Ever since I wrote about Elon Musk buying Twitter last year I’ve been triggered a little — and not for reasons you might imagine.
The question that fires me up right as I’m supposed to be drifting off to sleep is how can so many, ostensibly smart, people be so dumb?
If that sounds harsh, it is, but I have scar tissue here. Old trauma makes me cranky, and watching people not just misunderstand culture but get it completely backwards drives me crazy because it does so much damage to so many people’s lives, and it’s relatively easy to fix.
Today we’ll look at what they got upside down that caused them (and me) so much pain, then move on to how we can all take culture from remedial to a strategic weapon — which far too few companies manage.
The cost of bad culture and the reward of great
Companies with great culture make twice as much profit as companies with poor culture, according to research from McKinsey. Of course, there’s no way to separate cause and effect to tell if well-performing companies just feel like they have great cultures, but the stat makes sense.
If you’ve had more than a couple of jobs you’ve likely worked somewhere where the culture was toxic or downright abusive. That’s how common the problem is. In a world where we’ve made so much progress in so many areas, culture is one that we still seem to struggle with.
Three things we got wrong about culture, and three ways you can unlock everything
As I watched ex-Twitter employee after ex-Twitter employee flagrantly misunderstand how companies work and what company culture is — and isn’t— I was thrust back to many a corporate offsite where I facilitated culture change. Companies executives in hotel meeting rooms hacked away at their cultures with blunt instruments while I facilitated the carnage from the flipchart. Back then I knew only that what we were doing was wrong, but I didn’t have the skills to tell them how it should be right.
I’ve run many corporate offsites and they all go a bit like this:
Individually or in small teams, execs list everything they want the culture to be
We post those on the wall and then everyone votes for their favorite, usually by walking around and sticking post-its next to them
While a colleague talks to the team about something terribly interesting, I feverishly count the votes and post the top 10 values on the big screen via PPT
The team debates the items, merges some, and wordsmiths others to come up with a tightly-curated list of 5-8 cultural values the company should embody (the perfect sized list is one people can actually remember)
The list is handed over to a sub-committee, usually chaired by HR, to go through a second-tier review and then roll it out
As a process, it’s not horrible. It allows creativity and attempts to resist groupthink and other team biases. Except the results were garbage. Teams would universally come up with a list of what I call “ways to be nice at work.” Additionally, the list was almost always a reaction to things people hated about the current culture.
What should we have done?
1. Culture isn’t about making employees happy
The ex-Twitter employees were angry. As Musk slashed through the company making wholesale layoffs they couldn’t understand how anyone could be so mean. They might not be wrong, but one thing they definitely did have backward is that culture is not about them. Culture is about the company.
A good culture is not there to make the employees happy, a good culture is there to achieve the mission of the company.
Worse, ex-twits had fallen into the trap that the primary job of culture — and perhaps leadership and HR — is to make the employees happy, perhaps under some misguided idea that happy employees are productive employees.
No, happy employees are entitled employees, just as we’ve all seen that one friend devote their life to their kid’s happiness, only to end up raising insufferable, immature “adulters.” It wasn’t tech workers leaving the building, it was toddlers throwing tantrums.
I’d estimate about 25% of companies — including many who should know better — have fallen into the happiness trap where execs spend time trying to work out how to make everyone happy, engaged, and feel welcome.
It’s not an unworthy goal, but it’s less effective for two reasons:
Happiness doesn’t make great culture. Great culture makes happiness.
You cannot increase happiness by focusing on happiness. Not in yourself, and definitely not in others.
What to do: Stop focusing on free food, nap pods, and ping pong. They won’t make employees happy. If you want to be a great humanitarian, create great culture by providing clarity, consistency, and alignment. Make it so employees know what to do to be successful and remove mismatches in what is said and done that create huge frustration, then your employees can choose to be happy.
2. Culture is as vital as strategy
You can’t understand what culture is and how to optimize it without understanding what a company is and why it’s there. Companies are legal entities that allow investors to pool resources to achieve a common goal. They have a vision or mission, which the exec team is responsible for translating into a strategy, the broad steps to achieve the mission.
Culture is how humans interact in a group, or “how things are done.” I would argue that because humans are the only things making decisions at work until Chat-GPT6 comes out next year, and because humans are constantly interacting to make the strategy come to life, that culture is at least as important as strategy.
You have a culture whether you define one or not. Culture’s not something you do to make work tolerable. It’s not an add-on to business as usual. It is business as usual.
A better way to think about culture than the “list of nice things” approach mentioned earlier, is to consider compromises and trade-offs.
For example, honesty and kindness might both make your final corporate values poster, but what happens when I have to choose between telling my co-worker they’re wrong about something prominent but not vital, or choosing to be friendly and letting it slide?
Chances are you just made a decision about which one you’d do in that scenario. The answer likely came quickly because you’ve been there before. But half of the people reading this would disagree with you, some quite forcefully.
The “list of nice things” approach to culture is just things everyone should be doing anyway: Honesty. Of course everyone should be honest at work. Kindness. Of course. Hard work. Of course. Safety. Innovation. Initiative. Of course, of course, of course.
The question should be, which values should take preference to achieve the mission?
What to do: Work out which tradeoffs your employees need to make and which cultural traits would make your organization massively successful. Then bake culture into everything: hiring, firing, retaining, training meetings, reviews, coaching, promotions, town halls, benefits, offices, branding, surveys. Everything. If you do that, the best people to help you achieve the mission will opt-in. The best people to help you achieve the mission will stay. The best people to help you achieve the mission will thrive.
3. Default culture is garbage
If we know what culture isn’t and we know how it relates to a company mission, we may also benefit to consider how culture fits in a wider perspective. After all, culture is such a broad term encompassing music, ancient temples, baking bread, nose piercings, and corporate offsites.
At the broadest level, culture is a nested hierarchy of norms from the many human systems we're involved in simultaneously.
We’re all part of nations, regions, companies, religions, languages, teams, and a thing called the human race. Each has a cultural expectation (this is how we do things here), all at the same time.
If you choose not to set culture at a company level, you’ll get the culture from the local area you’re in. If you don’t care about risk tolerance, for example, the cultural norm in the US will give you the whole spectrum from hesitant cowards to reckless mavericks. The spectrum would be different in France or the Philippines or Japan.
These nested expectations sit side-by-side, overlap, or contradict each other. The latter is deadly because when you break culture you’re expelled from the group that established the norm.
I grew up in England. English people don’t talk on buses or on the underground. It’s very rude to have other people overhear your conversation. It would be an intrusion and it’s just not done. So when Americans bumble into the tube and start yelling at each other (what Americans call “talking”), every single English person in the station or on the train knows those people are not part of this group. (The Americans, meanwhile, never notice.)
If you’re counter-culture to the English, you’ll be expelled from the English herd. If you’re counter-culture to the human race, you can be expelled from that too. Throw rocks at children, for example, and the other humans will expel you from the human herd using every tool they have available, even if you never hit them. It’s just not done anywhere.
What happens to you at work when you’re counter-culture is similar. If you happen to break the mostly unwritten code, you’ll be shunned, looked over for promotion, or fired. It could be just that you’re bumbling around yelling at everyone, or you could be throwing rocks at sacred idols.
How are you supposed to know? You have to pay attention and pick it up. People will correct you subtly at first, then more forcefully. This is why many jobs come with a years-on-the-job expectation: how many years does it take the average college grad to know how to navigate the unwritten rules of mid-management?
Employees struggle with this for a number of reasons:
They may not know how to observe
They may not know they need to observe: after all, we’ve been telling people they are “special” for years when they’re just ordinary
They think it’s the company’s job to keep them employed or to keep them happy even if they see the mismatch (looking at you ex-twits)
There’s no real consistent culture, so people have to relearn it for every team and office they work in
There are not enough signposts at work: consistent culture isn’t baked into everything
What is said and what are done are vastly different: it’s very confusing when official culture is different to the actual culture
Local culture, company culture, and team culture contradict each other (team culture is usually mostly set by the team leader)
What to do: It’s the leadership’s job to understand which things should be consistent culturally and which things should not. Culture doesn't have to be homogenous to be successful. It just has to be clear. Take the best from your location. Clarify big trade-offs at an organizational level and encourage teams to build on that. Different teams inside the organization may have slightly different cultures: your compliance team and your sales team are going to have different cultures. But there's going to be some base that they're going to get from the company and some base they're going to get from civilization in general.
Conclusion
So in summary. Culture is insanely powerful and much more complicated than we give it credit for. Don't just focus on happiness, focus on clarity and you'll find happiness.
You should be talking about culture as often as you talk about strategy. If you don't define strategy, your location will define it for you. And that's going to leave a mess in some fairly important pieces in order for you to achieve your vision.