[CTQ Smartcast] What companies get wrong about cultural values
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As companies grow, they seek to build a common philosophy that ties the company, its work, and its employees. Capturing the DNA of an organisation in this way can be very challenging, but done well, it can pay off by providing a reference point, direction, and an answer for "how things are done here". But what do they get wrong about this exercise?
In this smartcast, CTQ co-founders Ramanand and Harish deconstruct company culture with Sirisha Bhamidipati, who has spent a lot of time thinking and directing such cultural exercises for diverse teams. In her own words:
Culture is very important part of an organization yet it often receives very little leadership mind space and often let to evolve rather than doing something proactively about it. Culture is the operating system of the organization. It is the way things are done at a company.
Company culture has four essential components:
Values - What the company stands for, what gets recognised and rewarded in the company
Rituals - The behaviours around the values that the company celebrates
Stories - Exemplary stories of how the leaders and the employees live the values in the company
Heroes - Constantly communicating through multiple channels how one can become a hero in the organization and can get recognised, rewarded and celebrated
Hear our point of view on how to build culture in organisations.
Some of the topics we covered:
• How, Why & When should companies build values
• Which values should companies build
• Examples of companies who got it right.
• How values set your company apart
• Examples of unique and interesting value statements
• Operational plan for moving abstract concepts to actual implementation of values
• How can companies check if their plans are working
• How to declutter the leadership’s ideals and zero down on the real values they care about
• Resolving internal dilemmas and the ideal number of values
• Breaking down a “value” into roles and responsibilities
• Role of stories in building culture
• How to disseminates stories through an organisation
• How to train people to find the right stories
Some interesting books and authors we spoke about include
• ‘The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business’ by Erin Meyer
• ‘Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility’ by Patty McCord
• ‘No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention’ by Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings
• ‘Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't’ by James C. Collins
READ THE TRANSCRIPT OF THIS EPISODE
[Start of Transcript]
[00:00:00]
It's extremely important to have the right culture to attract the right set of people. What we also realize is there could be star performers outside. But when you recruit them into the organization, if they don't fit into your culture, you might have disparate, fantastic individual contributors, but you don't get the benefit or the power of that cohesion that happens across the leaders.
Ramanand: As companies grow, they seek to build a common culture. These can help the company tie its work together, tie its workforce together. In times, like 2020, when everyone gets scattered across the world, you still have something that binds you to the DNA of the organization. So here is where a lot of companies use the power of their cultural values. Some have already defined them, and they try to make them very apparent. Some are in the process of defining these values. But not everyone gets the process right. Not everyone understands the best ways to bring out the power of these cultural values. That's what we want to explore today in this Smartcast.
Today, we are going to have Sirisha, who's our resident expert on building culture, transformation within organizations, especially from a people's point of view, to talk about some of the best practices, some of the do's and don'ts of working with these values within an organization. Welcome, Sirisha.
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Hi, Ramadand.
Ramanand: So Sirisha, before we begin, can you give us a couple of lines of introduction for yourself, relevant to this topic?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: I primarily work with companies to help them build the [00:02:00] right kind of culture, which is completely aligned to their purpose, the purpose of being for that organization, and actually also help them translate their culture into their values and the behaviours in the organization, which will actually bring their culture to life.
Ramanand: Let's begin at the basic question, why should a company think about these cultural values? What are these typical cultural values?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Culture is like, say, an operating system for a company. It is what defines them, what defines their being. It is about their set of core ethos, or principles on the basis of which the company is run. Usually, the identity for their company stems from the founders. They envision what is the kind of culture that they want in the organization. Unfortunately, that gets broken, as the number of people in the organization increases, and the priorities keep changing. That's where it's important to actually define this culture into what it means in terms of values for the company, and what it means as behaviours for individuals, so that it can be driven through the company using lots of examples, recognizing a lot of role models, rewarding them.
Ramanand: Can you give us some examples of typical values, words, and how do you express them?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: For instance, there's an organization, which has high performance as one of its cultures. Just imagine an organization with that as a cultural norm. Then you're going to have people who are the best in class, you have people who are self-driven, you have people who will be experimenting, who will not just be following a set of instructions, [00:04:00] but will be constantly experimenting, and who are going to be engaged or intrigued by the kinds of colleagues that they have, the kind of people that they work with. Their environment matters a lot to them.
Now, if you assume a high performance organization like this, then honesty, brutal honesty could be one of their values. Where people are giving feedback directly to each other, there is no mollycoddling. If somebody is not performing up to the mark, you should be ready to let go. You should give them that concrete feedback. That is where you're actually driving one of the values for the company coming from the culture. From that, you have to come down to behaviours. It could be something like you need to be delivering, adding value to the company. You need to be working with the bigger norm or the purpose of the company. Everything that you do, should be aligned to that, should help everybody around you to actually contribute to that common purpose. Then, it should be about people working extremely hard and staying relevant. It's not about past glory. It's about what you're doing right now. This could be some of those behaviours that should constantly be drilled down, be it in terms of messaging, be it in terms of stories where you're actually recognizing people, and your values are actually non-compromisable.
If you look at it, values are what will differentiate a company from its competitors. It's what is going to make you stand out. Everybody knows the product that you're making. There will be ten other people who are making something similar, or working in a similar area. What differentiates you is, what is the kind of environment that you provide? What does this organization respect? So, values are the sacrosanct principles, which are non-compromisable. So people are rewarded, recognised for it, people are pulled up if they're not practicing it, or you go to the extent of letting go of people.
Ramanand: Could you give us some examples of companies that [00:06:00] have got these values right? Whom we can look at as role models, and these are not necessarily companies that maybe you've worked with. You've worked with a lot of different kinds of companies. Some leading examples that you can tell us about?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Some leading examples, in the multinational context, one is Netflix, where they completely believe in freedom and responsibility. To ensure they bring that value, the cultural aspects to life, they have gotten rid of the majority of their policies. They have a-no vacation policy. Nobody needs to go for approvals for something that is good in the larger context of the organization. With great freedom, they say comes great responsibility. So, every individual should work in the best interest of Netflix.
Then Novartis is a company, again, that's doing a lot of work around building curiosity. They call themselves the 'un-bossed' culture. There's no question of a boss. It's about people working together and actually getting things done. It tends to go closer to the Holacracy model, where there is a particular project that you want to execute. A bunch of people who are capable of contributing to that project come together. Whoever has the best view about the longer term picture for it, actually drives the project, and then people contribute and they get the work done. So, Novartis is also building curiosity as a culture in the organization because they want to be agile, nimble, want people to constantly learn, question all the assumptions so that they, as a natural process, keep reinventing themselves.
Google has a good culture where they say, ‘we take care of the rest of the things for you. So you come to your work with your whole self.’ You're not bothered about other things. These are some good multinationals, which are actually living the culture that they talk about. [00:08:00] It's not restricted to the plaque that they put up in the office.
Ramanand: Because I am a little sceptical about some of these from personal experience, I've often found that some of this is paid lip service to. You have three, four words that sound very generic, very abstract. I sometimes struggle to understand, one, how does it differentiate one company from another when you say a value like 'execution'? Let's take it, I'm not saying that every company that has that value is paying lip service to it. So, one is it's a very generic kind of word. I don't understand what I should do differently if I was working there. Secondly, do you think that someone comes up with this and then there is a reality, which is very different from these. Comment on these things?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Majority of the companies that I have seen, I've attempted speaking to a lot of CPOs. Most places it is lip service. Just think about the genesis of this. After growing to a certain extent, everybody realizes that they need some culture statements and value statements, because that seems to be the in-thing, and they need it. So, it ends up being the boardroom discussion, discussion with the leaders, and they come up with some of these nice sounding words. That's what usually happens. Then it becomes an HR agenda, which is the most surprising part for me, because culture has to be above TEO or COO agenda. You're actually building the company for the future. It is built to last in a very different sense than what was used earlier. It's about building a resilient organization that is agile, nimble, constantly keeps adapting itself, and it's actually delivering best in class, and getting 10x goals. [00:10:00]
Now, that is ideally the vision of a CEO and the board. If you see, after the real capital that is required for running a business, it's the ‘people’ capital that's the only differentiator. So something which is as important as core, as culture, often gets diluted because of the way it is done. Where it is pushed to HR, then it becomes setting up foosball tables and table tennis boards, and getting people to forcibly come together as part of get-togethers and events that are organized. That's not what is actually going to drive the culture in the company. It should be about who you hire. If I'm looking at joining a company, it should be, 'Why should I join that company? I can see a career path, money.’ But that matters only to a certain extent.
If you actually see the millennials and their reasons for picking up companies... There's a recent survey, which was done by BCG and somebody else, which talks about millennials and the reason why they picked the company. People are talking about having spectacular people to work with. People are talking about their first job as a platform where they learn much more than what they learn in a B-school. They're looking at using that as a platform where they're actually growing faster and they're doing that real networking, where they're having some meaningful connections with people. That's what people are aspiring for. It is something that organizations should look very strongly towards. Unfortunately, it falls in the important but not urgent grade.
My attempt is to actually change the narrative, saying it is important and urgent, because now is the time that, if you haven't done so far, now's the time that you need to define what you stand for.
Ramanand: Right. Quite a few things that I wanted to get into. But, one thing I'm [00:12:00] taking away is that these values, if done right can serve as compass, direction-setting mechanism, something especially when a year like this, where you're looking for something to orient yourself or reorient yourself, these values can play that role of direction-setting. Like you said, a foosball table is of no use in a year like this. But if you've stated some form of resilience, whatever is your unique brand of values, that is something you should be able to carry with you wherever you are and whatever be the circumstances.
One thing I wanted to ask you is, what is the best time for a company to think about it? Probably, we can take two examples. One is, let's say you're a startup, and you're moving through the years, and funding and all those kinds of things. And let's take another more established company, maybe they're going from one order of magnitude growth to another. Is there a good time to do these kinds of exercises? Or do they just happen by default?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Like, we were talking earlier, culture stems from the founders' philosophy of what is the kind of company that they want to be? What do they want to stand for? Now, if you look at the founders, and probably the next level of people that they hire, it's very easy for them to transfer that, in terms of this is how we work, because we are working very closely. Culture values are not statements that you make, but it's actually where you're walking the talk, where you're doing what you're preaching, and so others look at you and start learning. Now, when you look at another level of people coming, you are the CEO, owner, [00:14:00] founder, next level, start hiring people to work with them. That is where the break in the chain happens, because it is A communicating to B, B is doing 70% of it, B will start showing that 70% and C will actually start imbibing 40% of it. Around 30% is lost in transition, translation. That's where it starts getting diluted.
So, any time when a company is going into a hiring mode, it's not like the first level, but they're actually going into a hiring mode, is a good time to take a step back, zoom out and actually see what we want to stand for? Because when you're looking at growth, you're looking at becoming an exponential organization. You're looking at becoming a bigger organization, and you want what you stand for to be the core. It's very easy to do it at that stage because you know your purpose, why the organization exists. You do some exercises, introspection around your desired identity, what do you want to stand for? And from that, you actually say, Okay, this is what I want to stand for. So this is the kind of culture I want at my organization. In order to have this culture, these should be those values or those non-compromisable things for me in the organisation, and don't leave the values at those word levels, but actually translate them into behaviour. So if you're saying, you want to demonstrate honesty, this is what we mean. Or if you want to talk about transparent communication, this is what we mean, whichever behaviours. So it's easy to do at that stage.
For bigger companies, established companies, and some of them that I work with today, where you have to go through a cultural transformation, it's like doing a triple bypass when the person is alive. It's critical, it needs to be done, because you're already seeing the damage of not doing it, or not following the culture norms that you want to follow. At the same time, it's extremely risky, because you will have people leaving. [00:16:00] Obviously, people who are not fitting into the culture will start leaving the organization. Then people who don't find their purpose aligned to the organization will sooner or later leave the organization. One of the companies that I dealt with, even when I talked to the CEO, it's been three years since I've done that, and we realize that the attrition that happened then was good attrition. Because when we actually went ahead to recruit people at that time, we got the right kind of people who are more aligned to the organization. That's where, at a later stage, cultural transformation has its own challenges when it comes to executing it.
But fundamentally, all of them realize that ‘culture’ is to ‘recruiting’ what ‘product’ is to ‘marketing’. So, it's extremely important to have the right culture to attract the right set of people.
What we also realize is there could be star performers outside, but when you recruit them into the organization, if they don't fit into your culture, you might have disparate, fantastic individual contributors. But you don't get the benefit or the power of that cohesion that happens across the leaders or across your team. So that's what becomes very critical. In terms of timing, any time when they see that they're getting into the hiring process is right. Does it happen in only startups, can you do it for larger organizations? Can be done for both. But larger organizations bring along with them a lot more complexity. It's not tough, but you need the CEO and the board to actually see where you're driving them and be okay with the initial blips that might happen.
Ramanand: I've sometimes jokingly said that these values are like... the words, 'democratic', or 'republic' or 'people', and some of these 'countries' titles', if you have to call it out, then maybe that's missing. That can be actually [00:18:00] a source of difficulty for organizations. You say honesty is your cultural value. If you have to call it out, then what drove you to do that? I want to ask you one more question about the benefits before talking about how one should run an exercise like this. You spoke about its benefits in recruiting, in giving people direction. Are there any external benefits of identifying some of these values because this is an exercise that is going to be effortful, painful. A lot of introspection is what I am hearing you talk about. So, what other benefits apart from recruiting or good attrition, can you think of?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: One of the bigger benefits that I've seen is the underlying negative currents that keep running in the organization between people. It demystifies all of those. There is only one way in which people can function in the organization. The other benefit I have seen is it removes a lot of these groups. 'It's my group, and my tribe, and I protect them...' It just removes all of that because then it becomes the organization's talent versus the talent that is associated only with the leader. The other part that I have seen is much higher quality decision making. This is what some of my clients have also acknowledged about the quality of decision making and the way it improves because people are very clear, what is acceptable, what is not acceptable. So, you just tend to become an organization driven by context rather than control, across all levels.
One of the things that you were talking about earlier about using some of these words for describing countries. [00:20:00] One client, a couple of years ago, was talking about honesty as one of their values, honesty and transparency. Then we got into discussing something and he says, ‘You know what, this is a problem with my CEO…’ and all. I said go ahead and tell him. He said, ‘No, no, no, he's been there with us for almost seven years. We have to figure out how to subtly tell him.’ That's where the fundamental problem lies. At the CEO level, he's talking about honesty and transparency, but you haven't built the culture in the organization where people are ready to share open feedback. Then, there is a problem. You need to build a culture of feedback, people are open to receiving feedback, where feedback is not personal. But feedback is about the kind of work that is done.
Now, if a leader demonstrates it, probably it's much easier for people below to actually look and say that it's okay to do that. They do not question people in meetings. They do not question authority. So when you say transparency, then that's what you should probably build in the company to actually start respecting those values that you lay out.
Ramanand: Has there been any instance or have you seen any example where there was a value statement or a word that you thought was very interesting, but it was not your run-of-the-mill set of words? Does anything come to mind?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: I primarily work with Indian companies. Some of these values, we are basically copying from the west. For instance, I call something like 'integrity'. Integrity is basic. You shouldn't even call it your company value. I mean, it's a fundamental human value. So, why are you calling it? By adding the value, how is it differentiating your company's values? One organization, I fail to [00:22:00] remember, they have a book on their values. They talk about 'metrics'. Metrics are core to our organization.
Zappos, which I was lucky to do an internship while I was doing my fellowship, was where they talk about being 'maniacal' about customer service. So anything in the best interest of the customer, people could go ahead and make decisions. That was phenomenal, because even the junior most guy, somebody on the customer call support is actually helping out a customer can actually make a decision to say what best can you do about customer service? But again, that is not like these one-word value statements, but they've actually defined what is the expected behaviour or the norm. So that to me stands out.
Ramanand: Just to summarize two things, I wanted to remind myself: one was that values are something that you don't plan on compromising on for a long, long time, maybe never. Secondly, there should be a Chinese whisper-proof. They should somehow be able to transmit them irrespective of how big things can get. That's when you get the true value of it and can help in things like decision making. Let's talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of coming up with something like this, but I think Harish has a question before that.
Harish Kumar: A couple of questions. I guess this will also segue into the next section that you're talking about, Ramanand. Does that mean, and since you said that it is a parallel to the operating system in a computer. So, instead of not trying to highlight, say, five, six, or in some cases, whatever, 14 values or whatever, does that make more sense to look at all possible values that are there, and actually describe what each of those means for different roles and in different situations so that [00:24:00] it is very crystal clear that what does this really mean in my context? Does that really make more sense than picking these four, five and saying that, Oh, this is what we really want to stand for?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: I often recommend doing it the other way round. I tell them to forget about the words. I'll help you come up with the words and the culture statements. I ask them their purpose, for instance, why are they even running their company? What do they want to stand for? And it's like the obituary exercise that we do, right Harish, where you're writing your own obituary to understand what are those core things that you stand for. I ask them to write their ‘done’... I call them the 'done grid' statements, which is like, five years, 10 years, if they're writing their own newspaper headlines. Forget about the numbers. What do they want to stand for as a company? That helps them come up with their desired identity.
Once they have that desired identity, it's about to get there, how should people behave? How should people work? When people actually come up with this, it's much easier to distil, and come up with what are those values and the associated behaviours. Otherwise, what often happens is, the exercise that I've seen people doing often is, when they have to come up with their values, it becomes three or four people sitting in one room, and actually coming up with these nice sounding words. It finally becomes, 'Yeh bhi chahiye, woh bhi chahiye.' But how do you translate, and do you really want to stand up for this, is a question. There are organizations that talk about innovation mind-set, or entrepreneurial spirit, or they have different words for this, but they are not a culture where people accept failure.
Now, even for accepting failure, you need [00:26:00] to create that environment. You need to create environments where people are openly coming and talking about what are the experiments they did and what did they fail in, what did they learn from it? Or, you have budgets to actually play around. So even if it is about innovation, even if it's about coming up with a new idea, they will really need to work on looking at, 'Okay, whose approval do I have to take? How do I justify my idea in the larger context,' and all of that? That is not right.
For instance, actually looking at these leaders brainstorming to see what kind of company do they want. It's always about resolving dilemmas there. When you're trying to define your culture and values, it's always about resolving a lot of dilemmas. For instance, I was talking about context and control. Now, context or control, bias to action versus analysis, thorough analysis. These are decisions organizations should take. There's no one right thing. But in the context of their business, what is the right thing?
Through workshops, and through talking to the leadership team, engaging with them is where you're resolving a lot of these dilemmas, that has just come up with what are these bunch of key things that people should do. Then it's easy to actually come up with those value plans. It could be statements, for some, statements are easier to understand, for some, it is about coming up with those key-words, or coming up with key mnemonics and abbreviations. That's the later part according to me. Otherwise, it just gets confusing, because you just want everything to be added. This is nice sounding, I want to stand for integrity, I want to stand for respect for my people. And I want to stand for transparency. Majority of the leaders, when you first have this conversation, these are things that they come up with. We want to be a transparent organization, but we are very secretive about our information. Then that doesn't make sense. So then you might not have, [00:28:00] which is okay. And that actually also brings to the point that culture is very unique to a company. You do not copy what others have done.
Again, defining culture and values for us is something that we are copying from the west, which need not be the case. For instance, what I have seen working with companies in India is, we are very relationship-based organizations. There's a thin divide between professional-personal relationships, whereas a lot of companies in the West are task-based organizations. So, you do well, you're doing well. Success in India is very differently defined. When we were kids, we talked about success being standing on top, being in front of the line, and growing faster, all of that. But success is very different in the West, where people are fine being individual contributors all their life, doing the same thing for 20-25 years because they're passionate about it. So, understanding what are those values that are important for the company, what are those values that will resonate with people who are going to be joining your company, is very important. I would always say, take a grounds-up approach.
Harish Kumar: I have a follow-up question on this as well. Should organizations treat this as a one-time exercise? And if they've done it, how do they know whether they have actually done a good job of it? When do they actually look back? What should be the trigger to think about even doing this exercise again? How do they know whether there is a need to take another look at it?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Patty McCord, who was the earlier Chief Talent Officer for Netflix, in her book, 'Powerful', where she talks about how they have worked on it relentlessly, actually talks about it as if it's not a one-time exercise. That's what I've also realized where it's not like [00:30:00] passing stone, saying these are our values, now hell breaks loose, we're going to follow those. Now that is not going to work because you have to constantly see whether it is serving your organization's purpose. That's the role the leadership team plays. That's why it's important to keep your values very simple. It's important to translate into behaviours, it's important to translate into metrics where you can follow it to the T.
For instance, you're talking about open, transparent organization, transparency in communication. Everybody is encouraged to speak; everybody is encouraged to give feedback to anybody. And you build that culture, people are opening up and speaking in meetings. You're talking about a high performance organization, you see that a fantastic performer two years back, but the skill set is not matching now, and the person hasn't upgraded, you should be comfortable to tell them to go. So, you have simple values and build all your systems, policies, processes around those values. And you see if it is serving the company purpose, you see if you are able to have the right people in place, right talent in place.
Again, an example from a book, for Netflix, she says, we expect people to work all the time, and people are constantly contributing. So, why do they need to apply for vacation? Why can we not say that... so they came up with a no vacation policy. The simple reason for that was people are doing it, we don't ask them or they don't charge us overtime when they are working after their work hours, they are solving problems for us, for the customers, so we'll come up with a no vacation policy. But the simple rules that they brought around it was you can take vacation for as long as you want, provided you've ensured that your work is not getting affected or disturbed. So, three people from the same department don't leave at the same time. Now three people from the same department don't leave at the same time, and didn't come out as part of their initial iteration. They said no vacation policy. After a year, or I think a year and a half, [00:32:00] they realized two or three leaders came and said, we had to step back on this particular deliverable, because three of our key people left at the same time. That's when they said, 'Okay, let's introduce this.'
So, it is an ongoing thing. But once you get the fundamental construct right, the ongoing thing is more a leadership conversation, and constantly looking at how it is working. And that's where the internal HR teams can actually take a seat at the table where they're talking about how their performance was in terms of people, in terms of their satisfaction, and some basic metrics that you measure, and how it is serving the larger purpose of the organization. For HR teams, understanding the business context, and actually linking performance to that, will help see which of those need to be tweaked. But working on the basic construct is a one-time thing.
Harish Kumar: Yeah, thanks.
Ramanand: Let's take that forward, and try to stitch it into an approach. So, Sirisha, if someone were to come to you and say, we want to do this exercise, we want to identify values, we think it should have words like curiosity, and honesty and teamwork. That's what we have in our mind. How do you guide the whole thing? Typically, how long does it take? What is your approach like? Walk us through the high-level outline of your approach.
Sirisha Bhamidipati: What I typically do is not get into the culture conversation at all in the beginning, but actually want to understand their vision. Again, 'vision' is not like the vision statement, mission statement kind of thing, but actually understanding the broader context of how they see themselves a few years down the line. Some of them even come up with things like I just want to be bought by a bigger company, which is also fair. So, in order to be bought, what should your [00:34:00] organization look like? Because somebody is going to buy you only when they see a 10x value in you. So, have those conversations, which is the business part of it.
Then in the process, understand their desired identity, which usually happens through a series of workshops with the core team in the company, come up with a desired identity, what do we want to be known for, as an organization? From that, work with them in terms of culture in order to get to their desired identity. Because, that's where we actually see whether things like curiosity, honesty, those are things that they want to stand for, how did they fit in? So what do you mean by having curious people? What do you mean by transparency? Now, transparency is everybody knows everything, might not happen all the time. So how do you define transparency in your context, so that people don't misinterpret that? Transparency could also bring a lot of aspects of communication. So that's the crux, where I throw all these dilemma questions to them.
And we talk through that to resolve, where we say, Okay, what about feedback in the organization? Are your senior leaders open to feedback? Do you demonstrate it? Because values cannot be something that you haven't been doing at all. It can't be a switch on and off. It has to be close to what you want to do, and probably a wishful area around it. But it can't be something drastically new. Once you identify that broad culture, and what are those key values, we translate that into behaviours. Most of this work is done with the leadership team. We translate those into behaviours, and that's what is percolated through the organization. Now that’s done in different ways. That's done in leadership communication, that's done through a lot of other internal organization communication, that's done with leaders walking the talk.
Basically, you start with the top, without actually explicitly calling things out, you start getting people to demonstrate some of these values [00:36:00] and talk more openly about it, narrate their own story. Then they also do an internal story collection thing where in the organization, you're actually recognizing people who have demonstrated these values. Then you work on the reward and the reward mechanism in the organization. Bigger chunk, the more significant chunk is actually integrating this into the performance management process. Because what gets recognized gets performed. That's what becomes your culture. So, you need to integrate that into the performance management process, where subtly, you're constantly noting down what are those things?
For instance, one organization where we've been working on building a high performance organization, we gradually over a period of time got away with the annual performance cycle, but started doing project based performance management practice. Because if it's a high performance organization, then you give feedback at that time. So that's something that we have done. This is the broad process and structure that is followed.
Ramanand: How easy is it to resolve these dilemmas? Because I see that as the point where you have to confront some of these tensions, some are unstated, some have been recently discovered. So how easy is it for them to reconcile these different tensions? And the second question is that, tell us a little bit about the output? For example, if you take something like curiosity, how do you break it down into behaviours? Is there a kind of a Goldilocks number for these value statements? Should they be 3? Should they be 10? I think we've seen multiples of 10 as well. So one is the dilemma question. Secondly, what is a value like curiosity expressed as in terms of, what other information do you usually collect? And finally, a little bit about the number? [00:38:00]
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Resolving the dilemmas, I've seen fights in rooms! I've also seen authorities snubbing the other voices in the room. But it's important to recognize and reconcile, or you just keep it to the side, saying this is not something we want to stand for, because we don't have an identity. Which is why in the earlier part, when you asked me about time, how long does it take, it's always been, in my experience, a function of the kind of organization and the kind of leadership team.
Sometimes it gets done in two-three workshops, in terms of resolving these dilemmas. Sometimes, people want to go back, reflect and come back. So it's challenging in the sense that you bring out all the hidden can of worms in the organization or between people, because we are explicitly asking them to talk about some of the things that they don't want to talk about. But it is very clear, either we decide on a way, we resolve our differences and decide on a way. Or we say that we don't have a point of view on this. And we don't want to talk about it. When things like that are left as 'we don't want to talk about it', the next workshop, I go to them with what are all the bad things that can happen if they don't talk about it. And that's a call that they take, whether they're ready to let those things happen, let that impact their culture. And it is fine. Lots of times, there are unresolved dilemmas, but they make it very clear to them that they don't talk about it as their identity. That's the first part.
And the Goldilocks number, I haven't really figured it out, the ideal number. Typically, I usually try restricting them to four to six, because it's very tough for people to remember versus driving behaviour. Sometimes whatever they have, people come to me with 18, [00:40:00] 20. I've also seen cases where people have 18 cultural statements and another 15 values. That's chaos, because it makes it very difficult for the other person to understand and interpret. So we actually bring that down to what is core for the company.
The questions that I keep asking is, is this something that you will measure people's performance on? Is it something that you will send people away from the organization? Is it something that you want to stand for in every practice that you follow? And actually bring those nuances out where I say that, in sales, if this is what you're talking about, let's say transparency is what you're talking about, this is how your salesperson is going to go and have a conversation. Or this is how your salesperson will come back and give input to the product team. Is your product team going to be open for that feedback, because you're talking about transparency, which means translating your customer insights directly into actions, and taking the call in telling the sales guy, whether you're doing it or not doing it.
A lot of times, some of these things are left in the lurch. So those are things that we keep talking about. That's what helps us drill down what that value stands for. I've also seen where transparency defined in one organization could be very different from transparency defined in another organization. So defining those behaviours is the critical part that I see in this exercise.
Ramanand: Let's take an example of something like curiosity. Say, in an organization, you've gone through the process, you're in the middle of it, everyone is happy with that being one of the values. What else do you come around? What else do you build around it so that it's more concrete? People understand what curiosity means in our context. And I want to ask what Harish had also alluded to earlier, which is, do you try to define this in the context of different roles or different levels, because I might be a freshman engineer, [00:42:00] what does it mean to me compared to I'm in sales? I've not heard of curiosity being a part of my value system? So, how do you approach it? Once you've identified it, what do you put in so that people understand how to operationalize this?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: How we define curiosity will strongly depend on the nature of the organization. It basically comes from them. So let's say curiosity is an organization where people are constantly learning. People are constantly upskilling themselves. And curiosity, they could define it as understanding what different functions in the organization do at different levels. So it could be people doing short projects with people from other groups, from other departments, teams. It could be about constantly looking at what is next for the organization. Essentially you're bringing in that future thinking aspect across the organization for them to start contributing to different things. It could be about bringing those tiny changes and innovations in their own role, where they're looking at doing things better.
So, most of this stems from the nature of the organization. Once they define this, the next step, and I think I missed answering that when Harish asked, is actually looking at some of the key roles in the organization, which have the majority of the population. Usually we pick up the roles which are assigned to 80% of people in the organization, and say, what does that mean, in each of these roles? Because sometimes, some dilemmas come out through that also. We also define what it means. So, at an org level, you have a broad structure. 90% of the time, what you define at an org level, gets into a little more detail, when it is done at a role level. You don't have any outliers that are coming up. And if they're coming up, you say what it is and what it is not. Make that very clear when it happens at a role level. [00:44:00]
Ramanand: Let's talk a little bit about the power of stories in making this very concrete, that Chinese whisper proof that we spoke about earlier. How do you advise organizations to do this, once the abstract thinking has been done, agreed upon, everybody understands at their level what it does, but how do you get this message across and the role of stories and other forms of communication?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: The abstract level thinking is done just by a handful of people sitting inside meeting rooms. Now, the crux lies in actually getting it out and stories play an important role. Now, two kinds of stories: One is leadership stories, the walk the talk that I was talking about, where we are saying somebody in flesh and blood has actually demonstrated this. That's an easy part to do, because they are the ones who've been involved in all these workshops, so each of them will have at least one or two stories to talk about.
The tougher part and the most critical part is actually getting stories from the ground. When you start collecting stories from the ground, one, you know how people are living this value at every level in the organization. And when you're collecting stories, you're collecting them at a behaviour level. You do not collect a story around execution, you do not collect a story around respect in the organization, but you actually talk about a nuanced aspect of respect that somebody's showing. Respect to people, the people talk down to people, is there an equal participation, equal feedback sharing mechanism in a meeting, what does respect mean, when you talk about diversity and inclusion in that context, what does respect mean?
So, when you're talking about all of these, you start picking stories at a behavioural level. That makes the behaviour come to life. Those are stories that people [00:46:00] resonate a lot with. They know that somebody else has done it, so I can do it. It's not that somebody from my role has never done it. There is so and so person in the organization who is in a similar role as mine, who has done it in the past. So I can do it better. It also gives people a lot of ideas about coming up with better ways of doing their own work, especially when they hear other stories. So I think stories play a very critical role.
Ramanand: How do you disseminate this in an organization effectively?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Lot of times, the places that I've seen are where the stories are sent to people. There are also times when physical events used to be the norm. Recognising a lot of these people and actually sharing their story, in terms of their citation is something, where the individuals also got recognition, and the individual is also very open in terms of sharing what had actually transpired. Some of the negative stories are something that I encourage a lot of leaders, especially up to the middle management, from the top till the middle management level to come up with, where they didn't practice something and what happened. I often encourage them to talk a lot more about it in terms of how it affected them, how it affected their team, the team morale and the company. So people also know what not to do. When something is being said about what not to do, they also know why it should not be done.
Ramanand: That's a very important point, because there's a danger of this being seen as a PR exercise, and therefore, especially if one of your values is authenticity, then you had better practice this as well. Because that can build a sense of trust between different... it's not [00:48:00] like your leaders are perfect, and everybody's going to practice all this 24/7. There are going to be missteps and I think acknowledging them actually makes it more useful and has the actual deepening effect, than otherwise. In fact, Omkar has just called out the fact that one of the books that we often refer to, 'Power of Moments', talks about how stories can help you stumble across the inside, the right behaviour, rather than you trying to preach it to them. Because I'm sure a lot of this gets into that preachy territory, where you're telling people, this is what you should be doing. And you come off from a ‘pulpit’ of sorts. So I think that's where the story can help you discover some of these for yourself, but in a manner that is sticky, and can also help it spread out.
Sirisha Bhamidipati: In a manner where you're actually bringing what it means and not the stated value. Just to ensure it doesn't become too preachy, an extensive amount of organized, structured communication, and using multiple ways, you keep sending the same mailer with a story, once every three days, people tend to ignore. So disseminating it through different forums and different mechanisms becomes very critical, especially the stories.
Ramanand: Last couple of questions. One is that, one of our favourite analogies this year or reference points for culture dissemination has been how marketing does it, how religion does it, how even the military does it. There are these embedded reporters, you have media and politics, the connection between them, they understand the power of communication, of story, consistency of the message day in and day out. Do you think that [00:50:00] organizations would benefit from these embedded reporters or people who are there to capture these stories? Because as you said rightly, one is that people struggle to identify the right kinds of stories. They may not know the difference between openness and transparency, if there is a distinction in that organization.
So, someone who's trained to spot it, like a reporter does, write it up like people are taught to do in journalism school, present it in a fashion that can be accessible to a lot of people, like marketing teams do. Do you think things like that, or systematic things like that would really help because otherwise, this is just, ‘I've been given one more thing to do, on top of all my other responsibilities?’
Sirisha Bhamidipati: What is done earlier in some of the companies, they're probably a little smaller in size, about 120-130 people, is where you actually drill down to people where this becomes a way of living for them in the company. For instance, if a leader is measured about how many people in his team are actually demonstrating those values and behaviours, initially, it becomes a force. But over a period of time, recognizing his team members becomes the norm. And the way a reader can submit a story about somebody from his team is actually publicly recognizing him in a team meeting. I'm just giving one construct. You put something like that, then, one, the leader has to see what people are talking about, the leader has to present an authentic story, the leader has to recognize that person, and the leader has to share the story with the HR team, or some central team, which is going to disseminate it across the organization.
Over a period of time, we're seeing that people start naturally doing it. There are some people for whom recognising others comes very naturally. This is the door where you need to prod them, but if they know that a part of their performance management is revolving around how many people have [00:52:00] I built in my team who are actually demonstrating these values and I'm presenting an authentic story, it also becomes very compelling for the person to start recognizing people. That's where we are integrating a lot of other processes. The way engagement is done and all of that becomes important.
Now, once they present a raw story, either their external companies that help them actually structure it and bring it to a form, which can be shared with the rest of the organization, or sometimes the HR teams start taking these stories and work on them and add all the pulp to it to share it across the organization. But getting the leader or the manager, or the lead to do it, on the spot at the right time is a behaviour that you have to drive in the organization.
Ramanand: It's almost as if you need a baseline set of behaviours around recognition and the immediacy and appropriateness of feedback and mapping that to your values that goes with the territory. It's the science side of maybe, driving culture. We're almost at the end of our time, Sirisha. Thank you so much. Before we end, CHROs listening to this, CPOs listening to this, they are starting on this journey. They just want to get their minds around how to think about this better. Are there books, are there podcasts, are there resources that you would recommend to them to start with?
Sirisha Bhamidipati: There are no specific books that are on culture code, there are no specific books which talk explicitly a lot about it. One of the best books that I have read is 'No Rules Rules', a recent book. It's a conversation between Erin Meyer, who's a professor at INSEAD, and [00:54:00] Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix. If you actually look at some of their cultural aspects, it's shocking. You'll say, how can a company work like this? Isn't this against the natural way of how humans work, where we are very empathetic, and we are not direct in our feedback and all, that's how human relations work. So, how does this company thrive? And he has a powerful explanation for all of this. So the book is actually a conversation between Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings. That's a very nice book.
Erin Meyer has also written another book, which is 'The Culture Map', which talks about some of these dilemmas to resolve in a cross-cultural context. Now, again, that's something that we didn't speak about today, but that again, is a huge dimension in itself, where some of these values that you have, especially for MNCs, some of these values that you have centrally might not interpret the same way in different cultures. So she actually looked at some of the basic human values and how they're interpreted very differently in different countries. So that's a very insightful book.
Then Patty McCord's, the stories on Netflix that she writes in a book called 'Powerful' is, again, a very interesting one. A lot of books about their own organization, you read a book on Google, on Amazon, powerful organizations, and if you actually read the founder stories, it gives you an insight into what was the kind of culture that they were breeding in the organization. Again, this is very personal to their organization, and probably the reason why there's no one single book on culture that exists, which acts as a Holy Bible, because it's very personal to the company and to what they want to transfer.
Ramanand: Right. I think Omkar also points out that books like [00:56:00] 'Good to Great', they talk about how you get the right people in the right places. And what you spoke about can help do that matching so that your organization is moving forward. All right, I think we've had a fascinating introductory conversation to the world of culture building through identifying the right values. I'm sure we'll do a couple of follow-ups on this topic soon. Thank you so much, Sirisha for giving us your insights on this topic. We'll chat with you very soon. Thank you, everyone.
Sirisha Bhamidipati: Thank you so much.
Choose to Thinq (CTQ) works with companies to help them consolidate their values and shape culture in their teams. CTQ does this across multiple levels, be it from getting companies started on this road, to setting up platforms and habits to make this an easier path to follow. To find out more, go to choosetothinq.com.
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