work and culture: the false binary that screws up both
Most teams and leaders I talk to think culture matters. Culture went mainstream years and years ago. Many folks are willing to pay coaches, consultants, facilitators and other supposed pros to come in and create or fix their culture.
Yay! This is part of what Ben and I are up to when we coach.
Also, boo! This is all wrong.
I’m booing a false work-culture binary that is super popular among leaders. Even and maybe especially among leaders with good hearts, the ones who care about their people.
THE BINARY I’M BOOING
On one hand you have WORK, the work, the stuff we do. How we make a difference, how we make the money. Why this organization exists in the first place.
On the other hand, you have CULTURE. A cloudy squishy vibe. Sorta how it feels while we do the stuff we do, I guess? You know - “morale”! Or trust/vulnerability/relationships. A gazpacho of all that stuff that makes people less complain-y, we hope?
With this binary as the guide, culture gets stabbed at. There are hesitant half-steps. There are icebreakers and happy hours and semi-annual retreats. People are even hired, sometimes into the very top tier of the organization, to bear responsibility for the vibes and the vulnerability.
This is a recipe for waste, frustration, and failure. For phoniness and phoning it in.
Instead of treating work and culture as distinct spheres that flavor each other, they are better thought of as modes of one another. Culture is the set of shared approaches we have to doing stuff around here. It’s the way we work. It’s not social cellophane wrapped around the precious metal of the product. It’s all the moves made along the way to creating the product.
Don’t get me wrong. I like happy hour. I like liking the people I work with. We spend a lot of time together! It’s way more fun when we’re friends.
But I’ve found the likelihood we become friends is dramatically higher if we’re engaged in meaningful pursuit of something that is really hard to achieve, really worthwhile, and requires us to take risks together.
Great culture, when I’ve experienced it or helped create it, sparks and shapes that risk-taking. It’s the mindsets and moves, deployed every hour, that move the group closer to making the mission real.
If the thing you’re doing to improve culture is not sparking and shaping useful risk-taking, you’re probably wasting your time, at best. You may even be diminishing your team and dimming your prospects. That really sucks! You’re acting in good faith. You’re earnestly seeking to create a place people like to be and work and see other people.
But the work-culture binary is cold and confounding. It’s like saying, “Yeah, there’s parenting, and then there’s my relationship with my kids. I really need someone to help me with my relationship with my kids. But let’s do that without talking about my parenting.”
Instead, there’s a more inspiring and powerful place to stand alongside your people. We aren’t here to be friends. We’re here to be friends who build something that really stinking matters. Our friendship itself, at least during work, should speed up that building and make it better.
Culture, in this telling, isn’t an average of the personalities and preferences of the group. It’s a lived commitment to progress. A fun paradox of it, once you’re building it this way, is that commitment opens regular, unexpected opportunities for personalities and preferences to flower.
-Eric
