Good morning, good afternoon and good evening.
Welcome to Rethink Culture, the podcast that shines a spotlight on business
leaders who are creating intentional cultures.
My name is Andreas Konstantinou and I'm your host.
I'm the founder of Rethink Culture, a company that aims to help create one
million healthier, more fulfilling work cultures.
Today, I have the pleasure of welcoming Spencer Harrison, who's a professor of
organizational behavior at INSEAD Business School and a TED speaker.
His expertise and research are highly
recognized in the field, and his work has been featured in Harvard Business Review,
Fast Company, Money, and Inc.
magazines.
He co-founded the Creativity Collaboratorium, the world's largest
working group of creativity researchers, and he has become a culture advisor to
many of the fastest growing organizations, including Google, Salesforce, and
Deloitte.
So with that, Spencer, welcome to the Rethink Culture Podcast.
Andreas, thank you for having me.
It's a pleasure to be here.
So I was recommended to you by Eric, who's been a guest on the previous podcast with
highest accolades, and you have been studying organizational psychology and
behavior for a long time.
So walk us a bit into your current work, your areas of interest, and what does
organizational behavior mean for you?
So I think the major theme that you see across the work that I do, and I do
research in a variety of some might say odd contexts for a business researcher.
So I've studied people that are designing t-shirts.
I've studied people that are making new products out of garbage.
I've studied modern dance groups.
I've studied popular music bands.
And what is sort of similar across all of these different contexts, is this idea of
How do you sustain transformation?
And that's important because it's no longer enough for a business to come up
with one really good strategy and then just rest on that for a really long period
of time.
There's a need to sort of constantly think about what are we doing today that's going
to make us better tomorrow?
And so this idea of thinking...
How do we sustain transformation is important, rather than thinking about
transformation as just sort of a one-time, discrete event.
And what led you to being a professor at INSEAD, which is a highly claimed business
school.
Like, where did you start?
Did you envisage becoming a professor as a child?
Did you envisage becoming a researcher?
Well, I did actually, but I did it through sort of a meandering story.
So the short version is this.
When I grew up, I wanted to be an animator for Disney.
And I loved creating.
I loved drawing.
I loved coming up with characters.
And then that love for creation led me to also love storytelling and writing and
poetry.
And I thought, what is a career that could subsidise
me as a writer, especially as a poet, and the idea was, oh, I could be an English
professor.
So originally that was sort of the idea is I'm going to be an English professor.
And at the same time, I happened to be working as a technical writer, just
understand the business side of language.
And as that career began to expand, I realized I can still write and I can still
create for myself on my own time.
But there's this opportunity to help organizations and help other people
sustain this sort of creation.
And that led me to become more interested in sort of the business side of things.
And that's how you get somebody that wanted to be a poet to become a business
professor.
And for some people, that might be sort of a very cynical story.
For me, it's been a really fascinating journey because I get to apply this sort
of humanistic lens that I learned.
through my studies and through my childhood to a business world that often
doesn't see that as important, but once they begin to understand where that has a
huge impact on them, then it makes all the difference in the world.
So yes, I did wanna be a professor, not necessarily a business professor, but I
found that it's sort of this perfect blend for me of my talents and how I can have
impact on the world.
And what's the most fun part of your job?
Is it research?
Is it working with clients?
Is it the innovation work?
I think it's both.
So I think that it's very often the case that professors sort of see teaching as
one of the things that pulls them away from research.
I think one of the really nice things about a school like INSEAD is we try to
stay really close to the real world and the experience of executives.
And as a result, some of my best research ideas actually come from conversations
with executives.
So there is this very nice exchange of, I learn a lot from the research, I present
that to executives, they're extremely curious about it.
They'll say, you know, could you come into my organization and help us?
And then as a result, that helps me change the model that I was thinking of before or
gain new insights, and then I can teach other executives.
And so that virtuous loop tends to continue itself.
And as a result,
There's always more ideas that I can pursue and more opportunities that I have
time to help with.
And that's sort of the constant struggle of my day is how do I find the space to
say no, or the willpower to say no to all these wonderful opportunities.
What is some of the research you're most proud of producing?
or some of the work you're most proud of, not just research.
the thing that always goes through my mind is I'm most proud of the thing that I'm
working on right now.
So once something is already produced and it comes out, at that point, I'm sort of
already past it and sort of moved on to the next thing.
So if I were to sort of keep that as a truism for me, I think the thing that I'm
really excited about right now is
a set of research that I've done with a colleague, Professor Kristie Rogers at
Marquette on how organizations connect their, what we call big C culture to their
small C culture.
And we have some research coming out in the near future on that topic that I think
is really exciting.
So tell us more, what is big C and small C culture?
Well, this insight comes from two places.
So the first place is, Kristie and I were working with a extremely famous
organization that had seen a spike in turnover and they were very concerned
about it.
And so they wanted somebody that was independent to come in and talk to the
employees that had left to see if they could understand what was going on.
And it was sort of...
you know, the Hamlet version of there's something rotten in the state of Denmark.
So the question that they were basically asking is, is there something rotten with
our culture?
And we did about a hundred interviews.
We discovered some really interesting things that were going on in this
organization.
And basically what was happening is this organization was scaling itself so quickly
that they became a little bit less focused on who are we bringing into the
organization and how many of those people are bringing into the organization.
So as a result,
they were hiring almost entire divisions of their company away from other
organizations.
And what that meant is people were sort of coming in with a blueprint for the culture
from the former organization and just pasting it into this new company.
So that led to a lot of what we called shadow cultures.
So sort of these cultures that are creeping up in the shadows that are not
following the culture that's supposed to be in place in this organization.
but they're allowed to persist because the organization is just growing so fast, they
don't have time to pay attention to it.
And what we found is these people were in some cases actively leaving the
organization because it was easier to boomerang back into the company and find a
manager that actually managed for the culture.
So there was this interesting moment where we were presenting these results and the
CEO looked at me and he said, Spencer, what are you going to do to fix this?
And I thought, Oh my gosh, you know,
I was hired to just diagnose the problem.
I wasn't hired to be the surgeon to fix this for you.
But what I said was, the solution for this problem already exists here inside the
organization.
And this is true, I think, of most organizations and they don't realize it.
I said, what you need to do is not figure out where these bad managers are.
You need to figure out who are the most excellent managers that people are wanting
to boomerang back into and ask them what they're doing.
If you can find those practices and spread those through the organization, then
you're going to make the entire organization that much more resilient and
improve the culture.
What we did is we took their performance management data and we used that to
isolate who are the leaders that were able to have the highest retention rates with
their employees, but we're also pushing them to get the highest level of
performance.
If they're doing both those things, then that means I'm pushing you in a way where
you're not feeling so burned out.
that you want to leave.
And so there's something else going on there culturally that allows people to
want to stay.
And that's where we found this really fun link between what we call the big C
culture.
So these are the official culture documents, the official expressions, our
mission, our values, our vision, the official selection criteria, onboarding,
leadership development and rewards policies, and the official measurement
systems.
And so we have those things sort of at the top level where we can point to, we can
say, that's our culture, this is how we manage it.
But what we found is that these leaders were actively building culture within
their sphere of influence.
And we grew to call that the small C culture.
And the idea is basically that even though we can point at big C culture, we actually
experience small C culture in day-to-day life in business.
And so it's really up to those leaders that have
the biggest control or influence on that small C sphere to bring the big C culture
to life.
And that was sort of the real exciting part.
I think that the second part to that is at the same time, I'm doing all this work
with executives and we would start talking about the culture.
And I had a participant in a class once that raised his hand and he said, so
Spencer, I don't understand why we're talking about culture, our CEO
has already articulated what the mission and the values are.
Like at this point, it's set in stone.
There's no way to change it.
So why are we talking about culture?
And at that point, it became very clear to me that for a lot of leaders, and this is
also true in the popular business press, when you look at books that are written
about culture, we glorify the writing of the culture as though that's the magical
moment where culture takes its meaning.
It's almost as though
we describe this moment of sort of coming up with the values and the mission
statement, like Moses walking down the mountain and he's got these tablets and
there's sunlight behind his hair and God speaking from the mountain.
And if we just get those tablets, if we just get the culture written right,
everything will fall into place.
And I found that a lot of leaders were sort of paralyzed by that notion because
if the culture is already written, then what do I do?
And that...
became an opportunity for us to realize there is a set of activities that leaders
can engage in that allow them to build cultural capacity throughout the entire
organization.
And what's important is these behaviors are completely scalable.
Anybody at any level of the organization can do them.
And most importantly, the behaviors themselves really don't require
permission.
Because I'm not.
going about changing the culture, not just doing things on my own.
I'm actually doing things that further connect what happens at the small c
level with what happens at the big c level.
And these managers that were the ones that led their teams to the highest performing
results, did they have different systems or did they have different behaviors?
So they existed in the same system.
What was different is their behaviors and their approach to the system.
In a lot of cases, leaders feel like their job is to be a steward of the system.
So I'm just here to keep the system moving, to oil the parts and sort of keep
people performing the way that they're already expected to perform.
And what we found with this group of leaders that were high performers is
number one,
they did not see themselves as the best leaders in the company, even though
quantitatively speaking, there was all the evidence in the world to say that they
were.
So what was interesting about them is they were actively learning from other leaders
how to be better leaders.
And they probably had the best network of, here's an idea I learned from this person,
here's an idea I learned from this other person.
And what that learning allowed them to do is to really think about what does the big
C culture mean.
for other people in the organization.
I know we say these values, but how are they putting those things into action?
So there's this curiosity about what's happening at the official level and how do
I translate that?
And then there's this curiosity about what can we do within my sphere of influence,
within my small C culture to bring that to life.
And what they do then is they begin to cultivate experiments with the culture
where they...
encourage themselves and the people around them to try new things.
So sort of the easiest way of thinking about this is there's a lot of data that
shows that most people don't like meetings.
We see it as a waste of our time.
We think that they could be improved.
We feel like most of them should actually just be cut from our agenda.
But meetings are actually really important because those are cultural moments.
We see culture come to life because people come together.
and we see how we behave with each other.
We see what's permitted, what's not permitted.
What does it mean to bring values to life?
So for example, with these high performing leaders, meetings become a laboratory.
How can I take this half hour or this hour where I have people together and use it as
an opportunity to bring our values to life based on what we choose to talk about, how
we choose to interact with each other, how long the meeting takes.
what the emotional tone of the meeting is.
And so they're using these moments, not in a taken for granted way, like, yeah, we
have meetings every day, it doesn't matter, but in like a very precious
cultivating way where they're thinking, how can I bring seeds of our values to
life and behavior so that the people in my small C culture can point to that meeting
and say, that's an example of us living our values because we did X or because we
did Y.
And what happens then is that these moments, and it doesn't just happen with
meetings, but that's sort of a low-hanging fruit just because we can all point to
them and say, meetings are horrible, they're a waste of time.
If all of a sudden you're changing something that most people agree is a
waste of time to something that's engaging and energizing and nobody wants to miss
it, that ripples through the organization pretty quickly.
And people start saying, oh, we should run meetings like this group and this other
unit because...
they're all standing up or they have a pizza every meeting or they start their
meeting by having a safety announcement or they start their meeting by doing a
relationship building exercise, whatever it is, they're using that opportunity as a
way to bring the organization to life.
That's a great point because at least I was only thinking of major events like
firing someone or a crisis as opportunities to...
communicate big C culture and convey messages and, you know, whatever you need
to convey to the workforce.
But actually, it is the everyday meetings of these, you know, daily opportunities
and we learn through.
through the tens or hundreds or thousands of small opportunities at every part of
our life, work or personal.
And yeah, it's refreshing.
Yeah, and what becomes interesting then is those daily opportunities are data.
And in most organizations, we are really excited about sales data or inventory
turnover in our operation system or how we're spending our marketing dollars and
how that leads to stronger market growth and market penetration.
And what's interesting is we're a little bit less fluent in reading culture data.
So most organizations have some sort of culture instrument or they outsource it to
another organization.
And this is great because it gives them sort of a baseline at different levels
about what's going on, but that's sort of a big C baseline.
I don't understand the daily interactions.
that actually make that come to life, unless I have people gathering that data.
And that data is usually not gonna show up in a report that comes across my desk as a
leader, because that data is encoded in stories.
So if you think back through sort of the evolution of the human species, long
before we invented numbers, we actually had stories as literally the survival
guide of the human species.
I would tell a story.
to a young member of my group to help them understand where to hunt, what is safe,
what is not safe, what does it mean to be a part of our group?
So there's this fabulous research that was conducted by a set of anthropologists,
where they went into tribes in Southeast Asia, and they offered them a sack of
rice.
And the sack of rice was a fairly significant offering because it meant...
basically the equivalent of a month's worth of food for people in this tribe.
And all they did was ask them one question.
They said, who else in the tribe would you want to share this rice with?
And then they tracked where the rice got shared.
So basically the people that were getting the rice, and this is not surprising, they
would keep the majority of it for them and their family.
But then they would share it with other members of the tribe, and then the
researchers would go and give that portion to other members of the tribe.
The people in the tribe that were most likely to get shares from other members of
the tribe were the storytellers.
So what that does is it shows that this physical resource that sustains human
life, in this case, it's rice, is actually going to these individuals that provide a
different resource for the rest of the group.
It's something that isn't physical, and yet it still has this sustaining function
because it tells the rest of the group, what is it?
that we do to belong together?
Or what are the patterns that we use in order to work together as a group?
Now, here's the most fascinating part of this study, is that when they asked the
storytellers what they would do with their rice, they were the ones that were most
likely to redistribute it to everybody else.
So the storytellers actually shared the resources with everybody else.
And that meant that the more storytellers you had in a tribe,
the more equally the rice was spread among the entire group.
Now there's a key learning there then for managers, which is you need to be a story
gatherer.
So you understand the daily data that's leading people to have their best
experiences with the culture.
And then you need to be telling those stories to other people, both below you
and above you, so that they understand what brings the culture to life.
And when you do that, you're sharing this key cultural resource.
This is the data that allows us to understand how we actually manage culture
day to day.
And stories, listening to the study you just recounted, to me sounds like
inspiration, a higher purpose, a story that tells us about the world that we are
part of and reaffirms that we're a very small part of this bigger world.
So it's in a sense a driving purpose, which gives meaning.
So how does a manager practically
give meaning to their team through stories.
Like if there was a manual, a short manual for managers who want to become story
gatherers and storytellers, what would be in page one of that manual?
So I think page one of the manual is to realize that culture is built on values.
And by values, I don't just mean nice sounding words that we want to have on our
walls.
I mean values are patterns of human engagement that are meant to foster
success.
So when I espouse loyalty as a value, I'm not just saying that's a nice sounding
word and it's something that we aspire to.
I'm actually saying we're going to interact.
in a particular way that brings loyalty to life.
And there's some hope for positive outcome that we're trying to drive to from that
value.
And those outcomes can be financial things like ROI or EBITDA, but they can also be
more subjective things like employee satisfaction or sense of inclusion or some
sort of triple bottom line measure.
It can be any number of things.
The reason why
values are important and understanding that values are the building blocks of
culture is important is because when we understand that values are patterns of
human engagement that are meant to foster success, we realize that values always
have a positive bias to them.
Organizations never espouse a value that is negative like we aim to be the most
lazy company in the world.
Nobody's going to want to be a part of that.
Well, I mean, some people might want to become a part of that organization
but nobody is going to want to invest in that company.
Um, so because values always have this positive bias to them, we see values in
action by asking for stories where people experience the positive moments at work.
So one of the keys then is if we're going to be good storytellers and good story
gatherers as leaders, we need to ask for specific stories that point to the values.
And the easiest one to ask for is tell me about a moment when you were at your best.
And if every leader just started with that one behavior, you would see a dramatic
difference in how organizations operate around the world.
And notice, as I said earlier, that sort of behavior is non-controversial.
No senior leader is going to get mad at middle managers because, Hey, I heard that
you're asking people about, you know, when are they at their best in their
organization?
Stop doing that.
We don't want people to be at their best here.
nobody's going to say that.
So what's great about it is it's completely scalable.
Anybody can do it.
And what's important is when I gather a story like that, I know the story as the
leader, but the employee that shared it with me knows that I know the story as
well.
And they know that I'm gathering those stories.
So now I've sort of authorized them to share that story with others.
And now it creates this sense of expectation and shared understanding
around
What does it mean when we're talking about culture?
So when you think about how do you make leaders good storytellers, and this is
something, this is one of those skills that more and more organizations are
spending millions of dollars on trainings for their leaders to help them become
better storytellers because they realize this is a skill that we need in the same
way that we need leaders that can read financial statements.
I can give you any number of tactics and certainly I've looked at the research on
what is the most effective structure of stories, how do you write those stories.
Clearly as somebody that studied poetry, like this is something that I'm extremely
interested in just individually, but the best stories are the ones that are the
most authentic.
And so if I'm able to actually say, here's a story about Andreas and his most
meaningful experience and Andreas is actually in the room and he's nodding his
head and everybody knows that's real.
and I'm explaining a value coming to life, like that's the golden moment for me as a
leader.
It's not me sort of trying to craft a perfect story and using an exact
structure.
That can help people, but if the underlying story isn't true and it didn't
really happen in the organization, it's not gonna inspire people.
And so this is why, you know, leaders need to be gathering these stories on a daily,
weekly basis.
because that gives them sort of this constant flow of, oh, have you heard
what's going on here?
Do you know about this great idea here?
And they're energized, the people around them are energized in sharing them, and it
just begins to take on a life of its own.
So what I hear you say is that the unit of culture should not be values which are
abstract or behaviors which are maybe impersonal, but stories which are
personal, they are relatable and they are every day, they happen every day.
And managers should gather these stories from individuals in their team or anywhere
in the organization, or their own. And recount them
as affirmation of what the culture is and how it's lived, which I find really
powerful.
Exactly.
And Spencer, before we move on, there's this game I like to play with guests,
which we talked about this.
So I think you already have in mind two truths and one lie, in no particular order,
just so we can get to know you a little better.
So we're all ears.
here we go.
So this will just sort of give you a sense of who I am.
Here are my two truths and a lie.
Number one, I broke my jaw on April Fool's Day and the neighbor we asked for help
thought it was a prank.
That must have been a painful prank.
Number two, I own a pet iguana.
And number three, my favorite poet is Pablo Neruda.
That’s a tough one.
There could be a lot of false positives there.
All right, let's leave it to the end.
So, moving on.
You also talk about culture needs to meet strategy, not just for breakfast but also
lunch, dinner and the after party.
What does that mean?
Well, the most common quote when people are talking about culture is that culture
eats strategy for breakfast.
And what I was trying to do there was be a little bit cheeky and turn that quote on
its head and say, well, how could culture meet strategy for breakfast?
And then as I was sort of building it out, I thought, you know, you don't, you don't
just want to have the meal in the morning, you want to have culture sort of be the
entire part of the organization.
So then it was, and lunch and dinner.
And then because.
you want to have celebrations for success, it should be at the after party as well.
So, very often I'll introduce the culture eats strategy for breakfast quote.
And what's funny about that quote, and I'll leave it to listeners to do this on
their own, but it's really interesting to go Google who actually said that quote
because it's been misattributed a lot.
And it has this, it's one of those quotes as this winding history where everybody
thinks one person said it, but it actually comes from.
a more obscure source.
But it was sort of taking that quote and saying, when that quote is real, when
culture eats strategy for breakfast, it's usually because the organization has made
a dire mistake.
It's usually because we committed to an acquisition, and all of a sudden we
realize this is not going to work.
Our culture doesn't mix with their culture, or we've committed to a new.
strategic direction and we brought in consultants and they gave us some advice
and we've announced it to everybody and we've announced it to our shareholders and
so we have to go in this direction and yet we realized none of our people actually
want to go in that direction.
It looked great on a spreadsheet but it doesn't look good in action.
And so usually I'll say, you know, who said this and down below the quote it will
say somebody at a low-performing company.
And then
I'll show the other quote, how can we make culture meet strategy for breakfast,
lunch, dinner, and the after party?
And it will say somebody at a high performing company because that person is
not thinking about strategy, absent culture.
They're not making these huge organizational decisions without thinking.
What is the shared values about the way that we work that allow us to do what it
is we're doing?
And, you know, that's where strategic leaders.
get into problems is that they can become seduced by a new strategy, whether it's
one they come up with on their own or whether it's one they see one of their
competitors enacting, without asking themselves, is that actually something
that fits with our culture?
And if the answer is no, that doesn't mean that you can't enact the strategy, but it
means you need to be a lot more thoughtful about what your next step is.
It can't just be announcing the strategy, or I can guarantee you that it's going to
fail.
This reminds me of this...
the talk about work-life balance, which in recent times is more referred to as
work-life integration.
And so you could say the same applies to culture strategy balance, how much we
consider strategy versus culture, into one of culture strategy integration, where the
two need to consider each other.
culture needs to consider where the company is going and what
types of clients it works with in one environment and so on.
And strategy needs to consider what is the small C culture, to use your analogy, in
order to be essentially executable.
Otherwise, it will just be on paper.
Exactly.
I think what is really comforting about strategy is it can be numerical.
And as a result, it provides this veneer of this is objective, this is achievable,
we can do this.
And I love strategy making.
I think it's extremely creative.
It's a lot of fun.
So I'm not degenerating strategy making.
But when it's done in the absence of strong information about the culture, then
it's basically an exercise in fantasy.
As much as those numbers make it seem real, those numbers are completely
meaningless if you don't actually have a sense of culturally, what will this
translate to in people's behaviors and the stories that they're gonna be telling and
the stories that I'm gonna be gathering now as a leader.
And so if that story gathering and storytelling hasn't happened,
before executives go on a strategic retreat and articulate what they're gonna
do for the next five years, it's almost guaranteed that the next six months after
they come back and they launch that strategy, there's gonna be a lot of
heartburn, a lot of rewriting the strategy because that's the moment that, you know,
that plan is going to come face to face with reality and it's going to be proven
that it doesn't fit.
Moving forward, Spencer, what are some of the topics or projects you would really
love to sink your teeth in?
Like what projects in the next couple of years do you think are really worth
exploring?
So I think one of the sort of golden keys to organizational performance and the
first companies that figure this out, I think, are going to have a massive
advantage in terms of talent, much the same way you saw companies like Google had
20 years ago, is figuring out, how can I create a culture
that allows people to be at their best at work while saving enough of their energy
so that they can be at their best in their life.
So you can either see this as sort of a sad reality of life or you can see it as
something really powerful about how we choose to spend our time.
But the reality is, is that the average working, or the average working adult will
spend the majority of their life at work than in any other activity.
And so if we aren't finding meaning from the work that we're doing, and if that
work is not preserving enough of our human energy so that we can provide meaningful
input in the other avenues of our life, then we're really missing out on something
collectively as human beings.
So organizations that are able to figure that out and whether that's a four day
work week or whether that's, you know, more frequent sabbaticals,
I think that there are going to be organizations that realize that working 40
hours a week is actually not in their best interest or their employees' best
interest, and there's better ways of making this all happen.
And right now, we're just so focused on, this is how we've always done things that
we haven't really changed it.
But I think that the organization that figures out that balance between, I can
allow you to be at your best here at work.
and then that preserves enough energy for you to be at your best at home and in
other areas of your life, everybody's going to want to work for those companies
that can figure that out.
Do you think it's a question of structure like in the Holacracy movement or the
self-management movement?
Or is it softer, more to do with behavior?
I think that there's an opportunity for it to be a mixture of both.
I think the research that's being done on holocracies and even if you think about
research that was done before that on transparent accounting or employee-owned
organizations where there was this idea of how can we push power down in the
organization, those are really fascinating experiments in human behavior.
There's a reason why they haven't been adopted more broadly.
And I don't mean that in a critical way in terms of criticizing the structure.
I think it's more of a critique of, do we give ourselves the audacity to make bigger
leaps in structure and systems?
And so again, I think that that's where organizations are able to figure out what
is the right balance between a system that enables people to live their lives, both
at work and outside of work.
and the behaviors that align with that system that bring it to life in a
meaningful way.
And the organizations that get that balance between the two right, I think,
are just gonna be so far ahead.
And one of the reasons why I've become convinced of that really came out of the
pandemic.
So for somebody like me that studies organizations, and this is sort of a
horrible thing to say, but it's brought a lot of attention to work that I'm doing
and it's...
provided me a lot of business because organizations are coming to me and they're
saying, hey, after the pandemic, we're really concerned about what's happened to
our organizational culture.
Can you help?
So what that means is, is that a lot of organizations were just operating their
culture on autopilot, and then this crisis happens, and most people are working
virtually and they realize, oh, what is actually holding us together?
Do we have any
shared patterns for what it means to jump on a Zoom call in our organization, and do we,
you know, ritualize that in a way that brings our values to life?
Are we doing things if we're working remotely that make these values come
alive?
So there is this need for organizations to really figure out how to make this work
because people are coming out of that pandemic experience asking themselves, is
this what I want from my life?
is this trade-off worth it?
And you see this whole phenomenon around quiet quitting and purposeful unemployment
where people are just choosing not to go back to work because people are sort of
looking at their options and they're saying, no, this is actually not what I
want in my life.
I want something that's more meaningful, whether that means I'm traveling more or
spending more time with my children or I'm more engaged in a hobby.
And...
organizations that are able to adapt to that reality are going to have an
advantage because they're going to get the most creative, intelligent people.
Do you think this maybe it's now become almost a common saying, which is we need
to be in the office to maintain our culture by the companies that want to go
back or have gone back to fully in-person working.
Do you think it's a...
It's a myth or is it a necessity to be in the office and to maintain culture?
I think that there is some truth to needing to be in the office to maintain
culture.
And this is why.
Because throughout human history, and I'm thinking, you know, if you go all the way
back to, you know, pre-history, human beings figured out how to work together by
working together.
And so we are used to seeing culture in the words that we say, in the tone of
voice.
through our body language, by watching what other people do.
So for example, some of my early research looked at how people are onboarded into
organizations.
And if you look at that broader research, you find that certainly one of the key
ways that people learn is they have mentors, they have trainings, they ask
questions.
So, you know, those are all things where
they might be hearing things and you could get that online.
But notice that like mentorship is not just hearing something, it's watching how
that person moves through the office and who do they talk to and how often do they
stop and interrupt what they were doing to help somebody else do something.
And the same thing with the training, like I'm there in a room with other people, I'm
meeting them, my network is growing at the same time, I'm learning content.
So.
What I was getting to is that a lot of these studies actually show that learning
is not just about hearing and being given written materials.
It's also about observing what other people are doing, what are sort of the
unwritten rules, how are people behaving, these values.
And so, if you're working virtually, you lose basically one of the main senses that
we as humans use to navigate our lives, which is like watching what other people
are doing.
We can't really do that.
And if you think about
some of the really poor habits that people have on Zoom, either they show up and they
immediately turn off their camera, and so now you can't see any visual information
about them, or they show up and their camera's on, but their eyes are down and
their hands are, and you get the sense very quickly, they're not even looking at
the camera, they're busy responding to other emails, then that means that all the
cultural information I might be getting from that interaction is severely
compromised.
So I think that there is something about bringing people together.
I think the thing that organizations need to be thoughtful about is, what is the
right cadence?
What is the right intensity of that?
And again, I don't think that the answer is, it requires 40 hours per week to get
the culture right because certainly religions have been able to sustain
themselves for millennia and the often ritual pattern there is once a week.
for like a very small slice of your time to sort of rededicate yourself to that
community and to each other and to a set of practices.
And I'm not suggesting that organizations need to go down to one hour per week, but
I mean, that could be sort of a radical experiment.
Imagine an entrepreneur that says, we're gonna build this organization, we're gonna
pay each of our employees to do one hour of work per week, but that's gonna be the
most fun, meaningful hour of their lives that week.
Like I think a lot of people would sign up for that experience because I can keep my
other job and I can work for this company for one hour a week and they're going to
pay me nicely for that hour, but I'm going to create this like really fun, engaging
way of working with each other.
I mean, you and I should just stop the podcast right now and let's go found that
company.
And you know, like if that sounds good, just saying it out loud.
So yeah.
Yeah, it's very radical.
I wonder what that company would do.
But yeah, it's a great thought experiment to think about building companies' culture
first.
With the purpose of having people fulfilled.
Before you talk about how does the company achieve a purpose and what should the
purpose of the company be?
outside that fulfillment.
Spencer, as we come to wrap the podcast, if you were to whisper to the ear of a
leader who's not intentional about their culture, what would you tell them?
What do you think we need to rethink about culture?
I would say that the best organizations will win the battle for talent by creating
cultures that allow people to be their best more frequently.
And so what that means for you as a leader is you need to start gathering stories to
understand when your people are at your best.
And if you were to create an organization with the hope that it would be someone's
best job ever, where would you start?
Well, I think that some organizations do start that way.
You know, so the founding story of a company like Hewlett Packard is the idea
that here's these two engineers and they just sort of say, Hey, we like working
with each other, let's build things together.
And it, and it starts there.
The question is like, how much of that is scalable?
Does everybody show up to the organization with that same sense of like meaning and
energy, and you don't know that if you're not gathering those stories.
So.
I think for me, that's sort of like the crux is thinking at the start, what is it
that allows us to be at our best?
And then inevitably as organizations begin to scale, like the focus on that sort of
shifts to how do we win in the market?
How do we get our financials right?
How do we grow past this stage?
So there are a lot of other distractions that can sort of take your eye off of
that and what happens then is we sort of let
culture grow almost unchecked because we just assume, because I know everybody here
and I've hired everybody here, I have a good sense of what the culture is.
But really quickly organizations get to the size where there are a hundred
employees, there are 200 employees, and suddenly organizational leaders wake up
and they realize, oh, I don't actually know everybody and I'm not even sure that
the culture is what I think it is anymore.
And at that point we've sort of lost the thread.
So I think that, again, the thing that I would whisper to leaders is,
The best organizations will win the battle for talent by creating cultures that allow
people to be their best more frequently.
And that means one of your practices as a leader needs to be gathering stories that
tell you when your people are at their best.
And using your paradigm about big C and small C, if you have an unintentional or a
default culture of a fast growing company, you could have the small C eat the big C
for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and the after party.
Exactly.
And I think that there's a lot of organizations where that happens.
And sometimes they are sort of naively intentional about it.
So they'll just say, hey, let that division do what's best for them.
Let this country or region do what's best for them.
And then all of a sudden, they start to think about pulling off some larger
strategic initiative and they realize none of these parts of the company can even
have a conversation with each other.
So if you allow small C cultures to sort of grow unchecked without any sort of
connection between with the big C culture, then you'll just have a set of
subcultures that are going to be at war with each other.
If you focus too much on a big C culture without having any small C cultural
experimentation, then you'll have people that are so focused on protecting
alignment with the big C culture that they're completely unable to change as
well.
So you need to have this middle ground where we have an understanding of what the
big C culture is.
And we're enabling some level of experimentation with the small C that
brings that to life.
And there's sort of a constant flow between the two.
So you can almost think about it visually as sort of a tree and the relationship
between the canopy and the leaves and the roots.
So if the big C culture is the roots, like this is what we're growing from,
those roots will die if they're not getting light and energy from the leaves
up above.
And those leaves are gonna grow in sort of different ways, depending on what part of
the tree they're in and what part of the sun they face.
And so that is a living system.
And we need to be thinking about culture is that same sort of way.
And I think that the nice thing about using those sorts of metaphors like a tree
is that it requires that same sort of care and nurturing from a leader.
I can't think about the culture from an engineering perspective.
Like I put it in place.
and then it runs and it just works like a bridge and people just cross that bridge
and I have the tolerances built in and that bridge is going to work.
I have to think about it as something that's growing because it is.
If the organization and the culture isn't constantly reinvesting in itself and
experimenting with what works, there will come a moment as there is for every
organization where there's a disruption in the environment that's going to cause the
organization to shift and cultures that are agile.
we'll be able to do that.
And there's actually sort of recent study that's brilliant by some of my colleagues
at the University of Berkeley, California, where they looked at exactly this and they
showed in recent market downturns, the organizations that were best able to
perform during those downturns were organizations that had as one of their
values, change.
So if change is sort of part of who we are, then when something dramatic happens,
we're actually able to be agile and to shift to meet what's going on with that
change.
and even be anti-fragile, if you can.
The metaphor is brilliant, Spencer, and you could even look for pictures of
malformed trees to make your point, because I think then it will be really
graphical.
I think it's so intuitive.
So intuitive.
So as we close, you told me about a broken jaw.
iguana pets and Neruda being your favorite poet and I'm gonna guess I'm gonna guess
that the broken jaw is true that Neruda is your favorite author and that you have a
different pet which is also unusual but it's not an iguana that's my guess
All right, so you are really good at this game.
So you are right.
So we actually do have an iguana, but the iguana is my son's pet.
It's not my pet.
So that was the nuance there.
Yep, but I did have this like crazy accident where I broke my jaw and Neruda
is my favorite poet.
What's one quote from Neruda that you recall if at all?
or what you like Neruda from Neruda.
yeah, so Neruda has two books that I would actually recommend to executives.
So one is the Book of Questions, which is just a series of questions that are sort
of magical and allow you to appreciate the world in a different way.
And I think question asking is one of these keys to developing a culture.
And, you know, notice that, like, as a story gatherer, I said, what executives
need to do is ask people, tell me about a moment when you were at your best.
So that's sort of a brilliant book that I think is super applicable.
The other one that I love is Odes to Common Things.
And in this book, he'll write poems about sort of the beauty of an onion, the power
of the word thank you.
And one of my favorite odes there is Ode to My Socks.
And he talks about how socks can be this sort of brilliant thing because
you put them on and they're sort of beautiful and they make your feet look
beautiful, but then they're also meant to be worn out as well.
And it's that sort of like duality of this can be something that is extremely
functional, but then I wear it out and I can have this gratitude for it.
And that sort of dual meaning that you can capture from even common things I think is
important as we try to look at life and just appreciate that in the.
the mundane contours of our lives, there's still beauty and meaning, even in a pair
of socks.
beautiful and humbling and down to earth in a literal sense.
So Spencer, it's been a pleasure.
I learned a lot.
I love your big C versus small C paradigm.
I hope it really gets, you know, in the headlines of all management publications
because it just highlights how the intended culture is.
often so different to the ground truth and just brings the need for intentional
culture to the forefront.
So thank you for being with us, sharing your wisdom, sharing your research,
sharing your life stories.
And to everyone listening, thank you for being with us. If you like
to not miss any future episodes.
You know what to do, you hit subscribe, leave a comment so that future listeners
will know what to look for.
And as I like to say, keep leading.
Wonderful.
Thank you, Andreas.