If you think culture isn’t something that should occupy your priority list, think again. In this interview, Success Authority Ronn Lehmann shines a light on culture and how it can make a powerful difference in propelling your success as well as insuring you against disruptive change.
Listen to Podcast:
Questions to Ask Yourself:
To gain more insight, ask yourself the following questions. Then, submit your responses along with any additional comments or questions you may have.
Transcript:
Linda Ruhland
What causes cultures to break down?
Ronn Lehmann
Over time, cultures when left unattended are subject to a lot of different forces. Every time you bring in a new person, there’s the potential that the culture will change. It takes a while. One person can’t usually change a very entrenched culture. But if you get enough new people, or enough new people doing different things, or enough changes in the competitive environment, then all those things can start to change a culture. If the leaders—and everyone, really—are not paying attention to the culture, making sure that they are intentional about having the culture they want, then it will decay. Or they will end up with a culture that no longer suits their strategy, goals, and the environment that they want. Typically, they break down slowly, almost imperceptibly, and one day people wake up and say, “Boy, remember how it used to be?” Nobody can put their finger on they day it changed, or say, “On September first we decided to have a different culture.” It doesn’t work that way. It usually takes a new person looking at something and asking, “Why do we do that?” or “Why is this the norm?” Then people will say, “Because that’s they way we’ve always done it. Now, be quiet.” Or people will say, “Now, that’s a good question.” Intentionality is the key to avoiding all that.
Ruhland
When it comes to maintaining or sustaining a culture that you prefer to exist in, can you give me an example of what that looks or sounds like versus what happens when it breaks down? You said that it’s almost imperceptible, but what does the inattentiveness equate to?
Lehmann
The inattentiveness comes in by accepting at face value that we have the culture we have. Nobody is really sure how it started, it might have been intentional at one time, but this is the way we do things around here. I always think of culture as how we show up, how we interact with each other, how we go to market, how we deal with customers, and how we go about our jobs. Almost always, the real indicators of culture are not as much what’s written down as rules, but how people learn how to behave within the culture. The inattentiveness happens over time as we take as a given that this is our culture. Nobody pays that much attention to it. We’re busy with strategy, goals, business, and responding to change, but I would argue that culture is a huge part of it.
Culture can be a competitive advantage for your company or a disadvantage. How you interact with each other and customers indicates whether you are going to be able to attract and retain the right people or get loyal long-term customers. So often these days as things get commoditized, even services, a lot of companies fool themselves into thinking they’re unique and have something no one else has. They may, but it won’t last that long. The distinguishing factor, though, is culture because it’s very difficult to replicate. This is because culture is made up of all the individuals in the organization agreeing, either consciously or unconsciously, to go along with the values and unwritten rules. For example, I’ve been in organizations where if you showed up five minutes before a meeting you were ten minutes late. Everyone showed up for a meeting 15 minutes early. That was not written down anywhere. On your first day you learned that this is the time meetings start—it’s 15 minutes before the number. I’ve been in other organizations where you show up when you show up. If you were there on time, you’d be sitting by yourself for quite a while. Neither one was good nor bad, it was just the way things were. Where culture becomes important is if it’s serving us well in terms of our strategy, goals, and who we want to be. If it is, then it’s just fine.
Ruhland
Do events like COVID break down culture? Is it subject to things out of our control? Or is culture impervious to outside conditions?
Lehmann
No, they are not impervious. When something like COVID or any major change in the marketplace happens, new competitors or any kind of change, the culture is under threat. If you have a culture that you pay attention to, know what’s strong about it, and are being very intentional about what your culture is, then you’re going to withstand those forces. In fact, culture becomes one of the ways that you deal with it. Let’s use COVID as an example. If your culture is one that says, “Everybody’s ideas are valued. We really value the input of employees and what everyone is doing. When COVID hits, people are now working at home. Everything is disrupted. But if the values stay the same, we value people and want their input, we just have to figure out a different way to do it. We used to do it in face-to-face meetings. Now we have to do it a different way. But the value doesn’t change. It’s important to us and we’ll make sure that we do it.
One organization that I work with has a very strong value of always trying to demonstrate that the employees are important. When COVID hit, they made a commitment to keep everybody working. They were an essential industry, so they could stay open. They did it within very strict COVID guidelines. They said, “Our job is to keep everybody working. They have a paycheck. We want to keep them safe. (Just as they want to keep them safe in their normal activities.) They made sure that they did everything they could to protect them against COVID. They also said, “If you’re sick, go home and self-isolate. Don’t worry about your job, you’ll get paid whether you’re here or not. Don’t feel that you have to be a hero, that you have to come to work because you need the job—you’ll have it.” They didn’t lay anybody off. They kept everyone working. They also demonstrated that in a time of crisis the value of caring about their people extended to their families. They offered vaccinations for anyone who wanted them, including their families. They brought families in to talk about what they were doing. They did everything they could to support people at work and after. They came through COVID with very few cases and an increased sense of loyalty from the customers who looked around and saw the people they knew working for other organizations—those that felt abandoned during this time. Loyalty goes both ways. That was an example where culture helped them get through all this.
On the other hand, there are examples where all the worst parts of the culture were shown under a bright spotlight. That’s why they are finding that a lot of people are choosing not to come back to work. They’re finding other things to do. There may be a lot of reasons for this, but I think one of them is culture. People will choose a culture that fits better for them. If your culture is one that attracts those kinds of people, and when people show up working in a culture they really like, now you have the real potential to make major gains.
Ruhland
We talked briefly on the idea of how people who used to work face-to-face are now remote. What is it that you need to develop and sustain a culture in a remote environment? Is it different from what you do in other cases? With us probably seeing more remote employees going forward, do we need to cultivate our internal communications and culture differently?
Lehmann
I’m not sure that I would use the word “differently.” I would say that you have to use different methods. Whatever the cultural cornerstones are, whatever the values are, maybe those were shared or demonstrated face-to-face whereas now we have to find a way to do it with Zoom.
One example is that they always tried to bring people together as much as they could. With people working from remote locations, it was difficult. One on the things they instituted was electronic happy hour. Wherever you were, you could join in and there was no business discussion. It was just connecting with people they worked with. They also encouraged people to set up their own. It wasn’t necessarily a crowd of 200 people—anyone who’s sat through one of those on Zoom knows that it’s just chaos. But if you can get three or four. Is it the same as being together? No, but it kept people feeling connected. One of the problems with COVID was the isolation. People started feeling like they were disconnected. If you were feeling a little uneasy about your work or the culture beforehand, if you became isolated you were really lost. “Why would I stay connected to this?” They did everything they could do to keep people connected. While I believe communication is important all the time, they doubled the effort to say “Here’s what’s going on. Here’s what we’re doing. Here’s where you’re contributing. Here’s what’s important for you to know.” Soliciting people’s ideas is sometimes difficult electronically, but it can be done if it’s a core value. If this is important and we want people to know that we believe in this, and this is what people come to work here for, then let’s find ways to make it happen.
As we move into the future, there are some benefits to the hybrid model of sometimes being in the office and sometimes not. There are some industries where people have always been on the road or out here. Smart leaders will factor not just productivity but also culture into how we do things and make sure that people still feel part of this enterprise, and that they can do their best work.
Ruhland
In any given environment, who is the keeper of the culture. Is there some one individual who keeps a thumb on that pulse or is it tracked some other way?
Lehmann
The short answer is “No, there isn’t any one person.” It’s all of us in the organization. We’re all keepers of the culture. How I decide to show up, behave, and think about the business is part of the culture. In an organization, sometimes you’re unconscious about that. You figure out what the rules are and show up to the meeting 15 minutes early. You don’t remember anyone telling you to do that. You don’t think about it each time. It becomes the norm, but you still own it by showing up at 15 minutes. That said, everyone can also influence the culture and decide that they can change this and show up differently. It’s challenging and difficult to change a culture. The “magic wand” of culture change—the effort and time it takes— is often underestimated.
The charismatic leader will come in and say, “We’re going to change everything and do things differently.” As humans we all resist change, and it’s the same when changing a culture. Some people will lean into it right away. Other people won’t. A whole bunch of people will be resistant not because it isn’t a good idea but because it’s change. A charismatic leader can come in and make what appear to be culture changes early on. But the business community is littered with examples where the charismatic leader came in and made what looked like incredible culture changes, then left and the culture went back to the way it was.
Obviously, the leader has to go first. Culture change is very difficult from the ground up. I’ve seen it done, but not without enlisting the leaders. They didn’t necessarily start off the culture change, but there was such commitment by a few people at other levels of the organization, working with the leaders to convince them that it was a good idea that it did change. But most often, it comes from leaders, the higher the better. If a CEO sets the tone saying, “These are going to be our values.” then role models and talks about those values saying, “Here are the things we are going to change and here’s the reason.” If that leader is very good at transmitting the message and holding his or her direct reports at the next level of leadership to those standards who then, in turn, hold the next level and the next while it cascades through, then is when you get real culture change. But it doesn’t happen overnight. Until you make clear expectations, role model the culture, and hold people accountable, then usually it’s just culture theater. You get a lot of cosmetic changes, you get a lot of rallies, a storeroom full of signs that talk about the new culture and how we’re all changing, but that’s all that’s left of it. It becomes “This, too, shall pass.”
Ruhland
We talk a lot about innovation in our group. Innovation requires a significant amount of trust, experimentation, trial, and error. How do you create or know if you have a culture that is tolerant of that kind of exploration?
Lehmann
I think there are some indicators that your culture is ripe for innovation. There are also some indicators that innovation is going to be difficult here. One of them is “Where do the ideas for improvement come from?” Are they coming from the same group of people, or senior people, or one or two people? Or are they coming from all over the organization? The more people you’ve got trying to innovate, the better chance you have of coming up with a good idea. If one, two or three people come up with all the “good” ideas…it’s a numbers game. The great Linus Pauling said, “The way to come up with great ideas is to come up with a lot of ideas.” You must have a culture where it’s okay to be wrong, it’s okay to speak up, it’s okay to challenge the status quo. Amy Edmundson of Harvard calls it “creating a psychologically safe environment.” People feel like they can contribute at that level and will not feel as if they’re less than or rejected. It’s very difficult to do because as soon as new ideas come up, almost always our first reaction is “That won’t work!” It’s different, it’s change, so you have to foster the openness. In part, I have to be courageous enough to speak up and, on the other hand, I have to be courageous enough to not react negatively to ideas and say, “Let’s explore it!” Most ideas are not going to be great, but we have to welcome them and try to get as many as we can. The cultural part of it is “Is it safe to speak up?” When people do speak up, do we feel like we embrace those new ideas at least enough to explore them?
Another key indicator is if you hear phrases like “that’s not the way we do things.” Or “We do it because we’ve always done it.” Those are negative indicators. Innovation obviously involves change. If you have a culture that’s change resistant, both individually and as an organization, it’s going to be a problem if you want to innovate. I find it fascinating that in the history of business how many successful companies end up stumbling when they stop innovating. The get really big and successful at running the machine. They build the machine and forget all the experimentation it took to get there. The culture becomes very insular and ignores outside influences. As a result, a company starts off innovative, gets successful, and then locks into that success pattern. But there comes a point where you either innovate or start to fall off. The big change in our environment is that drop-off happens much faster and much steeper than it used to. You used to be able to gradually go out of business. Now, it’s one day you’re on top and the next day you’re not. Meanwhile, everybody inside the culture is asking, “What happened?”
Ruhland
From what you’re describing, though culture may seem nebulous and hard to get your arms around, it’s a risk mitigator to a certain degree.
Lehmann
I absolutely agree. It is a risk mitigator and insurance against disruptive change. On one hand, you want to have a culture that at least explores change and doesn’t react, lock down and say in resistance, “That doesn’t apply to us.” It also provides you with a bedrock of values that can get you through disruptions like COVID. Depending on the culture you have, it gives you flexibility to react and respond. In the best case, a culture that helps you be intentional and initiate change is even better. Then, you’re the one innovating and creating disruption for everyone else. I’ve never forgotten what a client of mine said about his competitors years ago, “They’ll catch on, but they won’t catch up.” Innovate, move quickly, be nimble and don’t worry if they copy you. By the time they do, you’ll have innovated something else.