May Takeaways: The Culture Code
Contents
Fuzzy Concepts and the Problem of Definition
I wanted to start this reflection by mentioning one of Plato’s dialogues, but then I thought it might take me a few paragraphs before I could make my point. I’ve also used that dialogue so much that it’s time to just let go, or not. So I thought maybe it would be better to share the underlying idea I have, letting you in on the process.
There are certain concepts that seem to be fuzzy. By that I mean they’re often difficult to either articulate or define clearly. Take for example the concept of justice. What you find in the dictionary is something like “the process or result of using laws to fairly judge cases, redress wrongs, and punish crimes.”
This definition does not really tell us much, though. If we look more closely, we could easily end up in a philosophical rabbit hole were we to put on our Socratic hats. What does ‘fairly judge’ mean? What is fairness? If this were a Wikipedia article, after a few link clicks we’d end up on the Philosophy entry. This is also known as the Wikipedia philosophy phenomenon.
Culture is one such fuzzy concept. One definition of culture is “the beliefs, customs, arts, etc. of a particular social group, place, or time.” Similar to justice, this definition requires the exploration of more concepts like beliefs, customs, and social groups.
Despite the fuzziness of these concepts, we do still have an intuitive sense of what they are. This is one of the goals of Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, where Socrates attempts to get a definition of piety from Euthyphro, who claimed he was an expert in the subject matter.
By the end of the dialogue it becomes clear that 1) Euthyphro doesn’t really know much about the concept. 2) The fuzziness of the concept means that it requires being examined from different angles. The more thought we put into it, and the more conversations we have about it, the better we grasp it, along with the complexity underlying it.
Well, there you go, I couldn’t help but include the dialogue after all, albeit more succinctly than I had originally intended.
Culture as Something We Do
This longwinded introduction leads me to Daniel Coyle’s book The Culture Code. Coyle thinks of culture more as “a set of living relationships working toward a shared goal. It’s not something you are. It’s something you do.”
From the outset, Coyle is telling us that culture is something we do, and this thing is relational whereby we work together alongside others towards a shared goal. For him culture is less about values and beliefs, and more about how we behave within certain groups, be those a family, a sports team, a small company, or a big organization.
Such an understanding of culture implies that we can build successful, highly effective groups by preparing an adequate petri dish for it to thrive. Coyle suggests this is possible through three interrelated skills:
- Building a comfortable space where everyone feels they belong, and can share their ideas and opinions freely without being admonished.
- Sharing vulnerability, which creates stronger bonds between the members of a group or team.
- Establishing a common purpose for the group, making it easier for them to know what they are working towards. By having that north star, they would all be working individually and collectively to help the group get there.
The underlying assumption is that, beyond setting these initial conditions, cultivating good culture consists of ongoing repetitive behaviors. This is achieved via putting out cues and signals for the group to let them know they belong (e.g. inviting quieter people to weigh in on the discussion), sharing vulnerabilities to establish trust (e.g. admitting a mistake or openly asking for input or help), and establishing a set of rules of thumb or shared principles to continuously remind them what their collective purpose is (e.g. the customer comes first).
In our discussion of the book, several things were brought up that made me think about the effectiveness of this approach, especially the focus on the behavioral aspect more so than anything else. If you’re building a team from scratch, a blank slate, whether you’re co-founding a startup or starting a new department at a company, it might be easier to establish a clear purpose, select the people that align with your vision, and even share vulnerabilities related to the mistakes being committed as you try to figure out and lay out new processes and systems together.
To what extent is this effective if you’re joining a team with a deeply embedded culture, where you have little say in who gets to stay and who doesn’t, and when there are different personal and social cultures floating around in the background? One example that was brought up during the discussion, which we couldn’t locate, led me to stumble on another book about culture that conveyed a similar point: The Culture Map by Erin Meyer.
Culture as Something We Bring With Us
The Culture Map looks at culture in the sense of the first definition I shared above, namely that culture is the set of beliefs, values, norms, art, etc. of a certain group. The premise is that we all bring different cultures into a team or group, and these social cultures often operate under different assumptions about how communication, leadership, management, and decision-making should work. By way of example, according to Meyer, some societies tend to have a more egalitarian management style, while others tend to prefer a more hierarchical one.
To illustrate this point, Meyer shares the story of Ulrich Jepsen, a Danish executive who worked at Maersk. Following a more egalitarian style of leadership, he found it difficult to apply the same flat management style when he moved to St. Petersburg, Russia. According to Jepsen, his management style of asking for input, sharing vulnerabilities, and letting team members in on the decision process was met with a lot of skepticism. Some of the complaints he received from the other management team during the focus groups were as follows:
- He is a weak, ineffective leader.
- He doesn’t know how to manage.
- He gave up his corner office on the top floor, suggesting to the company that our team is of no importance.
- He is incompetent.
Meyer’s goal is to highlight that these cultural differences are deeply ingrained in us, and when managing cross-cultural teams or doing business internationally, it is important to surface these differences to figure out how to adapt and manage a team or do business more effectively. To that end, she draws out a list of behavioral scales across different aspects of doing business, including communicating, sharing feedback, and building trust.
I don’t want to dwell too much on this, but I thought that Coyle’s and Meyer’s approaches can be complementary in a nice way. Given the fuzziness of the concept, the more we explore it, we notice new issues that require our consideration.
Bridging the Cultural Gap
In a globalized world, we are exposed to different ways of working and communicating, and so the cultural background issue may not be as relevant, or predictive of arising problems, in certain contexts as was rightly brought up during our conversations.
However, these differences become more salient during cross-border interactions, when two companies are negotiating a deal, or when one particular culture dominates within a group or team. Under these circumstances, to avoid falling into the Jepsen predicament, a manager or leader would benefit from understanding the different scales within which each culture operates before applying Daniel Coyle’s 3 skills: safety, vulnerability, purpose.
Either way, the petri dish of culture is not one of rainbows and sunshine, but of different individuals with different cultural backgrounds, goals, and aspirations. They come together to work towards a shared goal, with lots of ups and downs. On that note, I leave you with this reflection from Coyle:
“One misconception about highly successful cultures is that they are happy, lighthearted places. This is mostly not the case. They are energized and engaged, but at their core their members are oriented less around achieving happiness than around solving hard problems together. This task involves many moments of high-candor feedback, uncomfortable truth-telling, when they confront the gap between where the group is, and where it ought to be.”
― Daniel Coyle
You can find more detailed notes about The Culture Code here.