Lukasz's Blog

Our Little Book of Culture

Over the past 12 months we have spent a lot of time thinking, talking and building the culture we wanted in our team. We aren’t a huge team - there’s’ about 75 of us - but we subscribe to the adage that culture eats strategy for breakfast so we knew having the right culture was essential to our success.

We started with looking at our team structure to see if it was encouraging the right behaviours and getting the right results. We completed a re-alignment exercise which focussed on functional leadership, flattening the structure and devolving as much of the decision making as possible to people who were materially impacted by the decisions being made.

We didn’t want to pay lip service to the consultation (as is so often the case) and took all input/feedback very seriously. We focussed on making the whole process very inclusive and the level of buy-in & engagement in getting the structure right was incredible. The final realigned structure ended up being about 40%+ different to the proposed structure we consulted on, based on high quality and well thought out feedback from the teams - again, something that very unusual in these situations.

We followed up the realignment with a 12-month plan of culture related changes and activities. Everything from introducing a regular rewards program to recognise peers who are ‘awesome’ to inviting senior managers to spend more time on our floors. We regularly host external speakers - especially from outside of government - to offer us their insights & perspectives and to challenge some of our thinking. We spent one weekend at a budget plant sale, buying second hand office plants and re-potting them to use in our office space - messy work but it literally laid the ground work for our culture.

Our culture and performance has shifted dramatically in the past year. People are engaged, working together more effectively, and getting consistently awesome feedback from our customers. We have built a high performance culture that still knows how to have fun.

We wanted to celebrate that and capture the journey we’ve been on - and continue to be on. We wanted to be able to ‘document’ our culture and use it to shape our everyday behaviours & values as well as give anyone thinking about joining the team some insight into what we were all about.  After thinking a bit about how best we do that we decided to put together a Culture Book.

The Culture Book is a book by us, for us and about us. It describes our culture and the things we value most and is a great reflection of the past 12 months. It started life out as post-it notes, bits of butcher paper and hand-written scribbles on a whiteboard wall and, through lots of input, feedback and iteration, it became the first published version of Our Little Book of Culture. The idea is that we will update the book on a regular basis as our culture evolves and grows but that we will be able to point to book at any time to describe our culture and what we are all about.

An electronic copy of the Culture Book is included below for you to have a look through.

Culture eats Strategy and Character decimates Values

It’s often been said that culture eats strategy for breakfast and it is absolutely true. I’d add to that by saying that character decimates values.

What do I mean by that? Values are what people (or organisations) believe and character is how they act. There’s a subtle but critical difference in that.  I’d take it one step further by saying that culture = character x values (the multiplier is intentional, anything multiplied by 0 is still 0 - you need both sides of the multiplier to be in the positive).

I’ve been privileged to work with a large cross-section of organisations and I must say one of the things that always sets off background alarm bells for me are vision or value statements prominently displayed in the office. More often than not they are generic (usually meaningless to anyone but a small group who have had direct exposure to their creation) generalities developed by consultants or ‘organisational experts’. (perhaps a case of ’protest too much’?)

Companies that have a winning culture don’t simply walk in on a Monday morning and 'have values’. Everything they do is infused with the right character and values for what they are all about and are out to achieve - it’s part of their DNA.

It’s something organisations need to do from within themselves - a bit of culture DIY. All too often organisations grasp for saviours in the form of frameworks or consultants when in reality the only thing that will actually help performance is knuckling down and doing the hard yards themselves.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of tools available to help organisations - and they should be used - but the journey to culture is more important than any output which can be put on a poster. It needs to be an inclusive, reflective and open journey which takes time.

It’s hard work (I’ve been there) but the dividends are incredible and I believe that culture is an inside game and it needs to be baked into everything you do - too often character and cultural fit are overlooked in light of other 'harder’ or technical competencies.

Time to shoot the hero?

Over the last decade I have acclimatised quite well to the New Zealand culture and way of life but there are still a couple of things I can’t make peace with. One of them is the hero mentality.

I’ve seen it time and time again. It’s usually late at night, the project encounters an unexpected ‘feature’ and you reach for the telephone and call in the hero! With his intricate knowledge of the systems landscape and built in knowledge-base of common problems he’s able to resolve the 'feature’ and your project makes it by the skin of it’s teeth. Where would you be without him, your project would have surely crashed and burned with his help?!? All accolades go to the hero. This happens time and time again.

Good result right? Well, maybe but probably not. Why do you keep running into problems that only one person can solve?

In other cultures the question about why we have stability and consistency issues to begin with get asked pretty darn quickly. The 'hero’ often proves villain as a result of not maintaining a predictable, clearly documented systems environment and retaining the knowledge-base in his head. Its recognized that the 'hero’ presents significant risk and potentially catastrophic consequences for the organisation.

There are many reasons the hero mentality is bad but broadly speaking it is not sustainable, not scalable, not transferable, not consistent and very risky to the business. Heros are bad for the project, bad for the team and ultimately bad for the organisation.

Unfortunately, putting an end to hero mentality can be challenging. Many organisations that embody hero culture don’t understand the problem — they think everything is OK and look to the hero as a critical resource, someone to save the day. This often has to do with organisation maturity.

I personally believe it basically boils down to incentives. If you further embed the 'hero mentality’ by praising the hero every time they do something 'good’ then you quickly shape your culture around that mentality. The key to ridding your organisation of the hero infestation is to conscious and swiftly change the incentives. Start rewards good behaviour and don’t acknowledge the here. The hero can either become a collaborative leader or move onto 'special projects’.

Rewards and acknowledge predictable, scalable and effective results and look down on unexpected 'features’ - the key is to eliminate waste. At the end of the day business needs to operate on a solid systems foundation and your 'hero’ is doing nothing to help you achieve that result.

If you’re serious about operational excellence, speed to market and really focusing on your strategic differentiators then my advice is simple: shoot the hero.

I think if New Zealand Inc. is serious about becoming a player on the global stage (which I believe it has every opportunity to be) it needs to look hard at its cultural challenges and overcome them.

There’s a great article entitled 'Why heroes are bad’ over at Rational Scrum which I highly recommend.