Creating a Sustainable Company Culture

An organization’s vision, mission, and values are the roots of its culture, and creating them is a completely different topic. This post assumes you have these things already and did a good job creating them. A good way for you to know if you did a good job with them is to ask a bunch of random team members what they are and what they mean. In the vast majority of organizations, a mission statement is largely window dressing. A marketing exercise completed and forgotten except on some walls and marketing materials. If this is you, then your culture is already in trouble. And lastly, before we move on from this related topic, a vision creates an asymptote, something you can approach and get close to by never meets. A mission points the organization in a direction and the values tell you how to get there.

This is important for culture because if your vision, mission, and values are a great fit for your organization, then a core part of your culture will be to follow them.

Before we go any deeper, let’s define what sustainable culture is. It’s durable, long-lasting, adaptable, inclusive and it’s the guiding force for creating trust and transparency in our organizations. It’s something we live in our work lives, not a marketing exercise. A sustainable culture serves its organization, customers, and partners. It helps to define the organization and should be easily propagated. Zappos culture book is an excellent example of an artifact that supports a sustainable culture.

Branham and Hirshfield’s book, Re-Engage is basically a set of case studies for how to define your culture, it’s essential reading to help you define your culture. In fact, there are a few areas of research that will be key to creating a sustainable culture. Positive Psychology teaches us to have optimal lives, how to be resilient, and how to be grateful and feel like we are enough. It teaches us how to motivate ourselves and how not to have a negative impact on other people’s motivation. This field also tells us how to attain Flow States which increase our well-being and the quality of our work. Behavioral Economics is the science behind marketing, it’s the study of why people do what they do and shows that while we are predictable, we are also very irrational. Most of why we do what we do needs to be researched to be understood because it’s so counterintuitive. For instance, in studies done around the world, when you offer someone a reward to do a creative task and measure things like time to completion of a creative task, the person being rewarded is always slower to complete the task. Cognitive Neuroscience is the study of how our physical brains work in conjunction with our cognition. We learn how memory and recall work, that our brains are essentially serial processors. We can only hold a small number of things in our minds at a time, which means we are bad at multitasking. Systems Thinking is also a key topic. It shows us how to create feedback loops to see how things are obscured by time. If you have long-term goals that span 20, 30...100 years, this will be very important. Human beings are very complex, and our problems generally require complex solutions. Browse my reading list for related books. It would be a great idea to get a grounding in these areas before trying to create a sustainable company culture. Like with most things, the more work you do upfront, the more it will pay off. Go slow now to go fast later.

If you are a bit overwhelmed by fulfilling these prerequisites, that’s normal. This is a huge undertaking that requires massive work and dedication. If the idea of this excites you, as it does me, it’s a good indicator that this sort of work is a good fit for you. Getting a grounding in these areas can take a year (if you work on nothing else and learn very quickly), to 3 or 4 years. 2 years is a good timeline to shoot for if you can be dedicated. To speed things up, work with your team, commit to being a SME in an area, and share your knowledge. If you don’t do the prework, you’ll make a lot more mistakes, take wrong turns, and find dead ends. You’ll also much more likely to fail or get crappy results.

I’ve been studying these topics since 2010 when I launched my blog. I’m obsessed with creating generational companies. Companies that last at least 50-100+ years because big hairy problems take generations to solve.

What next? Use your learning in intrinsic motivation to help your team inspire itself to take on the task of defining your culture. The more the team is involved, the more they will buy into the results, the better the results will be. Keep in mind the things you’ve learned while you are defining your culture to keep the team engaged and put in feedback loops to help you know when things are going off track so they can be addressed.

The vast majority of company cultures are random and not well thought out, many that are thought out are not based on good science, either way, the results aren’t great and usually not very sustainable. That’s because doing this well is hard work and most companies want a quick fix. Even the ones with great intentions can easily go off track if they don’t understand the science.

If you thought you were going to get a quick answer, sorry about that. That would be like looking up how to do a laparoscopic appendectomy, having not been to med school and expecting you could hit the medical supply store, read up and do a quick operation over the weekend. Humans are very complex, the more of us that interact, the more complex things get.

Now get out there and change the world!

The Most Impactful Thing You Can do as a Leader!

From a team perspective, the primary service we can perform as leaders is to enable the success of our teams, to be servant leaders. To do that, we have to know what success looks like, ensure that the team has the tools and knowledge they need, that they are developing mastery and growing, and that we have created an environment conducive for them to motivate themselves.

There is a lot to unpack here!

Knowing what success looks like starts with our mission and vision, then working with each team member to negotiate their goals to support the mission. Once we do that, we can work with them to create measures. The goals should be stretch goals. They should cause the team to learn new skills or expand existing skills. Having a learning organization is central to keeping up with our ever-changing world. It’s also essential to consider the area(s) of mastery team members are developing so their goals align.

Now that we have a direction and goals, we can do a gap analysis to ensure that team members have the tools and mentoring they need and a learning plan. We are setting them up for success and fulfillment. Measures of success should be reviewed regularly. This may vary due to the complexity of the task or the goal date. A weekly check-in is a good idea. If we had waited to look at measures until near the end of the project, it could have veered off track. It’s also important to take an agile approach and adjust or even eliminate tasks as business needs change. If you have to change direction or end a task, make it a collaborative decision. Don’t make a pronouncement. More on that shortly.

Team members’ mastery is essential for an organization to stay relevant. The rate of change in society and technology is ever-increasing. If we think of an organization as an organism, we can’t just have some portion of the organization growing and learning. The whole team needs to participate. The whole organism needs to evolve. Not just the head or the feet.

Underpinning all of this creates an environment conducive for the team to motivate themselves. Extrinsic motivation, command, and control, or carrots and sticks, is an outdated and harmful practice for team members who do creative work. In the knowledge economy, that should be all of us. This leads us to intrinsic motivation, the engine of personal purpose and self-motivation, our “why.” Dan Pink, in his book Drive, says the team needs Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose for us to motivate ourselves. We need autonomy about the work we do, when we do it, and who we do it with, we need to be constantly challenged and growing toward a deeper mastery, and we need to be part of something bigger than ourselves. These things are necessary and not sufficient.
All of this is important because if our team does not feel safe, valued, and relevant, if they don’t trust their leaders or each other, their fight or flight reaction will be triggered, and their ability for creative thinking will be impaired. Any time this happens, it takes a lot of effort to build trust and feel safe again. Because of how our brains work, it’s much easier to make us feel unsafe or threatened than to do the opposite. This is one reason why trust and transparency are so important. We are less resistant when we feel safe, trust our leaders, and are involved in change. And we want our teams to embrace change, not actively resist it.

This is why servant leadership is so important. Leaders must build relationships with their direct reports, trust, and demonstrate care. They have to be dedicated to the well-being and success of each team member.

Being a servant leader is more like being a coach than a boss. And a well-cared-for team will walk over hot coals for such a leader!. Some of you are probably thinking, what about the shit work? That’s easy. We all do it, each of us takes a turn. We do it for the good of the team. When I was in IT leadership roles and a truck pulled up with equipment, I was the first one out the door to help unload, and with a smile on my face and a spring in my step.

Building these relationships with the team, understanding their passions, what motivates, them how they like to be recognized, and what they are good at is hard work, helping them create goals and measures is harder still. At our core, we all want to be of service, and this is the way leaders can be of the highest level of service. It’s the most important work we can do.

The Science Behind Scrum

Scrum is a flavor of agile software development. In agile the development teams are cross-functional and self-managing. The development cycles, called sprints, are short, four weeks or less. By the end of a sprint, the code must be functional, tested, and working. Scrum functions on something called empirical process control. Traditional software development (command and control) uses defined process control based on the theory of how something should work. This is at the heart of why so many traditional software projects either fail or generate bad code. Defined process control is meant to work on projects that are not very complex, tasks that do not need to be exact, like making hat pins. Empirical process control is used in serious engineering when tolerances need to be exact. 

Instead of planning out your software design months in advance and guessing at what will work, like traditional software development, scrum encourages experimentation via transparency, observation, and adaptation. The saying “fail early and often” comes to mind. With scrum, one is constantly learning and improving skills, efficiency, and quality. Scrum is conducive to creating flow states which leads to mastery. A scrum is a self-organizing team or rather a team without a manager, a team that picks what work it will do and how it will do the work. Whether its creators know it or not, scrum has a lot of self-determination theory.  Scrum is, in many ways, intrinsic motivation in sheep’s clothing.

I am floored that I just figured this out. I had heard of agile development and scrum but I had never read anything about it, nor have I come across it in any of my research. Scrum is rife with positive psychology, self-determination theory (SDT), behavioral economics, and cognitive neuroscience.

None of this is mentioned in any of the literature I have read, and by this point, I’ve read quite a bit. What is the benefit of using scrums to develop software? Scrum teams develop software up to 15 times faster than traditional project management processes. Holy performance increase, batman! Granted, a minimal number of teams ever get to that level. Gains of 400% are achievable by any team willing to do the work. Not only is the work done quickly, but at the end of a development iteration or sprint, the code developed is ready to ship, and it generally has fewer bugs than traditional methods.

I watched a Google Tech Talk: Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum team by one of scrum’s creators: Jeff Sutherland. He talked about how having people co-located creates a social bond. The idea is that if people work closely together, they will care about each other, be a better team, and do better work. This comes out of behavioral economics, which tells us that we have two kinds of relationships, social relationships, and transactional relationships. Social relationships build trust and result in win-win situations. Transactional relationships build rewards and result in win-lose situations.

Agile development teams do 30% of all development. Though my research for this post indicates that only 50% of teams that call themselves agile are fully agile, and only 10% of scrums are scrums. Most teams implement some kind of less successful variant. This kills me! Implementing agile or scrum means that management has to change too much or give up too much power to fully adopt these practices, that or teams are resistant to change. Speed and quality matter, not how compliant you are with a framework.

The sacred protector of the team and scrum theory is the scrum master. Part leader, part servant, his job is to ensure the team is fully enabled to succeed and remove any impediment to their success. She does this by being an expert on the framework, genuinely caring about the team, and focusing on doing whatever it takes to make the team successful and keep them focused. It certainly would not hurt if the scrum master understood SDT, positive psychology, and behavioral economics. Though I think all leaders should.

I’m ecstatic to find evidence-based practices worming their way into the workplace! As a side benefit, it gives me something new to research and writes about. Hug your local agile programmer; they is making the world better.