I have a theory that leaders overthink how to create highly collaborative and productive teams. This article from the Harvard Business Review recommends the new rules include a culture statement, a way to measure performance, and continuous improvement systems. What’s novel? And why is there demand for this knowledge?
I respect HBR’s work, and I value that they’re serving a need. Thank you, HBR. And I believe their output is not new, it’s what we do everyday — culture.
Let’s consider culture a system of transmitted behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that shape our society or organizations. It’s everything we see and can’t see. The system, like any organism, evolves in adaptive and maladaptive ways.
If that definition is true, here are my reasons for why we’re overthinking teams.
Life Finds a Way
Critique: Large teams are composed of people likely organized in sub teams. When people are organized together to create work outputs, they’ll create a system of behaviors, norms, values, and status markers that help them create valuable outputs — Robin Hanson calls these developments “cultural gadgets“.
Alternative: Allow sub cultures to form and thrive. Great work cultures can have contagion effects. Enjoy that. In fact, go out of your way to share subcultural practices with other teams so that they can be adopted. You’re creating your own internal and mini culture market.
Robustness vs Performance
Critique: Establishing key performance indicators is critical. No disagreement. However, as initiatives change your team will need to adapt. You’ll want robust culture systems that evolve to meet the shifting demands and pressures.
Alternative: Employ real time performance management dashboards (recommended by the article) and track how well the team adapts to changing priorities. Keep a history of all of the changing demands your team evolved to meet, productivity levels during those changes, and challenges you all overcame along the way. Share that story with your team constantly!
Maximize for Bottom Up
Critique: It’s common to hear that culture starts at the top. I disagree. I believe, based on my experience, that the inverse is true. Organizational culture statements are often feel good statements defining “who we are”; however, those statements aren’t a system — they’re words. Platitudes ≠ outputs.
Alternative: Allow your cultures to pop up and grow. In fact, allow for cultural drift — the process of a culture system evolving and adapting to new demands. As leaders, create selection pressures that favor more effective team cultures — celebrate the groups (collectively) that are making the most valuable outputs. And be wary of rigid company-wide policies that may stifle cultural evolution.
Do My Ideas Work and Scale?
Yes. My ideas are not novel. Scrum teams and creative groups operate in similar ways. The teams I build need to be high executing and creative problem solvers — adopting ideas from software and collaborative arts makes sense.
Scaling is both easy and hard. It’s easy to allow cultures to form. As a leader, it’s hard to let go. I am comfortable letting go and allowing culture to form. It’s my experience that people want to feel trusted, and when they do, they create good work. Your mileage may vary.
Potential Downsides
My ideas may not be suitable for teams that need to run a certain way to be successful. More rigid teams or organizations may find my ideas too radical — and that’s okay. As a leader, you need to assess your own culture and determine what’s best.
Wrapping it Up
This blog is for people who are obsessed about talent — spotting it, cultivating it, retaining it, and successfully exiting it into better roles internally or externally. If you’re going to be that person, it’s critical that you create environments for talent to do their best work. That means, creating space for micro cultures to take root, evolve, and adapt.
Talent Revolution 