Culture Requires a Strategy

Can you set the strategy to create a great culture? Or is organizational culture too organic, too ineffable to really plan for? I have long thought that culture didn’t really lend itself to strategizing, but recently have started to reconsider that assumption both as I think through how I’ll establish one for Ratio and as I work with and observe organizations that have built a positive culture into the core of how they operate. I don’t know if I have the answers yet, but here are a few hypotheses about how you can plan to build culture.

Make it unique: I’ve worked at a several ad agencies that said they prized creativity. But the one I worked at with the most distinct and powerful creative culture rewarded people who asked, “what if?” In other words, they had a culture of curiosity and experimentation which naturally led to creative breakthroughs. If your culture is built on the same idea that everyone in your industry says is important, then you don’t really have a culture.

Tie it to “why”: pharma companies always talk about how much they care about patients. In my experience, this rarely if ever inspires employees to act differently or work harder on behalf of those who benefit from their drugs. The exceptions are those who do something specific and different, and tie that unique approach to the end benefit for patients. Some of the most motivated employees I’ve seen are working at a company trying to lower costs for insulin and other common generic drugs. They know what a life-changing difference that can make for patients: the ‘why’ of what they do is so clear that they hardly need to say it.

Leaders set the tone: it sounds nice to say that a company has an organic or “bottom up” culture, but I have universally found that to be a get-out-of-jail-free card for leaders who don’t want to put in the work of instilling a culture. If you say you have a fun-loving culture (aside from needing to answer what ‘why’ you’re tying that idea to) your senior leaders better be heading out for happy hour on Friday or participating in the spontaneous funniest meme contest that randomly broke out. It doesn’t do to simply hand a more junior employee the corporate card every so often. One agency I work with cultivates a very informal, low-stress culture, and that comes through in everything from their name to the fact that I’ve never heard either partner raise his voice in a meeting to the fact that they both offer unlimited vacation and insist on each employee taking a minimum amount of time off.

Keep it simple: If you need more than a sentence to describe your culture, you undoubtedly have failed in your effort to create one. I worked on a project to define the values and personality for a technology company, and it didn’t go particularly well. In hindsight, I realized what the challenge was: the CEO had a very distinct vision of what he wanted the culture to be (basically, a hard-charging, no-BS crew of experts with a vision to change how doctors learn), but he was being told by his team that the culture he wanted to create was turning off some employees. I tried to find a solution, but it turned into a wordsmithing exercise. If you have to agonize over word choice, you’re putting your hope in the wrong thing: the words you use to describe a culture should reflect the reality of your business. If they are pretty words that you hope will somehow lead to change, you will be disappointed.

Teach it, don’t say it: So, with what I just relayed, how can you change or create a culture that doesn’t already exist? You have to commit to teaching it every day. I worked at an agency that had some beautiful ideals for their culture, and hung signs and gave awards celebrating those values. And when I got there, those values felt very real. I bought in. But over time, the leaders who created and lived those values either retired or moved on to bigger things, and the people who replaced them, while still speaking to those values, did not instill them in their day-to-day work. A culture cannot be created by celebrating a few high performers at an annual meeting. You create it by providing feedback to employees on a constant basis: this thing you did was great because it aligned with the way we want to act here. The way you spoke to your subordinate is not how we want to communicate. You prioritized the wrong thing when you did X instead of Y. Not all these conversations will be easy, but they don’t need to be angry or accusatory. Each one establishes exactly what the norms are that comprise your culture.

Enforce what matters: Culture requires commitment. Leadership has to create it and teach it, but employees at all levels have to buy in or that culture will not take root. Which means at some point someone who refuses to operate within the bounds of that culture must not be allowed to undermine it. One company I worked at had a high-performing employee who was self-centered and self-promoting, in defiance of what was billed as a “no ego” culture. When other people on his team complained to leadership, they were told that he was too important to the client relationship to be disciplined or let go. Years later, after he drove many talented people to leave the company, the CEO had a conversation with the lead client and discovered that the clients didn’t think much of that individual, and had only stuck with the agency because of the dedication of the broader team, which was now in question due to the defections they had noted. It won’t always be that black-and-white, but if you believe your culture is important to the success of the company, no employee is so valuable that they should be allowed to flaunt it. If they can’t be taught to be part of the culture, they have to go.

So, how do you create a strategy for your culture? I’ll distill the above into three core points:

1) Your culture should be built around something that sets you apart from the norms and cliches of your industry, and clearly reflect why you do what you do

2) Your leaders should identify and embody the company culture, and they should be able to express it in simple, BS-free language

3) You should have a plan to actively convey the culture by teaching it constantly, and enforcing cultural norms even if it means parting with employees who refuse to buy into it

If you hire a consultant or agency to help you define your culture (through things like a mission statement or company values), you should either ask them how they’re going to help accomplish those goals, or have a plan to take their recommendation and bring them to life in your organization.