A Business-Needs Approach to Culture

Everything proceeded swimmingly for a while, but now something feels off. People are not talking as much, morale seems low, and employee NPS scores are dropping…what happened?

Cultural challenges in an organization are often hard to spot and even harder to resolve, but organizations should face them head-on when they arise. Culture eats strategy for breakfast, as the saying goes, meaning foundational issues are of paramount importance in any list of priorities.

Even when leaders acknowledge a problem, the amorphous and slow-moving nature of cultural issues makes them difficult to approach. It is easy to put complex issues on the back-burner in favor of “quick wins” and “low hanging fruit” or solving other organizational problems just to feel progress. While these strategies temporarily boost stamina, they cannot replace taking action on the more unwieldy concerns of any organization.

The following is a roadmap for tackling the challenging work of cultural change.

Identify the Symptoms

The root causes of cultural issues rarely present themselves in neat packages. Unless every staff member is an absolute powerhouse of emotional intelligence (and operate at the top of their game), it will always be a fantasy to believe an employee will walk up to your desk and say, “I think the way Jack presents himself in meetings is shutting down critical conversations and disenfranchising new employees, and that’s why our 3rd quarter showed increased turnover and several missed deadlines.”

It’s far more likely you will simply notice increased turnover and missed deadlines, and if you’re lucky, you’ll be catching the trend early. 

If you see a pattern of issues emerging, but there’s no satisfactory explanation - like “a global pandemic changed the market” or “the team took on way more projects than usual” - it’s a good hint there may be an underlying culture issue.

Perhaps the pattern is that projects are all reporting “green” status until the end when suddenly issues abound and all indicators turn red - this is now your guiding question: how do we improve issue-reporting processes?

Brainstorm with Empathy - Look Beyond the Simple

So people are not presenting issues promptly; now, what will fix the problem?

The easiest path would seem to be “tell people they need to report issues sooner.” The kernel of this idea is good - clearly communicate the issue at hand - but most organizations claim to have an “open-door policy” already. If the behavior remains, explicit instruction is not what the team is missing. 

Rather than thinking about the question as a high-level business problem, consider what experiences contribute to the problem day-to-day. An excellent place to start brainstorming is to reflect on your own experiences. For example, when did you feel unable to bring up issues? What stopped you then?

You might remember times when you felt the issue was not your responsibility to address, or you were not aware of the problem, or you were afraid of blowback on yourself or colleagues if you said anything. 

Even if you assume your organization or team is in a different situation than when you felt similarly, there’s a good chance you are making too big of an assumption, or there is still a common root cause. 

If considering team motivation leads you to dismissive thoughts, it may help to refresh your knowledge of the Fundamental Attribution Error. In this social phenomenon, we allow for greater acceptance of our own mistakes than for others’. The classic example of this is cutting someone off in traffic. When you do it, you know it’s because you are running late or just made a mistake, but when someone else does it to you, it’s easy to assume they are horrible drivers who probably should have their licenses revoked. 

A similar phenomenon occurs in leadership. For example, when it comes to compensation, managers often believe their staff is motivated by money, whereas they have many other nuanced motivations like work-life balance. Likewise, when it comes to cultural problems like not reporting issues, it’s easy to think, “I wouldn’t do that, so other people who do must be doing something wrong.”

This is why empathy is an essential part of the initial brainstorming process; assuming greater shared experience between us and others allows us to investigate new (and likely more accurate) angles of an issue. 

Ask Around (and Watch Your Semantics!)

So how do you know if your brainstormed hypotheses are correct? And how many are correct? 

This is the time to pull out two critical tools for any human-first leader - asking open-ended questions and listening deeply.

Ask many different people about your hypotheses and connect your questions to the original question. It’s important to gather many viewpoints, especially those with a different view than yourself and those particularly close to the issue. If asking many people seems daunting, you can deploy any number of online survey tools to fit the need.

When asking the questions, it is crucial to think about the wording. Asking people Why is there a problem with people not reporting issues on projects? is likely to inspire defensive and deflective answers. A different approach - and a great way to avoid defensiveness and simultaneously gain buy-in - is to ask for solutions. How can we learn about issues in projects sooner? is a much more open and exploratory question.

Asking questions with “why” elicits defensive responses, whereas “how” is an invitation to brainstorm and contribute.

Experiment and Communicate

With ideas and information gathered, it’s time to try out potential fixes. Like any business problem, it’s worth taking the time to figure out how to implement, roll out, and test/iterate on any potential solutions. This means communicating upcoming changes, ensuring people know why it is necessary and what it is working to address. Even if the solution is not a perfect fit, there will be rewards in communicating efforts and progress; teams will feel heard simply by acknowledging their concerns, even if the first solution does not right the ship. 

The more attempts made, the more data gathered from the team about what works and what does not. From that point, you can repeat the roadmap drawn up here to get to the core of large, hairy problems any culture faces.