about culture.
A slide presentation is not a conversation. Only a real conversation is a conversation. And you know what that looks and sounds like.
- There’s no endpoint in mind.
- Everyone talks in equal measure.
- Speakers listen to each other
(Tip: a great way to have better conversations = Carl Rogers’ humanistic approach: summarize what the previous speaker said + have previous speaker validate before saying anything original.)
There are definitely drawbacks to this approach. It’s less certain. You can’t cleanly attach it to your OKRs.
But the biggest advantage is that, if done well, it begins the process towards creating an actual team culture. And when you have a group of people who know who they are, and are proud of who they are — I don’t know if you’ll take over the world or anything like that — but you’re definitely in a better spot than any amount of minions.
THANKS for reading. I’m researching team cultures and am always interested in new perspectives.
Drop a line and let me what you think :) Better yet, link to something you’ve written!
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