A few years ago, I did some writing work for a great client. They were lovely, smart, enlightened people. They had integrity and purpose. They had an outstanding product (I became a client and still am one). It was early days – they were just about to launch – but they were on to something, and it seemed like they had a big future.
So I had a conversation with them about doing culture work. The response was surprising. In short, it was: our culture’s great, and if it ain’t broke, why fix it?
My response to that is: make sure it’s fixed, and it’ll be much harder to break.
It’s easy to think that culture is strong when things feel good. And it’s easy for things to feel good when the business is young and full of promise, everyone’s excited, and there aren’t that many of you.
But humans are complicated beings, and the more us there are, the more complicated things can get.
Even when it’s just one of us alone, it can be hard making sense of our own feelings, thoughts and actions. Add someone else to the mix, collide your feelings, thoughts and emotions against theirs, and things get reallyhard. That’s why friendships go sour and marriages end. Now multiply that complexity by 10 or 100, which is exactly what happens when businesses grow and more people join, and you have a labyrinth of personalities. The potential for (and likelihood of) conflict and misalignment increases every time a new person is added, new teams are constructed or new departments are formed.
So how does culture work help? It “fixes” things – not in the sense of repairing them, but in the other dictionary sense. Culture fastens, firms, formalises. It secures, steadies and stabilises.
Culture work codifies very fundamental things about an organisation, like: Who are we? What do we believe in? How do we want to be? It makes a public statement and puts a stake in the ground about how we do things, and why. It articulates, to people inside and outside of the group: This is what we’re looking for in people. This is what we sign up for when we work here. This is what we expect of ourselves.
It’s not about groupthink. It’s about shared values and common ground. You might like rugby, someone else might like knitting, someone else might like magic classes. A strong culture says that we can be diverse, we can be different, we can be ourselves – but these are the things that we are aligned on, that we all agree on and agree to.
Without it, there’s no frame of reference. Nothing that tells people, this is what we all subscribe to. Without it, people have no way of knowing what is expected of them, or what is considered okay. Without it, decisions are made and actions are taken subject to personal whims, individual moods and changing circumstances.
With a clear, codified culture – often articulated through things like purpose and values – people do things in accordance with, and with reference to, a shared worldview and a common, shared, agreed set of values and principles. People are hired (or fired) not only because they’re good (or bad) at their jobs, but because they act in a way that aligns with (or goes against) our culture.
It's easy to get along and feel good about each other when things are small, tight, exciting and the going is good. But when numbers grow, and things are tough, and there’s nothing to hold it all together, that’s when cracks tend to show. That’s when culture breaks.
And then it really is hard to fix.