Author: gothamCulture

How To Take The ‘Cult’ Out Of Your Company Culture

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,
cult company culture

When you think of a cult, do shuttle buses come to mind? Probably not, but Silicon Valley tech companies have used this method of transportation to keep their workers isolated from the rest of the world. And as they bind their employees closer together, workers are significantly less likely to leave.

While the term “cult” often conjures up mental images of drab clothes, remote farms, and blue Kool-Aid, cults can also refer to the culture within certain companies. A cult, after all, is simply a group connected by appreciation for the same thing, person, or ideal.

There’s no doubt that articulating a clear and compelling vision for the future of your organization can drive member excitement, but things get murky when control enters the equation. If your company culture governs the thinking and behavior of its members, then you might be entering cult territory.

Your Company Might Be a Cult If…

There are multiple signs that indicate that your company is exhibiting cult-like behavior — for example, encouraging your employees to blindly follow a charismatic leader. By taking the leader’s opinions as fact, your company may grow so rigid that innovation becomes impossible.

Additionally, organizations that minimize two-way dialogue stifle growth and encourage employees to accept the status quo and silence their opinions. However, creating an environment where people don’t push back and aren’t engaged in healthy debate can lead to serious problems.

Lastly, in cult-like organizations, values are taken to such an extreme that anyone who questions the way things are done is quickly ostracized or ejected.

Create a Collaborative Environment

All of these practices can seriously endanger the health of your organization. If you’re noticing any of them creeping up, put these four fixes in place to safeguard your company from becoming more of a cult than a culture:

1. Take Responsibility

Once you’ve diagnosed the situation, take responsibility rather than avoid the issues at hand. Author Ronald Heifetz suggests reducing avoidance mechanisms such as denying, scapegoating, or pretending that the problem is technical. Companies that attack individuals rather than issues risk further cult-like behavior.Owning the behavior is difficult. You should allow people to take responsibility for problems, but they should do so at a rate they can handle.

2. Introduce New Talent

Strive to introduce new, talented employees who live on the fringes of a culture fit. If you onboard people who challenge the culture, your company will be able to grow and mature.You may need to rely on new members of the organization to raise the issue of cult-like behavior because they’re experiencing your company for the first time. Encourage acceptance of these new employees — particularly when your goal is to change the company’s trajectory.

3. Create Dialogue Mechanisms

Develop mechanisms for leaders and employees to engage in honest, two-way dialogue in a safe environment. Talking with new hires, consultants, and advisors will force your organization to think about problems from multiple angles.You must protect people who raise hard questions. At first, raising these potential problems will generate distress, but the questions will challenge your employees to rethink the issues at stake.

4. Reward Responsible Risk-Taking

Establish a new team, business, or investment with clear authority to take risks and create beyond the organization’s previous boundaries. Businesses can only grow through introducing new ideas and taking appropriate risks.Share the charter of the new team with your company to ensure that individuals threatened by the venture know that the team is working on behalf of the whole.

Some companies would disagree with the notion that creating a cult-like culture is a bad thing — they believe that culture drives people’s thinking and behaviors to increase performance and productivity. It’s a fine line to walk, but leaders shouldn’t be compelled to manipulate their employees or do things that benefit the company at the expense of employee livelihood.

Instead, create a system in which people are informed, engaged, and aligned around a compelling path forward. If you promote an open environment that values new talent, you may even save a few dollars on bus fare.

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Organizational Strategy: What We Can Learn From Our Veterans

By gothamCulture
Published at In Category Blog Tags: ,
veteran culture

Yesterday, on LinkedIn, I wrote an article highlighting our veterans, and how the US Army values of LDRSHIP (Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity and Patriotism) can, and should, apply to your personal and professional lives and the culture of every successful organization.

Ask yourself how your accomplishments or your company’s success would improve exponentially if only two or three of these seven values were a focus and priority of your business every day.

What better way to show your gratitude to our veterans that have given so much, than to epitomize the culture and values that so many of our soldiers lived by during times of sacrifice for our great country; these seven values of LDRSHIP.

We can learn quite a bit from these men and women in uniform. Successfully overcoming adversity through the war game soldiers must play, and the values and strategies they use to win that game, can excel company culture to heights of performance never imagined.

Imagine what a different world we’d live in if we truly incorporated the military’s Loyalty, Duty, Respect, Selfless Service, Honor, Integrity and Patriotism in our business strategies and operations? Or, if we committed to those values more in our daily lives at home with family and friends?

Talking about strategies for organizational change using these seven values is a powerful place from which to launch, learn and lead. And, it has been proven time and again in my own work with clients.

Learning from The Hero’s Journey

It’s not just these embedded cultural values that prepare veterans for success in today’s organizations. It is also their experience with the “Hero’s Journey,” what is termed the “monomyth” as introduced by Joseph Campbell:

“A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.” – Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1949. p.23.

Because of their preparation and commitment to this model, veterans play an ever more important and unique variable in the success as part of, or the head of, any organization.

Let’s dig in a bit more:

In my work, I have come to see first hand that organizational strategy can become more relevant as real world scenarios are applied to its development. The Hero’s Journey model that our soldiers and Defense Department live by ensures that five crucial attributes for organizational strategy are included in the process. These include:

  • PLANNING
  • RESISTANCE
  • TRIALS
  • SUCCESS
  • LESSONS LEARNED

Working with these five attributes creates a strategic planning process that is not linear, but circular and continuous. If you consider these five areas, team members start to think strategically in their own paradox, and not in a one-size-fits-all approach. The story of the Hero’s Journey is a framework that helps customize the process and the resulting solution. But, no step can be omitted in that journey.

Don’t Stop At Planning

Many organizations and leaders think that planning, the first attribute above, is the beginning and the end of their strategy.

However, you cannot reach success (success = achievable and high performing strategy) without trial and tribulation, as our solders and veterans will tell you. Those remaining four steps of the hero’s journey ensure the cycle of trial, failure and trial, failure is repeated until true success is achieved, defined, repeated and institutionalized.

Emerging strategies never intended or expected will come from the trials and lessons learned of failure. Strategy is an evolving, continuous, learning process that follows the hero’s journey.

Veterans In Organizational Change

No one knows this hero’s journey method better than our veterans.  They have been to war, lost small battles, lost battle buddies, or lost understanding of the mission in times of intense stress or crisis. But they continue to move forward to test, adapt and overcome through trial and error. They ultimately define a new strategy or desired outcome of success for the environment they are in, based upon the trials and resistance they are up against.

Our veterans are well suited to be a part of, if not leading, organizational strategy development and accountability in our nation’s agencies and businesses. As we celebrate them today, companies should be seeing Veterans as incredibly attractive, qualified talent fully prepared to fill the leadership pipeline.

Where many organizations may have a void of talent, they should be seen as an absolute resource.

Veterans have embedded the “journey” framework of venturing forward without fear, learning from failure, and making change based on the wisdom of experience. Your organization can learn by studying up on that journey and hiring leaders who have lived it.

I would love to hear your thoughts and specific steps you are taking to embody and live these, or other, values in today’s business environment. Please leave a comment or connect with me on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going!

How Decentralizing Data Informs a Successful Organizational Culture

By gothamCulture
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data decentralization

With the rapid adoption of technology into today’s organizational culture, data collection and analysis is becoming a common component of the way we do business. However, this new reliance on data brings a new host of challenges, including how to combine and share this information across the organization in order to get as much value out of it as possible.

Every department has unique data needs, and while it’s important to analyze the data for individual departments, managers and leadership need to aggregate departmental data to gauge the overall health of the organization.

There can be huge differences in how departments structure and format their data. So, while combining multiple data sources has significant advantages, the disjointed nature of departmental data formats has led some organizations to rely on a less than ideal “top down” or “one size fits all” approach to analysis.  In some cases this approach can work, but it often forces the organization to follow an architecture that reduces the data’s usefulness within each department.

Attempting to simplify the process by generalization may support the manager’s agenda, but the end results are not nearly as specific or as meaningful as they could be.

So, how can organizations ensure data and its analysis serves the greatest number of departments and people as possible, while still benefiting the business as a whole?  Below are several ideas to consider:

Determine which questions need to be answered.

First and foremost, data has to help us answer questions.  It is essential to clearly articulate which questions are more critical to managers and business units, and to ensure that data can be captured to support those.

Establish similar terminologies.

Despite the likelihood that each department has its own unique culture and terminology, organizations should strive to use a similar language across the board.  This will help promote cross-communication and maintain a certain degree of data integrity for managers.  Where this is not possible, organizations should develop a “translation table,” (i.e. a “Rosetta Stone” for the business) which can serve as the key to understanding the different terminologies.

Agree to a common set of core variables.

Each department has its own set of questions that will require a unique set of data, but managers need to address questions that span departments. To ensure they can, organizations should agree on a core set of variables that each department will collect.  This can be something as simple as time, location, identification number, costs, and labor hours, etc.  The key is to agree on how these variables will be defined and documented. Yes – that could require a bit of time and finesse. While this may be the most taxing part of the process, it is the most critical in the data decentralization process.

In an ideal world, individual departments and leadership would easily find a compromise for their various data needs.  On the one hand, each business silo need data that is specifically relevant to their operations. On the other hand, managers need data sets that address broader questions and issues. If the overriding concern is real usefulness in the data, the time it takes to create systems that allow for both will be well worth effort.

How is your organization decentralizing data to inform your culture?

The Culture Implications Of Starbucks New Dress Code

By gothamCulture
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starbucks culture

Starbucks has gained a lot of attention in the wake of their recent dress code policy changes, allowing their employees to wear black denim, colored ties, and allowing visible tattoos.

This may seem like a small change, but in the context of recent controversy over this very issue, it made us wonder what the deeper implications were for these policy changes.

We asked our team at gothamCulture how they viewed this recent change, and what bigger implications for the coffee giant’s organizational culture may be underlying it. Here are some of our thoughts:

Stuart Farrand – Associate

stuart-farrandI’d say its 60% PR and 40% pragmatism and believe the two go hand in hand.  A growing percentage of the population has tattoos, especially within the services industry.  At the moment, having a tattoo doesn’t carry the stigma it used to. In fact, it’s become more of a cultural norm.

From a PR standpoint, it did seem that Starbucks was out of touch with society.  From a pragmatic standpoint, I think they realized that tattoos are really not something they can control. It’s much easier to acquiesce than to make the dress code more restrictive (i.e. wearing long sleeves to cover up tattoos, regulating the color of the long sleeve shirt, etc.), which would also be more difficult to enforce.

In terms of what other organizations might learn from this, I see two big takeaways:

1. Weigh the costs and benefits of the rules you impose on your employees.  Dress code is a good example, but it the same is true for broader rules across your organization.  At what point do the rules (and enforcing the rules) actually impede someone’s ability to do their job?

2. Organizations must be flexible with emerging social norms, and try to accommodate them as much as possible.

Samantha Goldman – Associate

samantha-goldmanThis is a great example of an organization updating a policy to act more in accordance with its values and mission, and thereby preserve its own integrity as an organization. The anti-tattoo policy or a very strict dress code did seem to be in contradiction with Starbucks first value of “Creating a culture of warmth and belonging, where everyone is welcome”. It also undermines their mission, “To inspire and nurture the human spirit – one person, one cup and one neighborhood at a time.”

While any organization must have some guidelines for physical appearance/dress code, employees can’t be blatantly prohibited from showing up physically in a way that reflects their own human spirits, especially when “warmth and belonging” are guiding values in the brand’s interaction with customers. Such policies are a critical component of an organization’s culture. If the organization is trying to create a culture that reflects their mission and values, it’s critical that policies are aligned as much as possible.

Mark Emerson – General Manager

mark-emersonStarbucks is bowing to the inevitable shift to a new generation.  This is a push/pull situation, in that their customers are younger, and the younger generation doesn’t view body art as any big deal. And, in most cases it is an expression of individuality – which pulls the company forward.

Then you have the push aspect. The company wants to show they are keeping with the times. What better way to do that than to have their baristas reflect a large portion of their customer base?  This feeds very much into the culture and system of values Starbucks wants to reflect: one of making the employees the bottom-line and everything else will flow from that.

Secondly, and I think Starbucks is always looking at the practicality of things. They were probably starting to run into a recruitment issue. They are, in some ways, the “McDonald’s of coffee” and provide starter jobs for many teens/twenty-somethings. Banning tattoos was bound to trip them up with their enormous staffing needs.

This also reminds me of the story in the NY Times about the Starbucks worker who was having so much trouble getting steady work hours and trying to care for her young son.  Literally, within one day of the story coming out, the company changed its global policy and vowed to make hours more steady for it workers.

What other corporation of this size would make such a change so rapidly, simply because it is the right thing to do?  They could simply have said they’d ‘study’ the problem, but they massively adjusted their entire work process because of their culture of putting employees first.

Dustin Schneider –  Senior Associate

Dustin SchneiderThere has definitely been a “latte” attention recently about Starbucks’ decision to allow employees to have their tattoos visible.

The purpose of an organization’s core values is to help guide behavior.  They provide clear guardrails on what’s expected, what’s allowed, and what should be encouraged.  To have a value of belonging and inclusion, while at the same time asking employees to hide their real selves, seems counterintuitive.

I commend them for continually bouncing their policies up against their stated values in order to ensure that decisions they make are in alignment with them.

Cary Paul – Senior Associate

cary-paulStarbucks is in a unique position in its industry, and the business world in general.  People love it or hate it.  Some people that love the coffee actually hate the business side, and the idea that they put mom and pop shops out of business.  But most business people respect that Starbucks almost single-handedly built the whole idea of a new culture around coffee and people being together… again, around coffee.

As a result, their every move is watched and scrutinized, and they can’t make a move in their business without at least some thought to the PR implications. That part of it was most likely at least in the discussion. But, I think this was about something bigger: freedom of choice, and inclusion, as defined in the core values.

 As Schultz discusses in his book, the core values are the critical lens through which the company operates.  Period.  When they didn’t, things went sour.

These have massive implications on workplace culture, especially as a model for a company adhering to the tenets of its core values.  And, if the company stands behind its commitments to those values, it becomes more likely that the employees will.

The Starbucks reversal of their tattoo guidelines may have been partly a PR move. What seems more likely, however, is that the company cares enough about their core values to constantly change and adapt in order to reflect what is important to their people.

Starbucks is doing well to authentically make changes to policies in order to better reflect their core values and build a culture through their people. They may not get everything right the first time, but they are aware of the journey – and are paying attention to when change needs to happen.

What did you think when you heard about this latest news? And, is Starbucks a model for evolution of employee policies that other corporations should consider?

Implementing Change, Part 2: Recognizing our Human Nature

By gothamCulture
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In Implementing Change, Part 1: With More Predictability Than the Weather, I discussed how reflecting on your own reactions to feeling out of control in relation to the weather is helpful in gaining empathy towards employees who often feel like the changes in their organization are as unpredictable as the weather.

As humans, we respond to our environments, whether it’s meteorological climate or to our organizational climate. There is research and a model that reminds us that we as humans respond to our environments in the same ways that we might only think of other animals responding–even in organizational settings. For example, we are grounded in our innate tendency to monitor our environment for threats and rewards and to then take action to avoid threats and move towards rewards. This circuitry and these impulses in our brains impact our relationships with others and more broadly how we interact with our environment and ultimately make decisions.

The SCARF model (developed by David Rock) highlights the importance of looking at these basic human instincts when trying to understand social interactions.

It is crucial to look at our sense of status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness.

  • Status: Our relative importance to others
  • Certainty: Our being able to predict the future
  • Autonomy: Our sense of control over events
  • Relatedness: Our sense of safety with others
  • Fairness: Our perception of fair exchanges between people

These feelings are at play in our life, and definitely at work when we think about how people experience their relationships with others in organizations. For example, my sense of autonomy (my sense of being able to control events) is exactly where I feel challenged when I cannot stop the oncoming winter and changing seasons in the outside world. I bet you could think of tons of examples within your own organization when your sense of autonomy was challenged; this is an often felt sentiment in organizations going through change. Similarly, my sense of certainty (being able to predict the future) is challenged from the weather when I don’t know if my flight will be canceled due to snowstorms, or if my much anticipated picnic in the park will have to be rescheduled; this sense of “not knowing” is also all too common in organizations when impactful changes are announced at random.

In organizations, it is crucial for leaders not to forget our humanity and to always try to address such needs as our needs for certainty and autonomy. This is even more critical when an organization is going through change. It’s important to be constantly asking:

  • How can we implement changes that allow people to have the most control in the process and a greater say in the change?
  • How can we be clearer about upcoming events and changes so that people know what to expect as much as we are able to predict?
  • How do we communicate this out in a way that respects people’s needs for certainty and autonomy?

The more we can support people’s needs rather than leaving them ‘out in the cold’ feeling a lack of autonomy and certainty, the less likely they will shut down due to a threat response. The more we can give people a sense of autonomy and certainty in their work, the more likely they will be able to have positive relationships with others and be productive in their organization.

Forbes: Culture – The Most Overlooked Element of Company Culture Audits

By gothamCulture
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Culture is defined as “a way of thinking, behaving, or working that exists in a place or organization (such as a business).” Essentially, it’s the core of your business — so why wouldn’t you include it in your company’s audit?

Your company culture drives all the decisions you make and the communication processes you use. Including culture in your audit allows you to take a closer look at what could use some revamping and how you might increase productivity for your business as a whole.

In this article, Chris Cancialosi discusses the value of auditing company culture and explains why it’s often overlooked as a key component of what makes — or breaks — a business.

Implementing Change, Part 1: With More Predictability than the Weather

By gothamCulture
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If you’re like me in that you wish every day was summer, but you happen to live in a place that too soon will be covered with snow, you might be feeling some anticipatory blues. Yes, there are still many months (hopefully) until we need to pull out our hats and gloves (see my previous post about putting them away!) But, just the occasional chill in the air and the noticeably shorter days reminds me where we are headed–and that’s a long, cold winter.

In my work in organizational change and my desire to understand how people react to change and handle transitions, I often find it helpful to reflect on my personal reactions towards changes in the weather. Understanding my own feelings of anticipation and loss as the seasons cycle allows me greater empathy towards individuals in organizations where they experience changes that are also seemingly not under their control.

Organizations are their own world and the people within them often are at the whim of the leadership or the marketplace–feeling as vulnerable as we do when the seasons change. And, while we as humans have mastered indoor heating and air conditioning to protect us from the elements, all we need is a week of rain to remind us of how much we need sunshine or a debilitating blizzard to reinforce our lack of control. Even just feeling the temperature drop, watching the leaves fall, and noticing the days getting shorter reminds us that there are greater forces at work, and that we must adapt i.e. wear a jacket, or find ourselves cold.

Whether people in organizations are facing the natural ebbs and flows of organization life i.e. the yearly busy tax season or the arrival of the latest wave of new hires or are experiencing much larger disruptions such as a merger, new leadership or new systems and processes, the resulting feelings are similar and stem from a sense of lack of control.

Recognizing that people within organizations often feel at the whim of the organizations and have a lack of control, is an important data point to consider when designing any sort of organizational change. The more you can minimize this lack of control the better. Engaging people in the process, frequently communicating, and making the process as predictable as far out in advance as possible, supports people in feeling more of a sense of control and predictability.

Our nature as humans is a huge part of how we react to changes and transition in our environments. Stay tuned for Part 2: Implementing Change That Recognizes Our Human Nature where I describe a bit more specifically a model that addresses some of the key feelings we feel as humans within organizations. I also list some questions you should ask yourself during the change process in order to make sure you are considering the human needs of your employees.

Forbes: Four Reasons Social Capital Trumps All

By gothamCulture
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We’ve all heard (or said) the phrase, “it’s not what you know but who you know.” And, entrepreneurs really shouldn’t take that casually. Because, your connections really can make a difference in whether your company just gets by or truly thrives.

This may still be a new concept for some, so take note. While financial and human capital continue to be important for your company, social capital can potentially gain your business the most benefits of all.

In this article, Chris Cancialosi shares four reasons why social capital is the most important for entrepreneurial success, and reveals how to make social capital work for you.

Forbes: Cross-Training As The Best Defense Against Indispensable Employees

By gothamCulture
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If one team member is unable to get his work done, another should be prepared to step up. So, consider cross-training as your best defense for unforeseen circumstances or relying too much on a sole employee. Not only is this level of strategic planning beneficial for organizational purposes, but it can also help the inner workings of your business. From increased sustainability to efficiency, cross-training ensures that your company — and its employees — will be able to handle whatever challenges may come its way.

If you’re not cross-training your employees, Chris suggests in this article that it may be time to start.

Change Culture From Within

By gothamCulture
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The conversation about a company’s culture, and the effects on productivity, satisfaction and overall success, is a widely popular one. In this Employment Notebook podcast , Chris Cancialosi talks with Tim Muma about strategies for changing that culture from within, instead of waiting for management to make adjustments. As Chris notes: “everyone has the capability to improve a company’s culture from the inside.”