How Would Others Describe Our Culture?

Every organization has a culture.

Some organizations boast terrific workplace cultures while other organizations survive in spite of theirs.

The healthy environments where I’ve worked – first as an employee, then as a leader and eventually as an owner – seemed to occur naturally. These high-performing workplace cultures were distinguished by talented people who collaborated with one another and also with clients we respected. We spoke hard truths. We had fun. We produced terrific results. We made money.

Looking back, it’s clear I took those wonderful workplace environments for granted.

It wasn’t until I experienced what it was like to work in a place with an awful culture that I came to realize that a great culture, like most worthwhile things in life, requires intentionality, effort and difficult choices. A culture clash eventually ended the top leader’s reign of mediocrity. See my blog The CEO’s New Clothes. 

Workplace Culture: A Human Petri Dish

Scientists often study microorganisms like bacteria, fungi and viruses by isolating them in a Petri dish, a shallow, circular and transparent laboratory dish with a loose-fitting lid.

A workplace culture is a human Petri dish. If you want to know how work gets done – or doesn’t get done – study the behaviors of people inside their organization.

Elliott Jaques introduced the concept of organizational culture in his 1951 book The Changing Culture of a Factory.

Jaques was a Canadian psychoanalyst, social scientist and management consultant who studied the structures and systems of organizations. By examining organizational structure as the way people work with one another, Jaques concluded that some people in organizations are more valuable than others (and command higher salaries) because of their ability to envision the future and complete a task without supervision. Jaques called this concept “timespan” and defined it as the length of time a person can work without direction using their own independent, discretionary judgment. Timespan became the way leaders measure the complexity of a task and the effectiveness of a worker. Jaques collected this learning into his 1989 book Requisite Organization.

In 2001, Jim Collins concluded in Good to Great that getting the right people on the bus and getting the wrong people off the bus were keys to organizational success.

Both Jaques and Collins examined culture.

In 2009, in the depth of a worldwide recession, I began researching the factors that separate high-performing companies from all the rest. I knew from working with successful CEOs and their leadership teams that an important part of the answer lay in how high-performing organizations approach the idea of accountability.

But if accountability is so important, why do so many leaders struggle with it?

What I found surprised me.

In my book Accountability: The Key to Driving a High-Performance Culture I noted one of those surprises: accountability is least effective when it’s reduced to a single conversation.

While being accountable (or not) can be linked to a single event, what surprised me then but seems obvious now is that accountability – when practiced effectively – is a way of thinking and acting all the time. Accountability is not based on circumstance but rather on an attitude of accomplishing a task or achieving an objective despite circumstance. With people, accountability is a mindset. With organizations, accountability is a culture.

Your culture – whether it’s terrific, terrible or simply the accumulation of unclear expectations, double standards and subpar work – is a significant predictor of your future performance.

Beware of These Behaviors

Your culture is a crutch when these excuses allow bad behavior:

The wrong culture. A new outside CEO hired to reverse a company’s poor performance discovered a “culture of collegiality” that allowed people to ignore tough but necessary changes, to disregard chains of command and to gossip incessantly. Armed with that cultural crutch, tenured employees gave themselves permission to behave badly. It took two years, a few terminations and lots of character to replace the dysfunctional culture with a high-performance culture.

You can change culture. It will take time, consistency and guts.

We enjoy low turnover. The talent on your team is the best indicator of where your organization is headed. This means low turnover is only good for your organization when your best people are staying and your poor performers are leaving. It’s obviously a bad culture when the situation is reversed.

Are people trying to join our organization or leave it?

One bad apple can spoil the whole barrel. If you think one person can’t poison a culture, think again. I’ve watched as leaders took literally years to remove a toxic person from the organization. Offenders are tolerated because of their tenure, their skills or their relationships with certain people. Perhaps there’s a belief you can fix them. Or that they’ll change. Failure to speak frankly with the person about his or her performance means nothing will change. Once a bad apple is removed, watch as your people cheer and your results improve.

One bad person can wreck your culture. One strong person can turn it around.

Silence doesn’t always equal agreement. When a leader is feared or it becomes clear that no amount of evidence will change a leader’s mind, people stop asking the tough questions. What passes for alignment is really surrender. Or self-preservation lest thoughtful, appropriate questions be interpreted as lack of enthusiasm, disapproval or disloyalty. Socrates’ questions exposed painful truths — and cost him his life. Did he ask the right questions, or simply one too many?

Ask yourself: Would I rather be wrong and happy or know the truth and be uncomfortable?

Two sets of rules. When there are two sets of rules in the workplace, leaders find themselves on a slippery slope when they fail to address offenders. A double standard can take many forms: a leader’s conscious decision to let certain performance slide. Owners exempting themselves from the rules they expect others to follow. Supervisors offering unequal praise or compensation for similar achievements or tasks. Failure to confront double standards is unfair to the rest of your workforce and will harm your credibility.

It’s not about being equal. It’s about being fair.

Years ago, Arthur W. Jones, a Procter & Gamble executive working in the UK noted, “All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get.”

Here’s one way to think about this idea:

How would others describe our culture?