QH #2: Culture Flags
QH #2: Culture Flags
Identify and assess the red/yellow/green flags within your culture
This is the second installment of my “Quick Hitter” (QH) series devoted to delivering a lesson or insight you can digest in a short amount of time.
Premise
We hear about culture and values in messaging from leadership, but relatively few companies consciously invest in and live out their cultural values at work. It is a “must have” mandated by the board and used as a placeholder to check the box.
This would not be an article on culture if I failed to quote Peter Drucker, “ Culture eats strategy for breakfast” to emphasize my point here on how important it is for your organization to invest in culture.
It is difficult for leaders and individuals to detach from their day-to-day work, break down, and understand what the organization’s culture is. Organizations that are purely results-driven fail to recognize taking time to identify and assess their cultures is a high-leverage activity. Explicitly devoting time to focus on this activity and incentivizing leaders to do so will lead to better business outcomes and happier employees.
Who is this for?
You are a leader of an organization and need to understand and shape the culture.
You are a rank n file employee and want to assess your company culture and how you fit in
You want to assess the culture of an organization to understand what they value and how they work
Examples of Culture Flags
Your company likely has corporate values, however, those are interpreted and acted upon differently at the local team level. A given organization’s culture has components of both top-down leadership and corporate values combined with the specific values that organically form within those organizations. Identifying what these “culture flags” are that have organically grown up within your organization or team is the first step to improving them.
A “Culture Flag” is a combination of defining what the behavior is and scoring the effectiveness of it leading to better business outcomes, happier employees, and customers. In the examples below, I use the classic “traffic light” coding to assess the health, effectiveness, and influence of these behaviors on an organization: effective (Green), neutral/case-by-case (Yellow), or toxic (Red). Below is a small set of examples meant to illustrate this concept and not a comprehensive list.
🟢 [Green] Open and transparent communications. A great culture has open and transparent communication from the top down and across the organization. People should feel empowered to voice their opinions and know their opinions matter. There is no benefit in hiding information and should be the exception, not the rule. High-performing organizations encourage people to communicate and over-communicate utilizing direct, asynchronous, and passive channels.
🟡 [Yellow] Land grabs. A potentially troubling sign to identify is if individuals or teams tend to jump on a new project or topic too quickly to “own it”. This can point to the classic “scarcity” mindset. This “scarcity” mindset illustrates the lack of leadership and strategic thinking in the organization.
The reality is that if you’re working in the tech world you have an “embarrassment of riches” and there are plenty of opportunities to go around. If you don’t get the opportunity you want, move on to the next one and execute.
🔴 [Red] Not invented here (NIH) syndrome: A culture that rewards creating everything from scratch is inefficient at best. If employees believe they will be rewarded by reinventing new things that already exist, it will lead to inefficiencies and sour grapes (unhappy employees). The culture should incentivize people to iterate and tweak existing processes, tools, frameworks, and templates that are already being worked on and only go through the invention effort if it is truly necessary and fill a gap. Over 90% of what is in place is “good enough” and teams should be encouraged to take advantage of what’s there.
I recognize that many of these “culture flags” can be the inverse of one another. For instance, “Open and Transparent communications” could very well be “Closed and opaque communications”. Whichever way you choose to word these and structure your assessment is up to you. The key point is that you should structure a model with the purpose of identifying, assessing, and improving your cultural flags.
Conclusion
You can hire an outsider to observe and break down your culture, but they will lack the data and tacit knowledge that the team has. The more effective approach is to consciously take time out of your day-to-day work schedule to detach and focus on what your culture is, its health, and how to improve it. The usefulness of thinking in terms of “culture flags” is two-fold:
Internal employees can identify and focus on what needs to be improved, removed, or rewarded.
External parties can assess an organization’s culture and values to see if it aligns with their own.
I will be shipping a framework for a “culture scorecard” in a future article, stay tuned!
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