#111: Creating Culture
Good morning
If you’ve been reading for a while, you know that this letter is shaped by my coaching. Every week I meet nine or ten people. We explore the opportunities and challenges that they face in their lives and businesses. My clients are diverse. Independent professionals, artists, CEOs, and executives navigating corporate life. Different sectors, ages, and cities (Nairobi, Dublin, London, Abidjan, Harare, Cape Town, Johannesburg, to name a few). Then, I spend 10-12 hours reading, listening, and watching the world. What I write to you about emerges from that creative ferment. I figure if it’s important for my clients, if it’s being discussed widely in what I read, then you’re probably grappling with it too.
Today’s letter is about creating culture. I suspect that it’s something you’re thinking about.
/ STRATEGY
The curious thing about culture in the business context is that it is rarely defined. Then often, when the culture conversation comes up, it does so in this way – “I really want our business to have a great culture, but I also need us to be productive” – as if somehow these are separate things. The result is that often ‘culture’ is handed to HR or Marketing to ‘run with.’ That’s a bit like hiring someone to be your personality – ‘hey, I’m really busy for the next while, please go out there, meet people, and let them know I’m a fun person.’ It’s not going to work very well. Culture is core. It’s everyone’s responsibility.
Great culture enables great outcomes which reinforce great culture. It’s a system. Good culture makes it clear where you’re going, why you should care, and what you need to do.
Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall say that “Culture locates us in the world. It consists of stories we share with one another to breathe life into the empty vessel of ‘company’.”
Cool, culture consists of stories, but what is a story?
Best-selling author Anne Lamott offers some guidance. Stories, “help us to understand who we are and how we are to behave. They show us what community and friendship means; they show us how to live and die.”
She goes on to say, “An author makes you notice, makes you pay attention, and this is a great gift.”
As the designer of culture, you’re an author. It is your job to help your stakeholders notice what you’ve seen, and what you think is important.
Okay, we now know what story does, but we still don’t know what it is made up of.
The core of any story is its plot. Writing on plot, Lamott says “something must be at stake, or you will have no tension and your readers will not turn the pages. Think of a hockey player – there had better be a puck out there on the ice, or he is going to look pretty ridiculous” and later on “if someone isn’t changed, then what is the point of your story?”
In an article describing LinkedIn’s recent culture review CEO Ryan Roslansky defines culture as “Who you are, and more importantly, who you aspire to be.” There it is again. Aspire. Hope. A way of pointing to a different future. And its action, who you are, and how you behave.
So, to build culture, you need a story that has a plot, that gives your business and the characters in it a purpose. The best purpose, the best plots are the ones in which something changes for the better, and we all feel a bit more hopeful.
In the business world, we call plot, purpose, or vision, and sometimes mission. The label doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the characters in the story know what is at stake. They all know how you’re trying to change the world. And because they know that they can figure out how to behave appropriately.
One of my favourite podcasts, Masters of Scale says, “Our mission is to democratize entrepreneurship.”
LinkedIn describes their vision as “Create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce.”
Stanford University defines their purpose as being “To enhance and disseminate knowledge that improves humankind.”
You get the point. Culture must define purpose. Without purpose, you’re that hockey player on the ice with no puck.
In preparing this letter, I turned to this podcast “The secret power of onboarding” with Canva CEO Melanie Perkins.
Perkins, and host Reid Hoffman, do a valuable thing. They speak about onboarding, not just employees but also shareholders and users/customers. Culture also defines how you act with everyone.
In speaking about Canva users, Perkins says “we wanted to make sure people felt confident and smart and empowered, and that they could totally design.”
Canva was determined to ensure that when people started using their product, “within a couple of minutes, they were having fun, they felt playful, they felt that they could actually do this.”
How can you create that for your customers and your colleagues?
Think of your experience when you buy a gadget with no instructions or pick up a book that is written in impenetrable language. It doesn’t make you want to do more. Good culture does.
Does your company’s onboarding process help people feel confident? Does it give a little spark of joy? Does it give people the sense of ‘I can do this’? Does it make them want more?
Hoffman notes that “new employees tend to already be motivated. They want to succeed, they want to get paid, and they want to advance within the company. But if you thwart this natural enthusiasm with a bad onboarding process, it can wane. And suddenly your employee is wondering whether this is the right place for them after all.”
He goes further, “You’re not just educating them, you’re enticing them…You’re asking someone to believe so much in your vision that they’re willing to commit the next years of their life to it. The amount of buy-in is huge.”
I hadn’t thought about it as clearly. When you hire someone, you’re asking for the dedication of more than a third of their waking hours for years. You really do want to make sure that you’re educating and enticing them effectively.
Pause here and let that settle.
Onboarding employees is not getting someone to initial each page of the HR Policy Manual. It is not beautifully gift-wrapped corporate goodies, although that can be nice. It is a systematic, intentional set of actions to enable them to integrate into the culture and contribute effectively to the achievement of the purpose. It doesn’t happen magically. You have to design a process that takes them along a path from being a stranger applying for a job, to becoming a partner committed to achieving a purpose. Like Perkins had to figure out how to give Canva users the confidence to keep going further into the product, you need to do the same.
Let’s go back to Lamott. We know that culture is, in part, story. That good stories have clear plots. What else?
“There must be movement. You need to be moving your characters forward, even if they only go slowly.” Stories, culture must create movement. There has to be action.
Roslansky says that “At the end of the day, our Culture and Values is… the thousands of decisions we make as a team on a daily basis using these shared values. It’s about how we aspire to make the world a better place even in the face of all of this change.”
Culture becomes alive when there’s a clear direction (purpose) and clear momentum (actions). That’s culture.
Lastly, just to be clear, having a powerful culture does not mean everything goes.
In a recent letter to staff announcing far-reaching changes to enable a permanent shift to hybrid working, AirBnb CEO Brian Chesky says “To pull off this level of flexibility, we need ample structure and coordination. Without it, things would become a free-for-all. The backbone of how we operate will continue to be our single company calendar with our multi-year roadmap. It’s centered around two major product releases each year—a May release and a November release. Even though not everyone directly works on these product releases, we’re organizing our entire calendar around them to maintain company-wide alignment. Our collaboration sessions, off-sites, social events, and breaks will be planned in advance and designed around this calendar.”
He reminds the organisation that there are boundaries. Every strong culture has them. There are ways you behave, and there are ways you don’t.
Culture breathes life into the empty vessel of the company. Its foundation is a purpose to change something for the better. It is embedded in a clear process that entices people along a journey, it is lived through actions and safeguarded by making clear what is not negotiable. That’s culture. It’s your personality. It’s useful to have one.
/ SELF
In a study conducted at UCLA, subjects were asked to give impromptu speeches. That’s stressful for most of us. The researchers asked half the group to describe what they felt about the process.
The people who were able to use a wide range of words to describe their emotions and who were able to be specific about what they were feeling experienced a far greater reduction in stress than the others in the study. Being able to name their emotions enabled them to be more effective.
The same is true for culture-building. Giving people a rich and specific language to understand what and why they do what they do enables them to be less stressed and more effective (This example is drawn from Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind).
/ SOUL
E.L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
The same applies is the story of your company. Find the one thing that you could do now to move the story forward. Do it.
All the very best
Karl
PS: I am fully booked until the end of June. I only have a handful of places left from July. If you’d like to work with me this year, please get in contact soon. You can follow me on LinkedIn or Instagram. You can subscribe to this letter here.