Chapter 5: The importance of practice
In the previous chapter I defined what culture is and why it’s important to shape. As Tess mentions, it’s important that everyone in the company has the same foundation. Culture can, when shared with a group of people, function as a stake in the ground and in the end create accountability says Deborah Alden. The theme of accountability has been evident throughout the interviews. Collin says that accountability keeps you honest and less coddled.
Yang (2012) finds that an understanding of how accountability structures, individual behaviors, and organizational outcomes are linked is required to gain knowledge around actionable accountability. As Deborah mentions there needs to be a whole understanding for the entrepreneur in their accelerator program, otherwise they won’t be able to support them in a way that relates to their specific needs. Formal accountability mechanisms can be done via participatory practices and storytelling, and through this exchange people can discuss problems and possibilities (Chen, 2012). Observing and being able to draw out these different components of accountability through participative practices seems to be important and a keystone in creating a sense of belonging and a picture of what the organization is about.
At the same time there seems to not be a defined structure or practice to building culture. Joe Hollier and his company The Light Phone comes the closest to a committed practice as they’ve set up a rhythm of meetings, once a week to update everyone and once a month to align the team and discuss long-term goals, due to bringing on an advisor that has experience in culture building. He sees this as the first step towards building a sustainable culture. Sanjay’s startup Datavore have weekly meetings at the end of each week where they discuss what they’d like to accomplish during the upcoming week. It’s only an hour, which according to Sanjay is a rarity in corporate America, but the efficiency is important to them as they don’t have time to waste. They also have a standup meeting each morning and want to keep the meetings they have simple and clean.
A standup is part of the SCRUM framework and consists of a 15 minute daily meeting, standing up, and asking each team member three questions (Mountain Goat Software, n.d.):
- What did you do yesterday?
- What will you do today?
- Are there any impediments in your way?
Rogelberg, Shanock and Scott (2012) mentions that successful organizations realize that the improvement of meetings can lead to significant benefits while contributing to the health and motivation of employees. Meetings can also build accountability for groups by establishing productive cultural practices. As Jorgensen (2010) states a good meeting should be structured in its core process, by providing context, purpose and outcome to the meeting and each agenda, which encourages participation. A lot of people expect actions to be the output from a meeting and to meet that expectation you should review actions, responsibilities and deliverables before the meetings end and then follow up on these (Ivanovic, Galicic and Susnjar, 2010). Since time is an issue in startups it would be of interest to use meetings in an efficient matter by making sure there are actions tied to the agenda while also using it as an artifact to establish cultural practices.
Sam Spurlin argues that the most important part about his job as an organizational consultant is to introduce new habits, along with new ways of thinking and behaving, to organizations. Allison has more of a coaching approach and has seen the fruits of coaching individuals and facilitating a monthly meet up among the coachees where they discuss their learnings. By doing so they’ve been able to restructure their organization and work better together. One of the most important parts of her role as a leadership consultant is to challenge her clients to make commitments by asking what happens after she leaves and supporting them in setting up a series of follow up meetings. This could be interpreted as her trying to hold her clients accountable to the process and to take responsibility of implementing their learnings in order to make a change, but also making it a habit to work on the issues at hand.
Gaining insight into tangible aspects of organizations’ cultures, which are reflected in the behaviors of individuals that they believe are expected from them is crucial for fixing and building culture (Balthazard, Cooke and Potter, 2006). But as Evans and Price (2014) find in their study the managing of tangible things is the easy part but when it comes to taking responsibility for abstract things like information or learnings it gets harder, especially when it comes to spreading it across different functions. There needs to be some type of cross-functional accountability and responsibility, and this initiative needs to come from the management and board. For the context of this project it translates to the founders and the first employees. This correlates with what Sanjay says about it being the first 6–8 they hire that define their culture and that by communicating and coordinating you can operate more efficiently. It also matches the first stage in Wheelan’s (2014) Integrated Model of Group Development, where members of a group look to designated leaders, the first employees and/or the founders, to inform their behavior. Focusing on the expected positive behaviors by leaders on workplace behaviors like interpersonal skills, ethics, initiative taking and personal development (Webber, Ser and Goussak, 2015), there could be opportunity to early build habits around these topics that translates when the organization grows. However, this dependency isn’t all good. As Wheelan suggests this is the first part of being a part of a constructive group. But if they stay at this stage, meaning new hires only look to and conform to the older members’ of the organization ways of doing things, the development will stop and they will not achieve true productivity.
Insight 1: Create accountability through participative practice, that is encouraged by providing context, purpose and outcome
Insight 2: Commitment to a habit of daily/weekly/monthly/yearly meetings to learn from each other
Insight 3: Focus on tangible behaviors that you want to develop
Defining the culture
As stated in “Chapter 4: What is culture”, culture is a fluffy and abstract concept. But why make such a big deal out of it? Why can’t it stay fluffy? If we want to create accountability, which there seems to be a strong need for, there needs to be an understanding of individual behaviors and organizational outcomes according to Yang (2012). Shaun Johnson, co-founder of the Startup Institute, says that there needs to be deliberate actions that underpin and underline the things that the organization stands for. Adding to this, Allison mentions that we need to define characteristics and words that guides the interactions we have. This correlates to the first two levels of culture, visible artifacts and adopted behavioral norms, that Schein (2010) mentions. Without these there’s nothing to measure against, according to Collin, and this creates ambiguity on what’s right or wrong to do in the organization. There needs to be a framework to lean on, says Tess.
McDowell, Herdman and Aaron (2011) found that teams that receive a charter consisting of items such as meeting management, decision making, and mission statement showed higher quality of teamwork. The study also showed that no extensive training was required to gain better results, simply providing them with a tool helped them to achieve better teamwork. These benefits are supported by Alex Ivanov and his experience of developing the Team Canvas, a tool for teams to work better together, and the feedback he gets from teams using it. This coincides with Google’s study on effective teams where the most impactful experience for them was to have a framework around team effectiveness and a forcing function to talk about the dynamics (Rozovsky, 2015). Combining these perspectives one could make the argument that providing an agenda or tool biased toward culture would enable startups to build their culture and talk about assumptions and positive behaviors/actions.
Alex mentions there needs to be anchors and reference points as you work with teams since they need a familiar concept to hold on to. Dara Blumenthal is somewhat on the same track and mentions that you have to make the development of people visible. An argument for that can also be found in Schein’s (2010) definition of culture and exposing the underlying assumptions in order to decipher what they mean. Without anything visible we’re all guessing. According to Mathias Jakobsen we can waste a tremendous amount of mental power interpreting symbols instead of instantly recognizing them. The same could be said for culture. If everything is implicit there’s a lot of energy wasted on guessing and navigating the system since there is no explicit way of doing or thinking about things. To have a constructive cultural norm, that has its foundation in cooperation, you need to have good quality of communication, people need to feel like they fit into the organization, have clarity of their role, and be satisfied in their role so desirable outcomes are met (Balthazard, Cooke and Potter, 2006). Being constructive and explicit should be seen as an important aspect of culture building.
One way of working more explicit is to facilitate a visual thinking space, that way you can direct the energy towards what it says in that space says Mathias. According to Bailey (2011) graphic facilitation works because people can see what they’re talking about making it more tangible which enables teams to be engaged and collaborative. Sibbet (2008) has developed a Group Graphics Keyboard that help visual facilitators to decide what visual pattern to use at different stages of a team’s process.
Sibbet (2008) argues that these visual patterns are the artifacts of something alive and dynamic, of people’s thoughts and feelings while creating the visual artifact. By creating an artifact, that is on a shallow level of culture according to Schein (2010), we could argue that we can access the underlying assumptions by visualizing and bringing them to the surface during the process. The artifacts can also be used to make the practice visible in the day to day, something that Dara considers an important part of organizational life.
One other thing to look out for when defining culture is the tendency to make the culture static. Carrillo (2012) writes that rules and procedures, both static approaches, do not influence the priorities of employees, instead it’s influenced by interactions and relationships. Among the interviewees of my primary research it’s stated that building culture is all about doing behaviors (Sam), culture needs to be lived through actions (Marianne) and that we need to role model the values we want to see (Sarah). Again, it comes down to making the abstract tangible through our behaviors. But Joe points out that there’s a need to go as leanly as possible in exploring and developing the culture and norms so there’s room to adopt new approaches, tools and processes.
In their study Han and Ma (2015) propose that culture shapes the brain by contextualizing behavior while also making an impact on the culture via behavioral influences. They further state that it’s possible that behaviors guided by shared beliefs could lead to changes in how the brain organizes itself which in turn leads to the brain guiding the individual’s behavior to fit into the cultural context. It also tries to correct its environment if it doesn’t resonate with the cultural norm. By acting and behaving in a certain way we can therefore change how others act and behave on a much deeper level. Not to suggest that an organization, or in this case a small startup, will change its employees’ brains. But the notion that we can influence our peers through our behavior can be seen as empowering through a role modeling perspective, and is a view that’s shared among the interviewees (see interviews with Sarah; Sam; Collin).
Insight 4: An explicit visual and tangible definition of the culture needs to be defined
Insight 5: Behaviors need to be contextualized for them to have effect in the daily practice
Insight 6: Having a framework based on familiar concepts is needed to develop the culture
The importance of practice
Both Dara and Alex urges the need of developing a sustainable practices and Dara goes as far as saying that all there are are practices that people do daily. Giddens’ structuration theory studies the processes that take place between an individual and the structure they’re in and makes the argument that outside of individual and human action social structures have no stability (Gibbs, n.d.). Through the process of reflection where you study your own behavior you’re able to modify these social, and organizational, structures by acting differently.
Marianne has the perspective that it’s all about learning by doing, which coincides with the behavioral aspects of culture that has been mentioned earlier and indicates that practices indeed are important to shape and build the culture in an organization. But how do we actually learn by doing and keep it explicit? Since everyone is going to have a different experience, based on that we’re all different people with different background, it’s important to, as Alex mentions, support the process and not own the content. According to him it’s about giving the team enough process support to make their own judgments and decisions. Lisa Pertoso, facilitator, shares this sentiment and urge the importance of supporting people by always doing a mini debrief after a process that enables them to reflect on their own experience and to build skills, and support them to do that in a transparent way.
A lot of the startups, especially in the tech realm, are using agile tools and techniques where one tool is the retrospective which is part of a sprint (work cycles). The retrospective looks at how the team is building the product/service and aims to answer three questions (Devendra, 2014):
- What went well during the sprint cycle?
- What went wrong during the sprint cycle?
- What could we do differently to improve?
Drury-Grogan (2013) writes that to manage agile teams better through team iterations they should specifically discuss functionality, schedule, quality and team satisfaction. The study is done with agile software development teams in mind in the area of project management, but could be used to inform iteration processes outside of this specific context especially since we’re moving towards a project-based work environment. From the popularity of using retrospective and agile tools, and blending it with objectives outside of the specific product/service cycle, it could serve as a foundation for a retrospective with a culture perspective.
Insight 7: Adding reflection to a process enables learning and team satisfaction
Next: Chapter 6: Reflection at work
Previous: Chapter 4: What is culture?
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Hyper Island — MA Digital Media Management
Industry Research Project
