The most important thing I learned about culture after hosting 300 open mic nights
I had a weird life for a while.
I would wake up in the evening, go to a bar, set up an open mic, and then host a wild and popular event that would often revel into the early hours of the morning.
With what brain cells I didn’t kill off, I learned a lot about myself, running a business, and about the 5,000+ artists I interacted with over the years.
The most important thing I learned: every inch of positive culture you want to instill in your organization must be fought for with savage ferocity.
Every little thing is a battle to draw out the best in people.
It’s not that people are bad. It’s that people think they know what’s best for everyone else and are going to vie for control over them. So if you’re the captain of your culture ship, you have to steer that ship straight no matter where anyone else wants to go. If you care about upholding a particular cultural value, you better chart a route, grip the wheel tight, fight the forces pulling you off course, and head straight toward your goal.
Culture must be a singular vision, empowered from the top.
Your Sunshine Committee is doomed
If your company has a Smile Patrol or Sunshine Committee, you may be in a bad spot. Hands-off managers may want to do something to improve the morale around their office, so they appoint some folks to form a culture committee. But a limp, powerless Let’s-Do-Fun-Stuff club will actually only worsen things. Broadly speaking, cultural values are the stuff people literally kill each other over. If there’s a culture clash in the office, do you think a cake or matching t-shirts is the right response?
From Harvard Business Review:
What’s the first thing many executives do after they decide to embark on a values initiative? They hand off the effort to the HR department, which uses the initiative as an excuse for an inclusive feel-good effort. To engage employees, HR rolls out employee surveys and holds lots of town meetings to gather input and build consensus. That’s precisely the wrong approach. Values initiatives have nothing to do with building consensus — they’re about imposing a set of fundamental, strategically sound beliefs on a broad group of people.
Whoa. “Imposing a set of a fundamental, strategically sound beliefs on a broad group of people” sounds downright cold, if not dictatorial. Do these folks at Harvard know what they’re talking about? Doesn’t it seem like a cake would be better?
Thrown out into the parking lot
How many rules do you think an open mic should have?
A handful? A dozen? How about 2 full pages in 10-point font?
We had a 2-page booklet on all the tables, a version on the website, and a sign-in sheet asking for your signature stating that you’d read the rules. If you couldn’t read, I would read the rules to you — no problem, no questions. We put a 4-foot poster of the rules on the wall next to the stage as well. If you broke the rules, I shut off your microphone and brought up the house music. If you wanted to throw a tantrum and physically fight about it (rare, but it happened), you were thrown out into the parking lot and the police were called.
As harsh as it sounds, this was the power needed to affect positive change.
We ran a tight ship, aimed at a great experience for everyone willing to follow the rules and be a part of our culture.
What is your culture committee’s analog to “shutting off the mic” or “throwing out into the parking lot” those who clash against the culture? Unless directly empowered by higher-ups, you’re simply not going to be able to address any real problems you uncover.
For example, if you have a cultural value, and someone is refusing to act within it, no cake can solve that. Any intervention not backed by the last resort a company has (an employee’s termination) is ultimately impotent — the employee knows they don’t have to listen to you.
I’m not saying the Sunshine Committee should have the ability to fire anyone in the company. I’m saying that when people fail in the culture expectations, they should be treated the same as if they had failed in their job expectations.
So since we’re talking about people’s jobs here…
First, ask if you should even care about culture
Sure, books say you should. Successful CEOs say you should. But let’s be totally honest. Your business is likely going to make some money for a little while and then cease to exist — like all businesses.
So you might just want it to be stable enough for people to get along and some folks to make a living for a while, no more. In that case, the right play is to not even bother with culture.
It takes a lot of hard work and pain to lead like Tony Hsieh or Chris Rufer.
Again, Harvard Business Review lays it out bare:
Coming up with strong values — and sticking to them — requires real guts. Indeed, an organization considering a values initiative must first come to terms with the fact that, when properly practiced, values inflict pain. They make some employees feel like outcasts. They limit an organization’s strategic and operational freedom and constrain the behavior of its people. They leave executives open to heavy criticism for even minor violations. And they demand constant vigilance.
HBR concludes, “If you’re not willing to accept the pain real values incur, don’t bother going to the trouble of formulating a values statement.”
If you do care, be ready for pain
I told myself I cared. I first wanted to create something that treated everyone equally. What does a cultural value of Equality mean? Here’s some examples from the open mic nights:
- It means giving everyone a chance, no matter how bad they were. (A homeless gentleman passed by the bar, saw what we were doing, and asked if he could whistle a tune on stage. Of course he could!)
- It means shutting off someone’s mic if they go over their time limit.
- It means being called a racist, sexist, and every other -ist in the book because you’re enforcing the rules equally and not giving some people a pass they feel they deserve.
- It means reprimanding your friends when they are out of line.
- It means praising people who hate your guts when they act in line with cultural values.
- It means no one is special — we could have a bona fide star in the house, but they have to wait their turn and stay in their timeslot like everyone else. (Zach Galifianakis came to our open mic. He didn’t stick around long enough to get to perform.)
When properly practiced, values inflict pain.
If we forgo values it’s often to avoid their pain or for a short-term gain. Both are the wrong answer if you’re trying to build an organization on a strong cultural foundation.
I could have brought more sales to the bar for one night if I put Zach Galifianakis on stage early or disallowed Ricky the Professional Whistler from entertaining us with his improvisational 10-minute lips-and-teeth performance. But if I conceded in these instances, I would have lost the trust from the community that I treat everyone equally.
With the cultural value of Equality, I strove to make anyone and everyone feel empowered to step up to the mic.
Why do you care about culture anyway?
The bad answers look like:
- To pay employees less, but let them have fun so they don’t mind.
- Because this book says I need to.
- I want everyone to be happy.
The only good answer looks like:
- I believe this value will provide real benefit to the company and I am willing to fight to the death to create a culture that cultivates this value and weeds out those who don’t fit this value.
“I want everyone to be happy” sounds like a good thing. But you likely have some employees who have become unaligned with the organization’s mission, perhaps actively engaged in mucking it up. And if they are happy, the company is actually being damaged.
Culture and politics
Culture is hard, painful, and divisive, and lack of strong cultural value enforcement leads to “political” places of work, full of back-stabbing, blame games, and side-channels.
Political behavior almost always starts with the CEO. Sadly, you needn’t be political to create extreme political behavior in your organization. In fact, it’s often the least political CEOs who run the most ferociously political organizations. Apolitical CEOs frequently–and accidentally–encourage intense political behavior. — Ben Horowitz
It takes strong, singular leadership to set the course on a company’s values and ferociously fight to preserve them along every bump in the way. If it’s something a CEO wants to pass off with no real support, it’s guaranteed to fail. You can’t be hands-off and apolitical and be a values-driven organization. Managing a team driven by immovable cultural values requires hands-on nurturing, correcting, and pruning every day to see it survive.
300 nights of lessons
I learned this over the course of 300 open mic nights. I made mistakes. I did favors for some people (for a short term benefit) only to see trust from the entire community erode over a longer term.
It wasn’t easy switching to a values-based operation. When I made the decision to stick to my guns no matter what, I lost friendships when I wouldn’t give my friends a pass. People stormed out of the building when I followed the rules to the very letter like a total prick.
But the business did grow because of its values. I can attest that it works. I can also attest that it’s hard and probably only worth it if you’re thinking long-term.
Organizational culture shouldn’t be relegated to a side project or fluff committee. If a company chooses to be guided by cultural values, these values need to be instilled with top-down authority and be a true priority. And ultimately, they need “constant vigilance” — to be fought for every day with savage ferocity.
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