Episode 274: The Importance of Culture: How to Ensure the Right One to Drive Results
As Mr. Rogers would say, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood right back here on this edition of Around with Randall. I am not a huge NFL National Football League draft follower or expert by any stretch, but I do find it interesting when they talk about drafting, particularly quarterbacks, because they're the highest profile position. Probably have the most influence on the game because they're hands on the ball every play.
And what drives success when it comes to quarterback play? And one of my favorites, Louis Riddick, who works for ESPN for player former executive, talks about quite eloquently the idea of culture making such a big difference in quarterback success. And as we move towards the draft, depending on when you listen to this and that context, I want to spend today talking about the importance of culture and how it affects production.
Does culture affect it in such a way that if we don't deal with it, it actually can deeply affect outcome? And I'll throw the spoiler out right now. The answer's yes. All this is about trying to figure out that culture by at least my loose definition is really about the work that gets done, how it gets done in the environment.
It gets done when there's not an organizational chart here. We're talking about this idea of how we work together, what the environment is when we do so, and that it's about shared behaviors, shared norms, the decisions that we reach, but maybe more importantly, how we reach them. Over time, not in a snapshot, but over time. And that what I really want to do is, in the end, as we try to in each edition of around with Rand, we'll talk about tactical outcomes, about how do we maybe add some things into our culture, some tactics that can help you.
Maybe you have one person who is a problem. Maybe you don't feel like the culture is great and you're not the leader, but you want love the mission and you're trying to figure out how to fit in. Maybe you're a new and you're trying to figure out where culture fits into your career development, or why it's important. All these things are going to be discussed today as five tactical things that might be put into very easy kind of operational, leadership driven aspects are opportunities to develop a stronger culture, more positive.
One start at the top. Work our way down. Why is culture so important? So the first thing we have to do is talk about that. It affects outcomes, that there are lots of studies out there that show that out, that this culture idea has a dramatic effect on outcomes. If I go back to the NFL and you may not be a big football fan, but you know that there's a quarterback, I'm sure that what Louis Riddick, who I mentioned at the top of the show, in which I've come to believe he's articulating, is, is that you can take someone and put them really talented and put them in a bad culture, and that it deeply affects their ability to do their job. Throw passes, drive the offense, hand the ball off in clutch situations. Be the go. To give you an example, this last year in the NFL Sam Darnold the head or excuse me the starting quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks was in his I think his seventh or eighth ninth year doesn't make a difference.
But he started his career in an organization which has had some real culture issues the New York Jets. And if you're a Jets fan, I'm not trying to disparage you. I hope they do better. The NFL is better when the Jets are better, but the fact of the matter is, is their culture hasn't been great. Sam Darnold was drafted into that culture and really struggled and then eventually was released.
Went to a couple of other places Carolina most notably. And then finally recently the Minnesota Vikings, where he went into a culture that was a lot stronger, did very well, wasn't signed again, went to Seattle and now won a Super Bowl. So here's the question. Was Sam Darnold a really a much better talented quarterback last year than it was five years ago.
Certainly more experienced. But did his talent grow. The answer is no. The culture changed. He found a place where his skills could be paired with others to generate success. He deserves the credit mentally, emotionally. To some degree, physically for sticking in there, for finding the right place. This is no different than where we are in our organizations. Even though we may not have 80,000 people for three hours each Sunday, watching us in the fall.
The point is, is that places like Gallup show and say and study that when teams are invested together, materially engaged, that the results are better, there's higher productivity, there's more profitability, there's lower turnover, there's less absenteeism. People want to come to work. That strategy and see in a study found that that when you have a majority of the executives, the managers, the employees, describing culture as being positive, as being critical in a incredibly positive way, there's greater success in the society for Human Resources Management sites, major turnover issues directly related to bad culture.
We are not immune in the nonprofit world from these outcomes. And so what we've got to do is begin the thought process of culture shaping what we do, the speed at which we do it, how fast we make decisions, the quality that we offer about how conflict is, is kind of figured out internally, as well as what we do externally with boards and donors, and that we want to retain talent.
It's really hard to find good people. If a culture is bad, they go somewhere else. That's like giving things away for nothing. Think about culture as a risk model. That good culture, when done correctly, reduces the risk of losing good people, of doing bad things, of having a sense of recalcitrance, having people be recalcitrant in the offense for just coming and taking a paycheck, but not believing that this idea of risk actually gets down to how we might think of as harmful behaviors long before policies ever actually come into the conversation that there's a natural understanding.
We do certain things, certain ways, because that's what our culture demands. And this then, then brings us to the point of understanding that culture is not a what I'll call a vibe. It, it it's a piece of who you are is the organization.
When things are really going well, culture isn't as much of a problem. It's when things get off kilter that culture, things like how you hire, how you onboard, what kind of feedback loops you create, how you promote, how you advocate for people, what your meetings are like, how leaders and staff respond under stress when things aren't going well, those things become really important because they hold the group together.
They hold the organization together, the department together. Depending on your size that we know, when we look at things like the Harvard Business Review, that culture really becomes a set of observable elements, of observable moments where we can see how things are shaped. It's not a soft concept.
Here's what I'd like you to do for three seconds of silence. Think about your organization. What three things are rewarded even if no one says them or writes them like an evaluation out loud. What things are in your organization? Do you look at and go, I'm glad my leaders or staff or fellow colleagues or whomever institutionally, organizationally, culture wise, do these things.
What do you like? Well, my guess is they're pretty much the norm, whether you're listening in Pullman, Washington, or in Boca Raton, Florida, or anywhere in between on that axis or around the world. The point is, is that cultures create an environment where we can all really rise to the occasion of what we need to do. I think it's also important to realize that when we have bad cultures, that there is a real cost to this, the kind of a misalignment that we know bad cultures can last, or maybe strenuous cultures or cultures, or maybe individuals who aren't aligned with the culture can last for a little while.
People are willing to put up with a little bit, but over time, what it does is just erode the team. That net performance drops, that turnover increases, that we begin creating workarounds. I've seen this with a couple of clients recently where culture has allowed one person to make do some workarounds in, let's say it, database technology, that kind of stuff where all of a sudden everyone is on the staff.
But I have no idea how to do this anymore. But the one person is now getting power and control and the culture says, well, that's okay. It creates a psychological negative and reduces kind of a sense of safety or basic premise of norms that organizations need. And we really need to have leadership look at containment of those kind of activities.
So let's start moving toward the tactical. And what are the things that can cause cultures to devolve? Maybe it comes from one person, maybe it comes from a group of people. Maybe it comes from the leader. In some ways, I look at this like my nine year old who is just the best, my nine year old in third grade, and it's not her and it's not her friends.
I think it's just being a girl and being nine years old. I have to defer to my wife on that. That their culture is not all that great at times. I think that's just part of growing up as a girl, being young. If you are one and experienced it, maybe you know better than I. I'm just trying to keep up and stay up.
But the point is, I sense some similarities and what I'm going to talk about and what I deal with and hear about at the dinner table every night, about what we called girl drama.
That number one is that repeated patterns drive culture. It's not a one off scenario. If something happens in the moment, people have bad days. If they apologize and everybody's okay, that's not a culture problem. That's just there was a moment they happen to happen in marriages, happen in friendships. They happen in all kinds of cultures. But it's when it's repetitive that's a problem.
When things are constant that it breaches values. And there's a difference between breaching a value and having a style differential, i.e. when if you want to dress one way and somebody else, one starts the other way and they don't really conflict with culture, that's your style difference. That's okay. But when it impedes upon the office environment, that becomes a value breach.
So disrespect, bullying, dishonesty, undermining teammates, client harm or donor harm, cutting corners, safety and compliance issues. Those are value decisions. And that leads to contagion. Meaning well they got it done. Why can't I get it done? These see some similarities between being a nine year old girl and all the friends that, well, that was okay for them. And they were kind of either rewarded or not brought together in, in a, in a way that would say, don't do this, that it became okay, it became the norm, and then it's accepted.
And if it's a negative behavior, that could be a problem, that then people start leaving the group, that retention becomes an issue that when you have these kind of moments, people have options and jobs and then it taxes leadership their time. How much time does it take to fix this? That's why you want to deal with this upfront.
And finally, if not handle it affects your brand, your experience, your kind of the risk of what your organization is and does and accomplishes, which is leads to trust, which is the thing we value the most with donors in the community. When someone's behavior or small group of of people's behavior forces organizations to pay kind of what I would call a hidden tax that exceeds measurable output, meaning it come more of a negative than a positive.
The math flips, and I don't care if they're the best producer or not. Eventually, as I said, one offs can be taken care of, but if it comes the constant eventually, it doesn't mean if they're the most valued producer, they're going to destroy the culture and the whole place is going to fall apart. And so we're down to the ultimate tactical.
What are the five things that you might think about to improve your culture? If things are incredibly tactical, meaning things you can do physically to help culture conversations. So you can do this individually, I would offer as a group, maybe it can be done anonymously, but things that can be done to bring the office and the culture more aligned together to move forward in a positive way.
So the first is, is to write culture, behavior, context or contracts or of awareness.
Take two columns specific behaviors that must be stopped. Specific behaviors that must start or be elevated. The idea is, is that you need to look at things like meeting and email tones and handoffs and protocols and interactions, and begin to define what's good measurably so, not just theoretically in terms of response time, feedback, rework rates, escalations, conflicts, whatever.
What do we need to stop as a as a department or an organization? And what do we need to grow if you do this office wide, if you're a small nonprofit, make for easy. If you're a larger nonprofit, it's by department is what you end up with is putting not people but the process in front of everybody and saying, this is what we like and what this is, what we don't like.
And hopefully that will allow those that do things that people don't like and that aren't really acceptable to be self-aware, that, oh, I do those and we can start curtailing them. So it's not accusatory to people. It's about behaviors. You're not saying, Bob does this, this is just something we shouldn't do it. It makes people uncomfortable. So the first is kind of a culture contract awareness.
Assessment number two is then to link that culture to performance compensation and kind of the progression of what you're trying to accomplish at the end of the day were outcome based, particularly in nonprofits and particularly within nonprofits, with gift officers, and that our evaluations should reflect this about outcomes, ROI. We've talked about it a million different times, written about it in my blogs, very, very consistent on this.
But if the incentives reward only outcomes, then culture will eventually lose if you have bad behavior. So part of the evaluation process has to be do people fit into the culture norms of behaviors? That's why we started number one. What do we want to stop. What a start. Have to fit into that. And then leadership has to say in the private environment of an evaluation with a constructive positive perspective, hope fully done that these behaviors, even though your performance is great, are affecting the team.
And I we'd like to kind of bring those back in and then still allow you to succeed. So if you do these two things in order, if you find out what's appropriate and not stop and start and then focus not just on dollars raised or dollars brought in or outcomes, if you're a nonprofit meal served in a soup kitchen or whatever, and talk about culture as well in the evaluation process, what you end up with is reinforcing these positive and negative things that you want to start or stop.
Third is don't wait. Just do the evaluation you should do. If there's a culture issue with that employee or with a small team, regular interval checkups or checkpoints, maybe it's 15 minutes per week or every two weeks where the agenda is about behavior and examples and kind of replacement behaviors like that was bad. We want to try to do this.
Do you want to make sure if it's a small group you're not embarrassing anybody. Maybe that's more individualized and a commitment to what we can do to improve. If you just wait every year for the evaluation, either to bring it up because you're a staff member and you're kind of offended by this or that or whatever, or you're the leader, what you end up with is waiting too long.
Like, well, great. It's not the values you got to create interval timing to have these discussions.
And then as a part of that you need to create number for the feedback loop, giving people an opportunity to feel as if they have a place to go with these concerns, as long as are reasonable. I'm not interested in my nine and nine year old, my 12 year old complaining all the time, but if they have a reasonable concern, I want to hear it.
As a dad, I can adjust. There's nothing that says I shouldn't do better, so it's kind of maybe unanimous. But how do you create feedback loops? A sense of collaboration, a sense of reliability that you care or that the office cares? The culture should care that it's based upon respect and it's not based upon a single comment. I always find it interesting when you have comment boxes, which I'm not opposed to per se, but one comment drives someone to make an enormous change in the culture.
No, we need lots of the similar conversation occurring for us to want to make big changes and then tie that back to those kind of what I call behavioral contracts with evaluation with, with, with, with the weekly or bi weekly or monthly check ins. When we talk about kind of those short cycles that we need to be creating regular communication.
The fifth is sometimes really the most difficult because it's about role design and being a trigger for change, which means leaders sometimes have to look at the situation and change the change, the decision process or how things get escalated. I have a client who's got a little issue internally and very quickly the escalation path had to be elevated because there was some culture issues.
You might have change meeting structures, you might have to change off hand offs, you might have to change how you look at accountability, that the change in context is important, because that will support some of the other things that you're trying to do in terms of culture change.
The point is, is that some of this, if we want to get to where we want to go, is non-negotiable, that we need to execute. On these examples, five things around the what's going to start stop. How we're going to look at how evaluations and the work that we do supports that, how we have not just one evaluation, but maybe we need to do more conversations internally as a small group and or individually about culture and what's appropriate.
Not that we create feedback loops. So the team has a way of feeling as if you care, or the organization believes in this feedback loop. And finally, to really look at what we do and how it has to change regarding decisions, meeting structures, things of that nature, culture requires clarity. It requires follow through. It requires attentiveness, and it requires it to be a norm, meaning it just doesn't happen once a year.
And back to Sam Arnold, because my guess is you have a Sam Darnold in your office that somewhere along the line things didn't go well in their career. And was it them or was it the culture that they were in. How do you give people the chance to elevate themselves to reach their potential? I always thought that was my greatest responsibility as a leader.
If you want to go in your office to sleep, I can't help you, but I'm going to create or try to create a culture that allows everyone to be as successful as they can be, whatever that might be. And these are just some ways in which we can embrace culture and.
Have a culture rise to meet the needs of the office, the people, the mission, our work. At the end of the day, that will produce a more effective nonprofit. Please don't forget the blogs. I invite you to go take a look at them at half length because you get RSS feed two per week. I'm really surprised when people read, to be honest.
Kind of. I hope they're helpful and I'm amazed how far they reach in terms of around the world. And secondly, if you'd like to reach out to me, if you got a subject matter, you want to talk, I'm getting more and more of that podcast, and I also want to become email me and I'll be glad to. You'll throw in a subject and see what we can do with it.
See if we can fix the problem we live in very interesting times and they're going to get more interesting. And this is where nonprofits and philanthropy are going to play a critical role. Don't forget, I always talk about point three being between the idea or the work that happens in government, which is not always efficient and for profit.
They don't want to do certain things that are not profitable. At the end of the day, what we do is we serve in that gap, and what you do every day is critically important. Don't forget my favorite saying some people watch excuse me? Some people make things happen, some people watch things happen. And then there are those who wondered what happened.
At the end of the day, if we do this well, you're someone who makes things happen. Your organization that makes things happen for the people, in the things in your community that are purely wondering what happens. And that's a great way to live a life, to live in a community that believes in that, that the culture is that to make everybody's life just a little bit better.
I'll look forward to seeing you the next time, right back here, on the next edition of Around with Randall. Don't forget, make it a great day.