I read a post by Scott Dunn that inspired this talk. I’ve known Scott for a while. He’s the principal coach/founder of Rocket Nine Solutions, an agile coaching & training firm. He recently moved from Orange County, CA to Nashville.
Since he’s now closer to me, and since Vaco’s headquarters is in Nashville, I’m hoping to collaborate more with Scott in the future.
But I digress…
The title of Scott’s post is – Your Culture is What’s on Your Walls. In it he talks about observing cultures by physical evidence and gleaning the culture by observation. I agree with his perspective and I liked the personal nature of the story. He also inspired me to extend the idea.
Beyond observation, you have to get inside things
The key extension I want to make to Scott’s thoughts is that culture is an inside-out thing. Sure, you can observe it. But you also have to dig inside of things (of people) to get a true sense for the culture.
You have to move beyond the observable, and take on more of an explorer or discovery role if you want to truly get to the culture of a thing. For example, if I’m visiting a client/organization and I want to understand their culture, I may want to:
Ask detailed questions about the culture. For example, explore how “safe” the culture is. Or how “diverse” it is. And if you don’t get clear answers, then follow-up until you gain clarity.
Challenge underlying assumptions. For example, if you get information around how the culture is “driven or hard-working”, explore the why behind that. Or if you hear the leaders talking about measuring employee activity, again, challenge it to understand the root assumptions.
A real key in your exploration is to listen for the organizational “stories” that are being shared or told. Ask for stories around success, stretching, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, etc. Really dig into the cultural narrative and see what you discover.
One of the most important things to do is to compare and contrast what you hear from various sources. Usually, organizational culture is a “fuzzy thing” that’s hard to pin down to the reality of what it is. But you can glean quite a good idea of things by aggregating all of the conversations you have and looking for common themes or threads.
Speaking of themes or patterns, I want to share a tool next that you might find useful.
Perspective Mapping
Quite often different individuals, groups, leaders or others have different perspectives in company cultures. The hard bit is uncovering those differences and making them transparent.
Jason Little has created a wonderful tool called Perspective Mapping that I’ve found incredibly valuable in alignment and culture-setting workshops. You can read more about it here. I wanted to offer it up as a useful tool in this discussion.
Wrapping Up
I want to really thank Scott for inspiring or instigating me. He made me think hard about how to discover the culture. Observation is one of the important things.
But also exploring and discovering it by inquiry. Then, putting all of your data together, I’m sure you’ll get a much more precise view of the culture of a company or organization. So that you can embrace it and navigate it effectively, or in the case where it might be just a tad too much for you, carefully avoid it.
Here’s to your cultural explorations. Stay agile my friends,
Bob.