The Human Environmentalist, Part Two
On culture
We have said before that whereas the challenge of team leadership is to shape the experience of people you interact with on a daily basis, the challenge of organizational leadership is to shape the actions of people you rarely, if ever, meet. Organizational leadership is a problem of action at a distance—of influencing behaviors in people who are out of sight.
In recent posts, we’ve looked at the implications of the finding that most people want to do a good job at work. We’ve looked at things to stop doing, because they inhibit performance, and we’ve looked at how to start using the lens of the team to understand some of the things to start doing. Today, we’ll conclude this conversation by looking at what to start, or emphasize, or expand, at an organizational level, so as to shape the actions of people we don’t interact with every day.
In organizations, we tend to call this thing-that-influences-action-at-a-distance “culture”—what people do when we aren’t looking—but there are some problems with this. First, it’s vague. Second, and relatedly, no one is quite sure how to make one, or change one. Third, and most importantly, it muddies the question of accountability. If we’re not really sure what culture is or how you make one, how can we be clear on whose job it is to do that? Who’s responsible for culture? The CEO? The leaders? All of us?
So I want to try a different way in. Instead of talking about some elusive and diffuse set of qualities that somehow come to characterize behavior at one company and not another, let’s think about the question from the ground up—from the perspective of the most junior employee. Here’s the hypothetical question: if the company you work for were a person, how would you figure out what sort of person it was, and what it wanted you to do?
And here’s the complication: you can’t ask it—because it’s too busy to be dealing with abstract philosophical questions from people at your level. So you have to guess.
Here are some of the things I imagine will inform your guess. You’ll pay attention to what senior people talk about, and what they don’t. You’ll notice if what they talk about in public matches what they talk about in private, and how often what they talk about changes. You’ll take account of the decisions they make—what gets resources, and what gets cut—and how congruent these decisions are with what they talk about. You’ll note who gets fired, and why that is said to be, and why that actually appears to be. You’ll pay attention, closely, to what they pay attention to. You’ll weigh how many rules and policies there are, and how long things take. You’ll see who gets forgiven, and for what. You’ll form an impression of who these people are—what they’re like as three-dimensional humans, what you feel their essential character is—and you’ll factor that into your predictions of how they’ll behave.
Which is to say, you’ll interpret a large number of signals, generally emanating from the senior people, and generally either consistent or inconsistent with what you observe immediately around you. From this, you’ll determine what sort of a person your company is, what matters to it, and how it likes to get things done. And then this will shape your own decision-making—because you want to do good work!—about how to spend your time and what to prioritize.
This—signals from the top, either amplified or attenuated by those closer to you, and informing your choices of how to behave—is culture in action.
But here’s where it gets interesting. When you look at what predicts high performance in an organization, in terms of the experiences people have every day, there are three flavors of experience that matter. An individual’s experience—whether expectations are clear, for example, or whether they feel called on to do their best work—matters. A team experience—whether teammates support one another, say—matters. And someone’s experience of the company overall—whether they are excited by its mission, say, or confident in its future—matters as well. This last category of company-level things we might expect to be the sorts of things that “culture” influences, and indeed, that’s a pretty good way to think of them. But what’s fascinating is that everything on this list of performance predictors—everything in these three categories—is mediated by the team you’re on. Your individual experience changes if you move from one team to another, as does your team experience, unsurprisingly. But so does the way you experience the company—the culture—overall. Your team is the prism through which you experience everything at work—through which the signals of leaders who never meet you are amplified, or distorted, or explained, or ignored, or embraced.
The signals that leaders send, then, are fleetingly important because they inform what you think of the company-person. But they’re lastingly important because they contour the environment in which your team operates, and because they shape the way your team understands the company-person. This is what I mean when I say the signals are “amplified or attenuated by those closer to you.” Your team reserves the right to interpret the signals it receives from the top.
The role of a team leader is to create the environment in which team members can do their best work. The role of a culture—which is shaped disproportionately by the actions of organizational leaders—is to create the environment in which teams can do their best work, and in which teams can make sense of all the things happening around them. Because what happens when a new leader is announced, or when a new priority is framed, or when something fails or succeeds, or when any of the other myriad events occur that shape our understanding of who the company-person is today? We make sense of them by talking about them with our colleagues, who are, more often than not, members of our own team.
You don’t need to take my word for it. Last week I spent a few minutes chatting with a new hire at a company I’m working with, who we’ll call Ned. Ned had been with this company for just under one hundred days. I asked him what he thought of the culture so far, and he told me he thought it was great. Why was that, I asked him?
“Oh,” said Ned, “because of my team.” For him, culture and team were one and the same.
The measure of culture, then, is the success of the teams. The actions of culture are those that give the teams clarity of direction and confidence in the future. And done well, it is a vital support for people who, as we know, show up to work each day wanting to make the world just a little better than it was the day before, not because we’ve cajoled or incentivized or nagged them to do that, but simply because they are human.
A quick programming note: I’ll be taking some time off over the holidays, as I hope you are able to. The Second Circle will be back in January—until then, season’s greetings to you all.
In addition to writing about work, I advise businesses around the world on leadership and people. If you’d like to explore how I can help your organization, please check out my website here.