Simplifying Culture to Make It Real & Tangible
By Robert Murray
I recently started a project called IM in a Car where I interview leaders, business owners, and community members who are making an impact. Today, I thought I would go back to doing a solo video on how to grow your business by growing, building, and sustaining culture.
When examining culture, the first step is to simplify the perspective. Sometimes organizational culture is perceived as intangible and fluffy. Sometimes culture is just some writing on a plaque on a wall, but has no life.
Culture is generally something we can feel when we enter an organization. Sometimes we can see it and hear it. It can range from vibrant to dreary. When you experience a strong culture, people use the words ‘we’, not ‘they’ (AKA management or the rest of the organization).
Here is my view on how you can look at culture differently and take some steps to grow it yourself.
Petri Dish
I wrote about the petri dish in my last blog (read it here). Here is a snippet:
Culture is an intangible phenomenon, but you can feel it, see it, and hear it within an organization. So, is it really that intangible?
The first part of the journey to grow a culture is understanding the nature of it. For me, I look at it like a petri dish. If you stop for a second and simplify our perspective of ourselves and the people around us, we are all biological organisms. Certain conditions allow us to survive; food, water, oxygen, shelter. Other conditions offer an opportunity to thrive; social connections, emotional support, love, sharing, achievement, etc. I believe that we over-complicate a lot inside our organizations, and if we just take a step back we will be able to see our companies for what they are — a petri dish.
Consider the grade seven science fair. Students test all sorts of hypotheses. In my day, there were always three or four projects contrasting plant growth or tooth decay by comparing the environments for the specimen in water vs. cola, or something to that effect. We all knew the outcomes before they started, but the point is clear — organisms live and thrive in healthy environments and die in unhealthy environments. This brings us to our organizations.
Sometimes we overcomplicate things in organizations. I believe that if we take a more simplistic perspective it can make it easier to manage. Our job as leaders or owners, is to build a petri dish so that a culture can grow and thrive. This will make it possible for everyone to do their own ‘thing’ and have a great time when they do it. It is the leadership team’s responsibility to build the environment for a culture that lives and thrives. If this is not done intentionally, your culture could die.
The petri dish is a useful analogy, because people are bacterial organisms. We’re alive and we have some essential requirements in order to live. We need oxygen, water, food, and shelter in order to live. If we have those four areas covered, then we are alive. There are also things that we need in order to thrive and be successful. I consider emotional support, social connections, and achievements those elements that allow us to thrive and be happy.
Identifying Your Culture & Values
When examining an organization’s culture, we need to take a step back and decide:
- What do we want to foster?
- What kind of environment will allow a culture to thrive?
Here are some important steps (that aren’t always easy):
Identify the values and culture you want to grow.
At Intrigue we value many things, but when it comes down to the core, we value; fun, learning, leadership, trust, action, and team. We bring those values to life through our standards of open and honest communication, getting outside of our comfort zone, doing what we say we’re going to do when we say we’re going to do it, and practicing an unquenchable thirst for applicable knowledge. The point is, we’ve identified our values so that we can create an environment to make those values come to life.
Live out your values.
As leaders, when Paul and I started, we thought about a lot of things that we should be and put these idealistic values on top of the organization. We quickly realized, after a few months of trying to live these values, that they weren’t right.
When you identify values that aren’t ‘you’, it will be very difficult to live out those values day in and day out. On the other hand, if you identify values that are aligned with what you do day in and day out, it’s a lot easier to live them out and be authentic in the way the organization is run.
An Intrigue, we identified our values, and now we live them out. In living them out, we have to lead by example. So, we put mechanisms in place in the organization to bring these values to life. For example we value leadership, so we developed a program called Leader Building. This simple approach helped us to develop a weekly habit of learning and reflection. Every week, each team member reads a book or a blog, or watches a video. Then, they reflect on their learning and write about actionable takeaways. These takeaways/learnings are then reviewed by their peers for feedback and support.
Really, culture isn’t about managing something that doesn’t exist and has altruistic values. It needs to be authentic, honest, and real to you. We need to identify our values. We need to speak about them like crazy, and then we need to live them out by example and put mechanisms into our organizations to make them come to life.
This is something near and dear to my heart, and I think it’s a ton of fun. We’re really lucky at Intrigue because we have an awesome culture. The team inside our four walls is second to none, and I couldn’t be happier to go to work every day.
The beautiful part of identifying values and living them out every day, is that it makes it a lot easier to figure out who we want to bring inside the organization. If they don’t live out the values we have, then it’s going to be difficult for them to join and thrive inside the organization.
At Intrigue, our values and culture are a huge part of our recruitment process, and we take time to communicate our values to individuals who are considering being part of our team. This is important because these are values we work by, and if they sound like you, then you want to be here. If there’s a part of our values that don’t align for them, then we don’t ask them to join the organization.
Simplifying Culture
I really want to simplify the idea of culture so that people can begin to see it as a tangible thing. If you can feel it, you can see it — and if you can see it, it’s a thing. We really have to make culture a positive inside our organizations.
Culture can have a huge spectrum, all the way from toxic to energized. Whether we’re controlling, managing, or building an environment to make it come to life, we need to be focused on getting an energized culture where people feel great to come to work. We want people to be stoked about the work they’re doing, love working with each other as a team, and not go home drained or emotionally unsatisfied.
Sometimes the best ideas are simple. I hope that my perspective gives you a bit of a lens into helping you build your own thriving culture.
