I completely agree with you and I normally describe it in terms of creating the right culture (aka systemic behaviours). I've yet to read the article in full but will make time for it.
Legal structures don't enforce good behavior, but it always helps to nudge folks in the right direction. As you mention, culture comes from people, and culture is the foundation of every org.
Instead of a "no shaming" culture, I'd like to find a culture of "don't fuck up". "No shaming" and "no assholes" just leads to people cheerily and politely fucking up.
This is easy to say until you have actually tried to create a clear culture. It is even more clear when you have suffered from a bad culture you are trying to reform.
For example, I bought a company, the culture was highly competitive, focused on greed and self enrichment...and what do you know, we caught employees engaged in shady behavior. When we disciplined or fired some, they claimed discrimination, and while I have personal experience with discrimination and fully acknowledge it exists, their allegations had no merit, and their actions required the consequences.
The longer a lead people the more I value and strive to create a good culture.
A great culture is really hard to reproduce because it depends on the ability of the CEO. The CEO needs to properly evaluate the performance of his team, and reward or punish them fairly to demonstrate the culture. In the meantime, the CEO needs to find the likeminded people to uphold the culture. In the end, culture is not a plaque on the wall but how the company rewards and punishes employees at every level.
A simple example. Netflix promotes Freedom and Responsibility. Their engineers seemingly had freedom to choose their own systems to build with their own designs at their own pace. The company's guideline to their managers used to be "All that a manager does is to set context". But really? How can the leaders avoid catastrophic failures? How can the leaders keep their orgs' schedules and promises? How can the leaders draw the line between empowering and micro-management in such environment? It's not there is a runbook. And things do fail and sometimes someone do take the fall. Then who? How much? How do the leaders do it to avoid sink the culture?
Building such culture requires checks and controls where you can see. It requires customers that complain after a while if things don't work. It requires management that does not reward pure speed. The "that's how it's done right and I don't do it half-assed" does not magically happen.
It's not really culture. It's a small minority of radical extremists who get their own way repeatedly by threatening meltdowns out of all proportion to the severity of the problem, and emotionally manipulating their own managers ("you're a bad person if you don't do this"). And they do it again and again, until the organization starts to collapse and becomes a mere tool for their political agendas.
The best way to push back on this is not some p2p techno fix. It's to systematically start firing anyone in an organization who demands the moral cleansing of customers or colleagues.
I think that it is sort of "darwinian." If a corporation doesn't establish a culture of excellence (whatever the measure may be), then they will get not-excellent results.
"Cultural fit" is important, but, as a former manager that had to make many accommodations for highly-qualified and diverse employees, it's also important for a team/company to be prepared to adjust their culture to get that excellence.
Right. But the fact that you and your colleagues care that people can attack problems and can learn is what the culture is. You would be surprised, some cultures are built with a desire for 'follow the leader' mentality, and do not care if you can attack problems, as long as your willing to obey.
Agree, it's a combination of both, as well as some other challenges. Yes, it's a culture that seems to support these behaviors broadly across the organization, a leadership team that isn't demonstrating the right behaviors and managers that are emulating their leader's behavior. There are definitely opportunities to change processes, behaviors, beliefs/thinking to tweak the culture, as well as give their managers training on how to get the best from their teams and support the company strategy.
Bad org culture will be bad no matter the mechanisms. You can use OKRs to be toxic and you can use Agile to be toxic and you can use your own bespoke bullshit to be toxic. There is no management framework that can fix bad culture because its only a part of it. Incentives structure, existing culture, hiring practices, company life cycle, market conditions, etc all contribute to it and no amount of data can fix those. Managing a company is like parenting, if you think that you can replace attention, care and hard work with a framework you are doing it wrong.
You're right, and I addressed this in another reply, but keeping a good company culture requires a very special leadership team, and it can't and won't last forever.
Of course, sometimes you still have to cut people out, but it is possible to foster a culture of growth rather than a climate of terror.
If this sounds strange, it's because so few organizations do it, not because it doesn't work.
reply