Note: It’s imperative to recognize that culture has nothing to do with perks, such as free food, fancy offices, free services, etc.

Culture is about values and how they play out in both the internal and external functioning of the company.

But company culture isn’t the end game — micro cultures are.

Micro cultures are based on individual bosses’ values.

Both cultures are fundamental to that perennially popular subject, employee engagement.

HBS’ Jim Heskett recently asked his audience what’s needed to engender employee engagement given that engaged employees are 2.7% more productive.

Most of the responses talked about the need for managers to respect their people, listen to ideas from everyone, have better people skills, etc., and several mentioned the skills acquired with an MBA.

But, as I pointed out, and Heskett cited in his summary, “Respect and valuing employee input have little to do with education and much to do with personal values.”

Unfortunately, education is no guarantee of values.

Colleges are no different, with MBA students leading the pack. “56 percent of MBA students admitted to cheating…  In 1997, McCabe did a survey in which 84 percent of undergraduate business students admitted cheating versus 72 percent of engineering students and 66 percent of all students. In a 1964 survey by Columbia University, 66 percent of business students surveyed at 99 campuses said they cheated at least once.”

If scholastic success was based on cheating it’s likely that that lack of respect/get-ahead-at-all-costs mentality would carry over to their management style.

Yesterday’s post ended with this comment,

That [provide an environment in which people can learn, grow and excel] is what a good boss is supposed to do.

But it’s the great ones who actually do it.

In fact, they go beyond that and shelter their people from any kind of toxic culture coming down from above.

Image credit: thinkpublic

I’ll bet you remember GoDaddy’s incredibly sexist commercials and bikinied conference models.

But did you notice that they totally stopped in 2013; they didn’t taper off, just stopped?

Obviously, something changed. It couldn’t have been public outrage; that had never bothered GoDaddy bosses before.

What happened was the installation of Blake Irving as CEO.

Irving not only stopped the ads, he set out to radically change a toxic culture that could easily have destroyed the company.

Culture starts at the top and its values and attitudes seep down throughout the organization.

That means change must also come from the top, but seepage won’t effect change.

Change requires structural and enforceable process change.

The answer is more complicated than just stamping out overt sexism. GoDaddy also focused on attacking the small, subtle biases that can influence everything from how executives evaluate employees to how they set salaries.

This was partly accomplished by changing the language, so that managers would evaluate impact as opposed to character.

“You can’t change a place just by hiring more women,” said Ms. Weissman, the senior vice president, who oversees a technical staff. “You have to create a safe space to talk about the assumptions all of us have. You have to work against the biases.”

Are the efforts paying off?

Today, almost a quarter of GoDaddy’s employees are women, including 21 percent of its technical staff. Half of new engineers hired last year were female, and women make up 26 percent of senior leadership. Female technologists, on average, earn slightly more than their male counterparts.

Who’d a’thunk it?

Go Daddy as one of the nation’s most inclusive tech companies and a top workplace for women and a lodestone of gender equity.

The company’s policies on equal pay, its methods for recruiting a diverse work force and its approach to promoting women and minorities had been lauded inside business schools and imitated at other firms.

Uber et al. take note.

With truly committed leadership a leopard can change its spots.

Image credit: jdog90

A couple of years ago, in a post citing Robert Sutton’s comments on scaling, I said,

A company isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal. (…)Yes, it’s the people. It has always been the people all the way back to our hunter ancestors.

And it will always be the people.

Years before that I wrote about creating a Good Culture in a Toxic Environment.

My e-buddy Wally Bock says bosses need to have a duel focus to be truly successful.

One is to accomplish the mission, make your numbers in business. The other is to care for your people, keep them safe and help them grow.

To that end, I thought I’d share Wally’s review of a book offering guidance on carrying them out.

Book Review: Winning Well

Everybody is talking about the NY Times article detailing little-known aspects and actions of Amazon’s culture.

There is a plethora of discussion, commentary, vehement agreement/disagreement on the information presented in the article and I don’t plan to add more.

What is important is knowing when your workplace crosses the line from tough to toxic.

While the fluidity of the line is a function of the individual, that is only true when there is choice.

And fear, whether real (no new job prospects), instilled (abuse resulting in an “it’s my fault” mentality) or imagined, precludes choice.

Without choice it’s toxic.

Flickr image credit: eek the cat