A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read allIf the Shoe Fits posts here
If you are looking for the worst advice on which to build your company culture, be sure to add this piece of un-wisdom from Ashok Kushwaha (whoever that may be).
“I am responsible for what I say, not for what you understand.”
The first half of the sentence is true, you are responsible for what you say, as well as the way you say it.
It’s the second half that will royally screw you up and contribute to your company’s destruction.
It is your responsibility to be sure you are understood, whether it’s working with your team or explaining your vision and market to investors.
And it’s not just when you’re the boss.
The same holds true as a friend, volunteer, parent or the grown child to your parents.
In fact, the second part relegates the whole to one of the stupidest sentences I’ve heard/read in my lifetime.
However, it does fit the current attitude that eschews personal responsibility and believes that any word/action/behavior is justified/excused as long as there’s a reason.
That said, the possibility of success should be reason enough to make sure that whoever your audience is has a clear understanding of what you mean, since not understanding provides a clear path to failure.
Juice your culture, because, as you grow, your culture will assimilate and mimic the traits of those you hire.
D’Souza was a diplomatic brat whose family moved every two years. The result was an ingrained learning curve and appreciation for those different from himself.
We learned how to love the world. There’s this great richness of diversity, yet people are far more similar than they are different. You’re not as likely to learn that when you grow up in one town, in one environment, in one culture or in one country.
This applies as well to those who change companies, since every company has its own culture and every manager a subculture.
Culture is a reflection of values, so the trick to good hiring is to know what which values in your own culture are truly critical.
It’s not important if previous cultures were similar to yours; what is important is understanding in which cultures the candidate thrived and how they compared to yours. As discussed Friday, skills and performance are not independent of environment.
The lesson I learned is that when you have to evolve that quickly as a person, you need to be aware of two things. One is personal blind spots and the other is personal comfort zones. Those two things can be real gotchas.
Good cultures foster personal growth, which requires personal awareness and a willingness to recognize what needs to change.
Finally, talent and attitude are far more important than current skills.
And you need somebody who’s got just raw smarts and talent and an innate ability to learn. Because the thing about functional expertise is that unless you’re in some very specific area, almost everything that we need to do our job becomes obsolete quickly, and the half-life of knowledge is becoming shorter and shorter. So do you have the personal agility to continuously renew those skills, to reinvent yourself?
Your team and therefore your culture are stronger when people crave new challenges that not only stretch their current skills, but are outside their comfort zone.
People who aggressively drive to constantly learn, grow and change are only a challenge to management when they aren’t given those opportunities.
When that happens everyone suffers; the individual; the team; the company; and you.
The ingredients described in the first article made me smile and shout ‘yes!’, because they are the same things I’ve been preaching for years.
However, the twisted use of culture to legitimatize bigotry and discrimination enraged me—as it always has.
I have long recommended using culture as a hiring filter and still believe it is one of the best around, since attitude is far more important than skills when it comes to who you hire.
People who believe manipulation is the correct tool for getting ahead do not belong in a company that promotes strictly on merit and accomplishment; in fact; they can easily destroy it.
However, a talent for manipulating people has nothing to do with age, gender, race, creed, color, alumni status or the myriad of other differences that may take you out of your comfort zone.
Henry Ford was one of the first to explain why, If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.
This is true for every company from startups through the Fortune 10.
And the key word isn’t “forward” it’s “everyone.”
Research has shown that culture trumps strategy and the most important component of culture is people.
Without people there is no company.
With the wrong people there is no team.
It is the team that makes vision reality.
It is the team that draws investment and customers.
It is the team that lets you pivot, innovate and change when necessary—no matter your size
It is the team that saves your ass when you screw up.
Your team is made up of the people who focus on the success of the company, knowing that its success ensures their own, not the people who work primarily for their own success.
A strong team always trumps a group of individual players—no matter how good they are or what each has done in the past.
Team needs and candidate attitude should always trump individual credentials, experience, previous title and company.
They have done all the cost-cutting possible and are still whining (through sky-high profits) that people aren’t buying.
I find this extremely funny (in a sickly way), since the reason people aren’t spending is that those same companies have slashed wages to the point they have no disposable income or they just aren’t hiring.
“The real reason businesses aren’t hiring is they’re not seeing consumer demand for their goods and services increase,” she said. “We need greater demand for goods and services. It is clearly true that if people receive higher incomes, that will help the economy.” —Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute
Even more revolting is the prevalent attitude that workers don’t deserve better pay, since they are strictly a “cost of doing business” and costs should be kept ultra-low.
That level of stupidity is breathtaking, although not terribly surprising.
Corporate America still hasn’t figured out that without people there is no company, but you would think they had noticed the connection between what people earn and what they spend.
That isn’t exactly rocket science thinking.
Henry Ford figured it out way back in the early 1900s when he raised his workers wages to a then-unheard-of level.
Ford was a pioneer of “welfare capitalism”, designed to improve the lot of his workers and especially to reduce the heavy turnover that had many departments hiring 300 men per year to fill 100 slots. Efficiency meant hiring and keeping the best workers.
Ford astonished the world in 1914 by offering a $5 per day wage ($110 today), which more than doubled the rate of most of his workers. (…) The move proved extremely profitable; instead of constant turnover of employees, the best mechanics in Detroit flocked to Ford, bringing their human capital and expertise, raising productivity, and lowering training costs.
Ford wasn’t being kind; he understood that if he wanted to sell cars people needed enough disposable income to buy them.
Ford’s policy proved, however, that paying people more would enable Ford workers to afford the cars they were producing and be good for the economy.
But Ford’s attitudes towards business, bosses and people don’t fly well in the 21st Century world.
If anyone of significance today said, “A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business,” Wall Street would poop its collective pants.
The news that we’ve all been waiting for—unless you’re a CEO who is paid relative to your counterparts.
According to new research by Charles M. Elson, director of the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware, and Craig K. Ferrere, one of its Edgar S. Woolard fellows, the whole idea that a CEO will quit if he isn’t paid more than his peers is, to use a technical term, hogwash.
…contrary to the prevailing line, that chief executives can’t readily transfer their skills from one company to another. In other words, the argument that C.E.O.’s will leave if they aren’t compensated well, perhaps even lavishly, is bogus. (…) “It’s a false paradox,” Mr. Elson said in an interview last week. “The peer group is based on the theory of transferability of talent. But we found that C.E.O. skills are very firm-specific. C.E.O.’s don’t move very often, but when they do, they’re flops.”
Surprise, surprise.
For ‘firm-specific’ read culture and colleagues—the same two things that impact any worker’s success.
Flickr image credit: GDS Infographics (click the graphic to see a large version)
Career experts and anybody with more than one job under their belt who can make the mental leap between cause and effect will tell you that culture is the number one reason to join a company, not to mention the number one indicator of how well a person will do.
Yalies are a particularly competitive bunch, and nothing delights us more than an acceptance letter (though an open carrel at Bass is a close second). For us, life is a parade of applications, and acceptance is an indicator of self-worth.
During all the years I worked as a recruiter and since in this blog, I’ve spent a lot of effort to help people understand that getting multiple offers should not be their goal, whereas getting the right offer should be.
(In fact, interviewing everywhere just to get offers for the ego-boost can brand you as a shopper; no manager likes wasting time interviewing a candidate whose reputation/history says “shopper” and that reputation got around long before social media existed).
Being in the wrong culture is like being a duck out of water.
Most people aren’t looking for a job they are looking for a home.
They are looking for an environment in which they fit and feel challenged, appreciated and safe.
Isn’t that what you wanted growing up?
Then why is it considered strange that you would crave the same thing in the place in which you spend more than half your waking hours as an adult?
An interesting interview with Ed Schein, a senior professor at MIT and a “pioneer” on the subject of corporate culture, who now believes corporate culture is irrelevant.
The real answer to that is that Corporate Culture is no longer the relevant topic. I think the relevant topic is macro culture, nations, corporations, corporate culture (where all these nationalities and occupations play out), and micro cultures where you have problems in the operating room and in teamwork because you have multi-nationals, people from different occupations that cultures, all interplaying.
OK, I don’t have a PhD and I’m not a brilliant, recognized expert with an international reputation, but my initial reaction to reading the transcript of the interview was ’duh’.
Of course corporate culture is impacted by having multiple nationalities working together, but it was impacted when the workforce were all native-born, but from different regions or even neighborhoods.
As to the micro cultures created by each boss (leader in the accepted jargon), again my reaction is ‘duh.’
Every person is shaped by their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), AKA, values. Every manager (from team leader to department vp) creates a culture in their organization that is based on those values and it can be similar, synergistic or diametrically opposed to the cultures above.
All that said, I think it’s great when recognized experts put shape and definition to the things that most workers know by instinct and they do it with a level of credibility far beyond the reach of someone like me.
Here is the interview or you can read the transcript at the link above.
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve been asked these questions or read an article about them I could retire on a private island. Seriously.
Because I’m still being asked I thought I would offer a KISS (keep it simple, stupid) style answer, one that is easy to understand, easy to remember and (relatively) easy to influence.
Culture originates with the boss and affects everyone below that level.
It’s your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), i.e., what’s in your head, your values, beliefs and how you implement them, that defines the culture of your organization, whether an entire company or a small team.
Culture spreads through communication.
Another MAP function; the way you communicate is a mindset, grounded in your attitude towards others, which, in turn, is based on your personal philosophy.
Make no mistake, culture always flows down—even when radical ideas take root that rise up from the workers.
Call it a “percolation culture” and it only happens when the culture already in place enables ideas to rise and doesn’t kill the messenger if they don’t fly.
In short, if you want to know your culture look deeply into a mirror and listen to all your communications, whether word or action.
And if you feel the need to change your culture use RampUp’s tagline as your mantra: to change what they do change how you think.
Entrepreneurs face difficulties that are hard for most people to imagine, let alone understand. You can find anonymous help and connections that do understand at 7 cups of tea.
Crises never end.
$10 really does make a difference and you’ll never miss it,
If you are looking for the worst advice on which to build your company culture, be sure to add this piece of un-wisdom from Ashok Kushwaha (whoever that may be).
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