On culture and belongingness
I don’t think there is a way to avoid the company culture conversations those days. Ever since the idea that culture beats strategy was established, everyone seem to have been focused on trying to build a great culture at work. Some companies even try to productise the culture itself.
As you have probably guessed, I have a few things to say on the subject.
The anatomy of culture
The recipe for culture seem pretty straight forward those days. You get everyone in a company into a room, ask all sorts of rather nebulous questions, gather feedback. Then dump that feedback into a dumpster, and assign to the company values that you think fit your vision for the company. Put those on your web-site. Done. Culture.
Sarcasm aside, there is a method to the madness. Culture is formed around shared values. And values are something that people, well, innately value and accept as true unconditionally. Say if two people like sandwiches, you have a sandwiches appreciation culture. Other two like bigotry, you have a bigotry culture between them.
And so companies leadership those days tries to tap into this bonding process by setting company values in hopes of spawning an uniformed culture. Which, as the theory goes, supposed to result in better performance.
The same goes for changing a culture. You change the values, those who agree with the new norms stay, those who disagree leave. You attract and repeal the right kind of people to proliferate the culture at the company. Some lunatics even try to measure how well people fit into the culture through KPIs and annual performance reviews.
Except, it doesn’t exactly work like that. Firstly, values are innately subjective, and therefore cannot be objectively measured. Secondly, not all values are helpful; it’s actually only a very specific group of values that have the potential to improve performance. And lastly, this approach can actively harm diversity within a company if values are chosen carelessly.
The traffic jam
I’ll try to explain culture in a slightly different, less conventional, way.
I used to live in an apartment that overlooked a busy narrow one way street. And so, every day I would see a long line of cars stuck under my windows: some are leaving, some new arriving and trotting along. A constant flow of cars in a slowly moving traffic jam.
On most days it would be relatively quiet. Cars come in, cars come out. But on some other days, something would happen, like road works, or someone gets upset over a pedestrian jaywalking across the road. A car would beep, and then another one, and then another. People get agitated, stressed, and start behaving poorly while being stuck in the line of cars.
The weirdest thing is that this constant beeping will just hang in the air the whole day. The original problem and drivers who started it are long gone, but the beeping stays. Old cars leave, new ones arrive, pick up the aggressive attitude from other cars, start beeping, and then leave.
This idea that something wrong just hangs in the air like a toxic cloud poisoning people’s attitudes all day, until all traffic ceases at night. And the next day it’ll be like nothing had happened.
A culture is like that, it’s an idea that people share. And this idea self-perpetuates through groups of people when they interact. And it stays present long after people who first voiced it out are gone.
How culture actually works
I think “culture” is a rather misleading word for what it is, actually. Bonding or attachment would be a more appropriate one.
In historical terms, society and global culture are relatively new phenomena. Just as most of the language is. As a specie we performed the exact same bonding rituals we call “culture” for hundreds of thousands of years before the idea of society and modern language appeared.
This idea of group belongingness and bonding is so strongly hard wired into us, that isolation and loneliness physically hurt. The recent research showed that the same exact brain regions we use to process physical pain activate when we process social isolation. We literally go mad without human connection.
We are social creatures, social exclusion feels wrong. We really want to belong to a group of people to improve our chances of survival. And the way belongingness works is through bonding over shared ideas. Yes, exactly like culture.
The weirdest thing is that it works completely backwards than we think. It’s not so much that people are attracted/rejected by specific values, it’s more that if a person wants to be a part of a peer group, they will adopt the group’s values as the means of bonding with them. And if they don’t want to belong to a group, they’ll find their values stupid.
Look around you. Thousands of years of religious leadership, rampant nationalism, etc, etc. It’s not like normal people value being bigots, or serve straight up genocidal maniacs. No, they want to belong to a group that improves their chances of survival, and then adopt those group norms as their own values.
And that is exactly what happens in the employment market. Nobody in all seriousness really cares about a no-name startup putting such and such as their values on their website. But, the same people will adopt a big-name company values with almost religious zeal, because it’s a more powerful peer group that can assure their steady employment in the years to come.
What a high performing culture looks like
If that little pondering above got through to you, then the first thing you need to understand is this. Words don’t matter, behaviours do. What people innately want is to belong to a group that provides safety and purpose.
People, especially the creative people who have a bit of an outlier streak to them, need to feel safe to do their best work. Physically, but most importantly psychologically. And that is where creative teams performance originates from. A safe environment where they can try new things.
When we talk about psychological safety, I’m not just talking about people being free of emotional abuse and bigotry from their peers. I’m also talking about the emotional cost of failure. Because if the cost of failure is high, people won’t take risks. And if people won’t take risks, you won’t have innovation.
That is where the bulk of people management efforts should go into. To create a safe and nourishing environment where people are free to bring themselves to work, take risks, and not feel the wrath of punishment when things don’t go the way they were planned.
In safe environments there are no long speeches and complex hierarchies. All interactions are quick and to the point, people maintain eye contact, and they joke a lot. Decisions are made quickly without endless meetings to “sync”. All this can take place because people trust each other.
You can always tell a high performing team when you see jokes being taken a little bit too far, but nobody gets offended. It’s like a constant pinging going on: “am I safe here? what if I do this, do you still like me?“.
My 2.5yo daughter does this non stop. She pushes buttons a bit too far all the time. But, she doesn’t do this to be annoying or elicit attention. She does it to double check that I can take it and that she’s safe with her parent no matter what.
In a way, we all do this in the peer groups where we feel safe. It’s just a hard wired pinging mechanism that keeps ticking in our brains without us realising it.
Culture vs. strategy
I will be blunt with you here. “Culture beats strategy” is easily in my top 5 dumb things that very smart people in software industry casually throw around like a truism. Why? Well, because culture is your strategy; or at least it should be.
It is an established fact that software engineering is a creative profession. And, the thing to remember about creative efforts is that they don’t pay by the hour, they pay per a good idea. And for every good idea there might be dozens of those that didn’t work.
What this means is that creative work has probabilistic outcomes. And, whenever you start dealing with probabilities, you start dealing with risks. People need to take risks to eventually discover good ideas. That’s how innovation works.
In contemporary ulta-competitive environment where most software products have near zero marginal costs, making a 5% better copy of something is not a viable strategy. Most products that make it are innovative ones, and the name of the game is to innovate constantly and continuously.
And so it follows then that if your organisation has to innovate as a way of life, then the team will have to take risks on a continuous basis. Which means the strategy should revolve around reducing the cost of failure to as low as humanly possible. And that is where the culture steps in.
No amount of “work harder” and “great work/life balance” slogans will do the trick here. Because if people don’t feel creatively safe, they will take low risk/reward items and work really hard on those. There is an endless slew of companies out there that always focused on the “low hanging fruit”, work on those for years and never amount to anything important.
Encouraging people to take risks and getting better at it is a cultural phenomena. If risk is encouraged and failures are celebrated, people in the company will know that it is safe to try new things and explore. And if you can channel those risks into the right direction with processes, sooner or later the team will produce something that the customers are willing to pay for.
Culture, the right kind of culture, should be right front and centre of any technology company strategy. Culture produces behaviour, and behaviour produces results. Therefore:
Strategy -> Culture -> Behaviour -> ResultsClosing notes
To be clear, I don’t really argue against having explicitly defined values and such. The point I’m making is that they don’t really matter all that much, because our need for safety and belongingness runs much deeper and goes beyond the language.
Moreover, poorly defined values that reflect the founder’s preferences rather the need to care for people might work against the company’s best interests because they might repel otherwise valuable members of the team.
There is a better way to think about culture. In military they have a good saying about that: culture is what you tolerate. And I think that is a smarter approach to the problem, because it turns it upside down.
What you really need to do as a leader is to be consistently intolerable towards behaviours that diminish people’s sense of safety and belongingness. Do not tolerate blaming, punitive actions, and just common ass-holery among the team members. Because when people start asking themselves “am I next?”, that is where trust is lost and an organisation starts to rot from the within.
The opposite is true as well. Openly tolerating questioning of the leadership by employees is healthy. Inviting constructive criticism of established practices is healthy. Actively giving people as much responsibility as they can stomach does wonders to overall organisational growth. The list goes on and on.
The last point I want to touch is that a culture cannot be simply defined. It needs to be modelled by the company leadership team on the daily basis. The reasons are pretty much the same, culture goes deeper than words, and most people don’t join a company to change its culture. Instead people repeat the behaviour of the company authority figures. And so, unless the authority figures in a group enact the implicit values, nobody will.
Culture is like a bowl of candies. Every time you do something right as a leader, you get one candy in. Every time you betray the trust of people, you get a few hand fulls of candies taken out. A classical asymmetric risk situation.