The Looking Glass: Culture Changers

More like a forest, less like a Stonehenge. A deep dive into what culture really is, and how you can go about evolving it.

Dear Readers,

Which of these entices you more?

1. A goal without a plan is just a wish — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
2. Culture eats strategy for lunch — Peter Drucker

(Side note: is the reason the second phrase is so popular explained by just how weird it is to liken abstract management concepts to animals fighting for food chain dominance?)

I’ll leave you to guess which is on my mind this week.

Warmly,

~Julie

In this issue:

1. Culture is the why
2. How to change a culture
3. From the archives: excerpt from Growing Up

For paid subscribers:

1. How to spread a message

Culture is the why, not the what

What’s your team’s culture?

Here’s a bunch of common answers I hear:

• We work long hours
• We have a fun, friendly atmosphere
• We’re competitive
• Our management is great
• There’s good transparency about what’s going on
• We’re too focused on metrics

Essentially, people tend to answer the question What’s your team’s culture? as if they are answering, This is what it’s like to work here (mostly the good parts).

That’s all fine and dandy and maybe helpful for an outsider, but I don’t find these answers particularly satisfactory. They’re shallow, like responding blue when someone asks, What’s an ocean?

The word culture itself comes from the root cultivate — as in to grow with intention. So how about we ask a deeper question: What beliefs water your team’s growth?

After all, beliefs are the roots of actions. They explain why the team operates as it does.

We work long hours can have many root beliefs. For example, a team might believe: Time spent working at the office convinces the higher-ups we are good employees. So there is a norm of staying at the office until past dinner, or coming in on weekends for the optics of it.

Alternatively, a root belief might be: People are capable of extraordinary things if you give them a lot of ownership. So folks are trusted to take on large swaths of responsibility, which means they end up choosing to work more.

The behavior might be the same, but the why differs dramatically in those two examples. I know which team I’d rather be a part of.

When you believe something deeply, it’s natural that you’ll put that belief into action, maybe even subconsciously. Thus, if we understand the story that team members tell themselves about what being successful looks like, we will understand their culture.

So. The next time someone asks you “What’s your team culture?” I hope you will answer it by saying: “Well, let me tell you of the beliefs we hold dear…”

Conversely, if you are looking to understand a team’s culture, ask the more opinionated question: “What would someone have to believe to be successful here?”

How to change a culture

Because culture is beliefs, and beliefs are more like forests than Stonehenge, culture can change. In fact, a single person can change a culture with a compelling new belief. Maybe that person will be you.

How do you go about changing a culture? You must cross 3 gates:

1. Gate #1: Know what existing belief you want to change and where it came from.
   What is the belief that you worry is leading the team astray? Where does it come from? (The CEO’s anxiety brought about by demanding board members and a chip on her shoulder? That terrible, horrible, no-good outage of 2021? An internally-viral LinkedIn post about how Amazon / Facebook / Netflix operates?)
   
   You need to dig past the undesirable behavior (“Ugh why do people write such garbage code?!”) and get to the core belief underneath it (“People here believe shipping faster is more important than writing sustainable code”).
   
   What made reasonable people adopt this belief? (“Hmm, looks like our leadership is constantly pushing the team to ship features as fast as possible.”) And keep going up the chain — what made those people do that? (“Leadership probably thinks this is how we’re going to get things done faster and be more productive.”)
   
   Now identify the specific error in the belief. One way to do this is to ask yourself: In what context is the current belief helpful? Since your leadership is (probably) not a bunch of idiots, they probably believe what they believe for a earnest, if misguided reason. (“If our team was a lazy bunch of mo-fos, then pushing is healthy. Or if our team were in pursuit of perfection in their quality bar and slowing things down too much, feeling some ship pressure is useful”).
   
   Now ask the opposite question: in what context does this existing belief lead to problems? This is where you can narrow into the specific place with the pre-existing belief falls short (“When you have a bunch of earnest, early-career engineers who are shy about pushing back and you tell them to move really fast, they are going to write unmaintainable code.”)
2. Gate #2: Know what alternative belief you’d like to stand for.
   Now that you have identified the problematic belief, it’s time to propose an alternative. Imagine all the miracles of the world at your fingertips in the form of a magic wand. If you could wave this wand and have everyone on your team suddenly believe something different, what would they believe?
   
   Now it’s up to you to stand up for that belief.
   
   It’s not enough to just cross your arms and oppose things. Naysayers only multiply frustration.
   
   To really bring about change, you need to create. So go ahead and propose your alternative. Make it as attractive as you possibly can.
   
   A good tactic is to go after the SAME goal as the original belief, but with a different strategy (“Guys, we can move FASTER if we write quality code!”)
3. Gate #3: Start telling this different story over and over again.
4. Once you have your new belief, it’s time to put on your leadership hat and spread the gospel.
   
   I don’t mean just write it on a Slack post, or raise your hand once in an eng sync and consider it done and dusted. We all know leadership is about the art of influence.
   
   The very boring part of influence is how much you will need to repeat a message — over and over and over again, until you are sure you have become a walking cliche — before it truly sinks in.
   
   Repeat your new belief in a 1:1, in a team meeting, on slack. If you find a new example where it seems to be playing out (“Oh hey, another production bug due to sloppy code!”), take that opportunity to repeat your belief. (“Guuuuuyyys remember how I said we can move FASTER if we write quality code? Now we gotta spent our middle-of-the-night hours firefighting! Not to mention our customer gets a bad experience!”)
   
   Let people poke holes at your belief, because deeper discussion further strengthens the idea. Some folks might not agree or change their actions immediately, but don’t let that discourage you. Keep repeating.
   
   You’ll know you’re on the right track when you start hearing a second person on the team repeating your new belief.
   
   Once the updated belief takes hold, it should be easy for the desired behaviors to naturally fall into place. (“How about more stringent code reviews? Holding folks to a higher code quality bar? The writing of unit tests? Better interview processes?)

Certainly, changing a culture is not easy. The more entrenched the belief and the bigger the team, the harder it is to sway hearts and minds.

But in my experience, people tend to think changing culture is harder than it actually is. This underlying belief — I don’t like how we’re doing things but I don’t think I can change it — is in of itself a limiting belief I’d like to persuade you to change.

Still unconvinced? Remember the wise words of Sun Tzu:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Of course he was talking about culture, right? :P

From the Archives: excerpt from Growing Up

Yes, a company is an entity, a dynamic organism. It has the capacity to change, but it also has its own soul. When it hums and breathes, it does so at a specific frequency. It can be inspiring and beautiful like nothing else, the whirring of dozens of minds and hearts in synchrony, hoping together and aching together. Hands crafting something larger than an individual could possibly accomplish. The company sings of a dream that feels ambitious and pure, that draws you in so you can’t help but sway along, throat shaping those same notes, head bobbing along, eyes bright.

And like with all real, living things — the company can be terrible as well. It lets you down. It frustrates you. You awake some days to find that it has strayed from its promise. That it has made a mistake, or ten, or maybe a hundred. That its insides are twisted up like snakes, and chaos has descended like a stormcloud, thickening the sky so you can’t tell north from west.

But through all that, the thing that is significant, the thing that really matters, is the way that sort of relationship changes you. Whether it’s a person, a family, a city or a company — some experiences craft you into the person you are. That you will be. A relationship can demand from you the type of growth that you never thought possible. Teach you lessons that you didn’t even know you didn’t know.

There is one more chapter in this article for paid subscribers

1. How to spread a cultural message

If you like my words and want to support more of my writing, consider being a paid subscriber!

My emoji-of-gratitude to all of ya’ll who have done so. It means something substantial to me.

Read more