Is toxic culture driving your team away?
Interview with Donald Sull and Charlie Sull
Is toxic culture driving your team away?
If you’re someone whose job it is think about culture, or maybe you’re a boss who has tried to communicate values to your team then today’s episode is an essential listen.
Donald Sull and Charlie Sull are a father and son research team who have discovered extraordinary insights into values and what they look like in the real world.
Here are some articles to get you going to understand the world of the Sulls:
Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation
The Toxic Culture Gap Shows Companies Are Failing Women
Why leaders need to worry about toxic culture?
Charlie and Donald have a business that focusses on this called Culture X.
AI Transcript – mistakes lie ahead!
Bruce Daisley: this week we’ve got a interview episode and we’re trying to alternate these between work chats and interviews. And this week we’ve got an interview, which I think is one for people who are really interested in the mechanics about workplace culture, and it’s a discussion that.
I set up and I think simultaneously you’d already had an interest in this discussion, Matt, this is with a guy called Donald Saul and he teaches at MIT. He’s a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in trying to understand the behavior of groups and. Alongside his work there, he’s, he set up an organization called Culture X, actually with his son, where they take an AI approach to try to compare notes between how culture in organization is talked about and the realities of it.
So he’s gonna go into the methodology, they effectively scrape the internet for what employees of organizations are talking about. You’d already been exposed to this, I think, Matt, when you, when we’d. Set this up.
Matt Cook: Yeah. I’d been fascinated by a report I came across a year a couple of years ago, which was looking at Glassdoor to understand different types of cultures in which perform well.
And what got me interested was I think that a headline, which essentially summed up that. CEOs, what CEOs say their culture is, doesn’t have any correlation to what the culture actually is. So their methodology is essentially, doesn’t matter if you talk the talk, but actually is this being played out in how people are, talking about it. So it does matter what you talk, if you talk the talk. But essentially, do employees also reflect that same language? So I thought it was absolutely fascinating and they went into kind of toxic traits. So they talk about the five toxic traits of companies and it felt like they’re essentially landing on if the dark triad.
Is for human personality, which is like Machiavellianism, like narcissism, psychopathy. They have that for companies. They’ve got that kind of the dark five, they call it the toxic five, disrespectful, non-inclusive, unethical, cutthroat, and abusive. So yeah, I was super interested to talk to them and they touched on their methodology and they touched on that toxic five and the impact it has on companies.
Bruce Daisley: In the show notes, you’re gonna find some fascinating articles were that were some of the reasons why we got in touch with them. Just about how toxic culture was driving the great resignation, how toxic culture affects women more than men. And hopefully that gives you an interesting context for this discussion.
So let’s open up the chat. This is our interview with Donald and Charlie Salt.
Hi both. Thanks for joining us. I wonder if you could kick off by maybe just introducing who you are and. Giving a sense of what you do.
Charlie Sull: Yeah, so we are cell etal. We’re a father and son research team based out of MIT and we we’ve pioneered a new kind of cultural measurement that powers our our research at MIT.
And that also powers our company that we started culture X, that measures and improves corporate culture in leading.
Donald Sull: Companies. Yeah. And I’m Don So I’m on the the faculty at MIT in our technology innovation, entrepreneurship and strategy unit. We cram a lot into that unit. And along with Charlie, a co-founder of culture X.
Bruce Daisley: I wonder if you could give us a bit of the origin story. So how did you, what made you have this curiosity for looking into culture and then how did you set about trying to measure it?
Charlie Sull: Yeah, so our background is more in strategy development, strategy, execution, agility, a few various things.
But as we did a lot of this work both research and working with leading companies, we kept on bumping across this. Invisible force that seemed to be almost at the heart of everything, which was culture. And the more we came across this force, the more interested we became in learning it learning about it and managing it.
But the big bottleneck we found a management was effective measurement. So this set us on a path that is a about eight years going on now, and it’s still going on. Of developing this this new form of cultural measurement that rather than looking at what you call a liquid scale response, which is how this is typically measured, on a scale of one to five, how do you feel about this is actually textual measurement.
So you’re listening to the employee’s actual words their natural language, what they say about what they like about the employee experience and dislike. And it turns out when you do things that way, you can get these really interesting insights, which we can talk about in our research. And it’s actually a much more effective way to, to measure and manage culture in in actual companies too.
Bruce Daisley: And as I understand it, you get a lot of your data, maybe all of your data from Glassdoor reviews, so from the reviews that people post online. Is that right? And what led you to that as a source of insight?
Donald Sull: It’s some of our data for research purposes. It’s a fantastic data source in the US alone.
Something on the order of 10 million employee reviews at this point from a standing start, a little over a decade ago. So it’s, almost certainly the largest, consistent source of information on how employees feel about their organization available. Maybe that’s ever been available. That cuts across multiple organizations, so it’s terrific in that regard.
Quite balanced, people have this perception that Glassdoor data is where disgruntled employees go to rant. It’s just empirically not true. The distribution looks actually, if you look at distribution of overall ratings or culture values or whatever, what is that it’s the distribution is.
Normal kind of skewing towards more positive. So actually on balance, more PE people are more likely to be positive in their reviews than negative. And what we find is that even if you look at employees who write a negative review and what they talk about positively, that correlates with what employees who write a positive review talk about positively and conversely, employees who write a, who rate their.
A company signed a company, a low rating, a one on a five point scale. When they talk about the cons, those are quite likely those are highly correlated with the cons of employees who talk about their employer positively. So even when people have different overall assessments of the organization, they tend to agree on what’s working and what’s not working.
So it’s quite a robust
Matt Cook: data set. That’s really interesting ’cause my assumption. Going into Glassdoor would’ve been the one that you just approved, that typically people are there, maybe more likely after they’ve had a bad experience, and probably if they are, that they’re going to overemphasize the bad areas.
But what you’ve said is that actually, so firstly, that’s not the case, but also the areas that are pulled out are pretty much the same, whether they’re quoted as being. In a positive review or a negative review. And,
Donald Sull: and it’s not coincidental that’s the case, that you see this more normal distribution of employee ratings in Glassdoor.
So the challenge that you have in most online rating systems is incentives, like who has the incentives to write a review? And typically is people who are either very dissatisfied or very satisfied. And so what you have in most online review forums is a distribution of ratings that looks. It’s not quite bimodal, but tends towards the extremes.
And what Glassdoor did, which was extremely clever, was they implemented a what they call a give to get policy. So in order to get all the goodies that they have online in terms of interview questions and salary information and other data. You need to write a review, and so that creates incentives for the typical user who may not be super unhappy or super happy to write reviews and therefore you get a more normal distribution.
I wonder if you could then
Bruce Daisley: give us a top line sense of what insight it’s given you. You’ve got this remarkable 10 million reviews. What has it told you about the state of company culture? The, I think one of the things I took from your work was that company cultures seem to be one of the biggest drivers for people changing jobs and seeking a new employer.
Is that right?
Charlie Sull: Absolutely. Our work has spanned a few things. So we started off with a research study where we looked at the correlation between a company’s espoused cultural values, their official culture statements and their actual cultural performance. And what we found there is that.
There is no correlation. It’s not positive, it’s not negative. There’s just no correlation between values. A company says they stand for culturally and their actual cultural performance.
Bruce Daisley: Wow. As a sort of an opening salva, that’s remarkable. Give us an example of what sort of things might be said.
Integrity or innovation.
Charlie Sull: Those are two of the most common espoused values and integrity is number one. One, one example we like to use is actually, if you look at Wells Fargo’s core cultural value statements during their their huge scandal a couple years ago. Two of their core values were integrity.
And customer orientation, we always do the right thing for the customer. So that’s one example of espouse values not matching cultural performance. But there are literally countless others,
Matt Cook: and I think Enron, I remember seeing had the same values on their wall with integrity before they committed one of the largest frauds in history.
So yeah, that piece of research was one of the first things I’d seen that, especially from you both was. Oh my God. There’s a clear difference between what a company might say and even what employees might say. Say when they’re asked. You mentioned the classic like hert scale with people in employee surveys.
There’s gonna be a clear disparity between how people answer those and the reality of the values that have permeated into the language, which it sounds like you are then able to access. That second part is that, am I, is that my understanding? Correct?
Charlie Sull: I think so. Yeah, liquid scale outcomes are really just a starting point for understanding a culture.
You can get a good sense of, on a scale of one to five how well do they like the company, how well they do they like their employer, which is useful information. But with textual analysis, you can just go so much deeper. You can look across hundreds of different topics, anything from. Agility to how pet friendly the culture is, these various granular aspects and get a real sense in high definition color of how a culture actually works and what’s not working.
Donald Sull: Yeah, for me if you think about, again, it comes back to what Charlie started off with in terms of measurement. So you can’t manage what you can’t measure. You don’t even know what it is if the root. Unfortunate realities in many organizations, discussions of culture, devolve to metaphysics and anecdote, it’s just really nonsense.
And so if you think about measures, one measure would be what are our core values? Completely uncorrelated with reality on the ground. Another way of measuring is this, traditional survey approach. And, don’t get me wrong I’ve used a lot of surveys over the years in, in, in research and it traditional liquid scale surveys and they have their their advantages, but the real limitation is.
You face a fundamental dilemma, right? I if you only ask a few questions, you’re missing a lot of topics. You’re telling employees what should matter versus them telling you what does matter and you’re likely missing a lot of topics. So you say, oh, great. The answer to that then is we’re going to. Give folks a hundred questions.
The problem with that is a hundred questions people just switch into onto into autopilot. And if they’re having, a good day or positive experience, you’ll get a lot of fours and fives across all questions where you should be getting very different answers. And if they’re having a poor experience, you’ll get a lot of ones and twos.
We actually see much less variance than you would expect to see across very different questions when you give people these long laundry lists of questions. And so the advantage of the free text approach is that people are seeing a blank sheet of paper. You’re saying what’s working, what’s not.
What feedback would you have for the top team? They’re telling you what matters, not you telling them what matters, first of all. Second of all, what they choose to talk about of, the hundreds of things they might mention contains a lot of information. It’s giving you a minimum, a measure of salience, like what’s top of mind for them, and arguably a measure of importance, like what really matters to them.
Which you can’t capture if you’re, listing the questions, the third benefit of the free text approach, it provides a lot more context. So if somebody just, says psychological safety, I don’t feel free to speak up. Rate the company low on that. You don’t really have any context, is that there Direct manager is.
The team dynamics, is it the middle, is it the perception of the middle manager or senior executives? Or is it, what topics do they not feel? It’s completely decontextualized these quantitative these numerical assessments on the questions. And it’s, free text really is, and it is not to say it’s the only way or different measurement methodologies have their pros and cons, but it has a lot of advantages relative to traditional approaches to measuring culture.
And the constraint historically has been there weren’t the tools available. To analyze at scale this data and scale matters because, for a typical for Culture X our startup, our typical clients will be, large multinational organizations. They’ll generate in a year between employee engagement surveys, pulse surveys, online employer reviews, exit interviews, something on the order of a hundred Harry Potter novels worth.
A free text data where their employees are talking about the company or their managers every year. You really need the technology to be able to analyze that data at scale. Historically it’s been lacking and that’s now possible, which is super exciting. I’ve seen
Bruce Daisley: discussions from you saying I, I think there was a discussion through the pandemic that the the workplace culture and toxicity at work was driving.
The great resignation, it was driving people to reflect on what they wanted from their jobs. How do you gather that data and is that trend continuing? Is workplace toxicity still one of the biggest elements that pushes people out of the door?
Charlie Sull: I believe it is. And yeah, in terms of our original methodology for that paper, so this relied on big data.
So we analyzed I believe it was 1.3 million glass store reviews to measure the culture of about 500 large employers. And then we looked at tens of millions of LinkedIn profiles to measure actual attrition rates. And then we used, a sophisticated machine learning explainability model to determine basically, which out of hundreds of these cultural aspects, these cultural topics that you can look at.
So anything ranging from, cross unit collaboration, to empowerment, to compensation, to what have you, which of these have the most powerful impact on actual attrition? And what we found by far, it wasn’t even close actually, was that toxic culture. The most powerful driver of actual attrition that we identified.
The reason we still believe that toxic culture matters is because when we work with actual companies and we do a similar analysis using their internal data we almost always find that that toxic culture is one of the most powerful drivers of things like employee satisfaction and retention.
What’s surprising about that is that’s true even in relatively healthy cultures, you would expect that to be true. And these relatively toxic cultures, but that’s true across the board. Toxicity is something that, as far as we can tell, really matters for almost all employee populations.
Bruce Daisley: What does it mean?
What? What is toxic culture? How would I recognize that? A toxic culture, I.
Donald Sull: Oh, sorry. If I could jump in, Charlie that was the question that first got us interested in this this topic. Actually we stumbled in it, to be honest, because what we were looking at was what were the attributes of cu culture and more broadly employee experience, so including things like compensation and benefits and other, all the things that would matter to an employee, what would be most predictive of a very negative review.
So it might not, and indeed we found it’s it’s asymmetric. Some of the things that are most predictive of a negative review, if you do poorly on them, are not most predictive of a positive review. If you do well on them. They’re threshold issues that employees expect to be met when they walk in the door.
And if they’re not it leads to a very negative reaction. So what we’re the, the question we got at what really makes a culture toxic? What leads people to say on a five point scale this is a one? And if I could give it a negative one, I would. And what we found again, we in that analysis, I think we had about 125 attributes of employee experience and culture that we measure.
And what we found was there were basically five attributes that were really predictive very strongly predictive of very negative outcomes, right? These weren’t the kinds of things that typical people grumble about a lot. There’s lots of things people grumble about, oh, it’s too bureaucratic.
We’re slow moving, it’s we’re siloed. People grumble about many things, but then they give the company a four or five rating, right? But these were the five things that when employees mention them, they almost always mention them negatively. And what those were first and foremost, respect.
If employees feel disrespected, if they feel excluded. Non-inclusive cultures, and that can be inclusivity, both in the sense of demographics or identity. Women feeling excluded or underrepresented minorities feeling excluded but more broadly cliqueishness or favoritism.
The third component was if employees perceive the organization as acting in an unethical manner. Back to the Wells Fargo or Enron. Examples if management is perceived as abusive, and then if the culture is described as cutthroat. And so what cutthroat means, it has very specific meaning in psychology.
Collaboration is oftentimes difficult in organizations across different teams. That’s normal. Cutthroat is worse than that. It’s not just the collaboration, it’s difficult. It’s that people go out of their way to undermine one another. If any of those five attributes employees talked about in their reviews, they’re much more likely to give a very negative assessment of the company.
And so a couple things to note about that. We just, so we didn’t have a horse in this race coming in. We didn’t, we didn’t have any strong priors as to, it was exploratory analysis. But we discovered this bundle of what we call the toxic. Were really predictive of very negative reviews.
We then went back and started digging into empirical research. And each of these had been studied separately. And what was interesting is they had been found in isolation to be predictive of negative employee outcomes attrition low engagement, job dissatisfaction. And there had been some work and some meta-analysis that showed they tended to be correlated much as we found them correlated in the Glassdoor data.
The question of what makes a culture. Toxic we took as an empirical question, like rather than, what makes it culture toxic is what I don’t like, which is a very broad and not very helpful definition. We discovered these five attributes and then when we dug into what other scholars had written about, we found that indeed, there was a solid body of data on each of them in isolation and some preliminary data showing that they tended to load onto a single factor.
They tend to be correlated with one another. Which gave us some confidence that the Glassdoor data was representative of of a, what we would see in a broader employee population.
Matt Cook: One thing I found particularly shocking, although perhaps, sadly not surprising from your research, was the impact that this has on women, that they’re more likely to experience the negative effects of a toxic culture.
But not only that, they’re therefore then more likely to leave a job. I’d love to, if you could just expand a little bit on your findings in relation to those power dynamics you also then pull out in the research.
Charlie Sull: Yeah, the effect size we found is very large. So we found that women are at least in America, but across different countries, we found fairly similar things. Women are 41% more likely to report toxic culture than men. This holds true across all, but one aspect of the toxic five. So this holds true across disrespectful behavior, abusive behavior, cutthroat competition, non-inclusive behavior.
Probably the big takeaway was simply how large this effect size is. One thing. You can compare this to is the wage gap, which is widely spoken about and rightfully but the toxic culture gender gap is even larger than the wage gap. And it’s arguably something that would impact employees more on a day-to-day basis.
Donald Sull: Yeah, I would just pick up on that point what that Charlie mentioned. There’s a, there’s not just our research, a lot of folks have found when they. Are trying to predict outcomes again, like engagement, attrition jobs, dissatisfaction compensation is typically not the top predictor.
It’s in the top 10, but in the middle. And often these elements of culture are better predictors, which is not surprising to anyone who’s had a job. Of course you think about compensation, but if your compensation is, over a threshold culture in many settings will matter as much or more than compensation.
Matt Cook: I’d love to dig into the social norms aspect of what you’re talking about. Previously in the paper, you talked about there being three ways to tackle kind of toxicity with leadership, social norms, and work design. Could you expand on that and expand a little bit about what you mean practically with these social norms?
Donald Sull: So the good news is we know social norms matter. I think the less good news is that there’s been not as much research as would, we probably like to see within the context of organizations which have their own dynamics. So the first thing to note is just how powerful they are.
So in the context of safety, worker safety, physical safety from accidents and so forth, the single best predictor. Of injury and high risk jobs. This is construction jobs, for instance. Manufacturing jobs is not. What the likelihood of injury. It’s not the demographics of the employees.
It’s not what the formal policies are. It’s not what the formal sanctions for violating the formal policies are. It’s the social norms among the Intact work team. So if, if you’ve got a, a group of construction workers who think it’s not macho to wear a, a hard hat regardless of what the rules are, those social norms are going to lead to behaviors that are in that case going to increase the risk of accident.
So what’s interesting there is that’s the social norms are so strong, even when it’s obviously an employee’s best interest not to get injured, right? One, social norms are extremely strong. Two. Coming back to this question about do you know, do you wanna th throw out values? No. But you want to connect your values to social norms explicitly to give them teeth.
And so an example would be Netflix. So we’ve written a case about Netflix, which has a, this is now we’re shifting from talking about toxic culture. In that case, talking about a culture that promotes agility and innovation. And so one of their their norms is candor, candid discussions, and there’s a lot of great evidence from Amy Edmondson and her, doctoral students and co-authors around the benefit of psychological safety and candor in terms of stimulating experimentation and learning and innovation.
Amy’s got a. A great new book out the right kind of failure on exactly these topics. So we know a lot, we know this is really helpful for innovation and candor’s really crucial for innovation and agility. And lots of companies listed as one of their values. But again, we saw there’s an average zero correlation between official values and reality.
So what you want is these social norms, which kind of shape behavior on a day-to-day basis where there are social rewards for conforming to those norms in terms of acceptance and status and so forth. And social sanctions for deviating from those norms that you’re, called out or and in the Netflix case for instance, they have something they call sunshine.
Which is basically they, when something goes wrong, they write up what went wrong and how what they learned, what lessons they learned, and then they circulate that that analysis throughout the organization. And that’s something most organizations don’t do. And that’s a, that’s a, that’s not a value, that’s not candor.
This kind of abstract, good, but abstract overarching value. It’s a very, tactical thing. Okay, we had an initiative, we, ’cause we’re trying new things. Sometimes they don’t work. We all know that. We wrote up what went wrong, what we learned from it, and we circulate that.
So we, we are collectively learning from this. And by the way, we’re nor, we’re sending the signal. It’s, this is what happens when you try new stuff. Some of it doesn’t work. And the most important thing is to talk about it frankly and learn from it. Yeah. Those social norms can play a very critical role in giving your values teeth in terms of how to implement social norms.
Two things to note. One is some social norms you can have, your listeners can have an impact on in their own team. So around psychological safety, for instance, Amy’s work on psychological safety is terrific, and she’s shown that at the team level you can build norms of psychological safety that may not be universal throughout your organization.
I. Other norms, like cross unit collaboration. You can’t unilaterally build those norms, right? Those have to be more organization wide. So that’s just a caveat to note, but for that subset of norms that which are very important norms, around respect around, candor around experimentation, which can be developed at the team level.
What’s interesting is involving the team in the norm, or what’s important, I guess as a practical matter, is involving the team at the norm development level, rather than, trying to dictate them from above. There was a, a very nice intervention at the veterans Administration Hospital in the us, which is the the healthcare system that treats military veterans in the us.
It’s the largest healthcare system in the us. And they were very focused on building respect among employees. That was the the value they were trying to address. And rather than saying, okay here are the set of norms that apply everywhere in the system. Which couldn’t have worked right, because they have, the norms that would apply in a, a research intensive facility in New York City are gonna be very different from the norms that would apply in a primary clinic in, rural Alabama.
Just social norms because of location and and function or discipline are going to. And the idiosyncrasies of a team. So rather than doing that, what they did was set up a program. They said, let’s be clear, what we’re trying to achieve here is respect. Okay. They gave some tools to help, back to Charlie’s point about measurement measure, the baseline level of respect.
And then the teams were given basically three hours off every week for about six months to work on, okay, here’s our situation at present. Here’s what’s working. Here’s what’s not. Let’s brainstorm norms that work for us that will help to increase respect and let’s track progress over time. Does take an investment in time and effort to for teams to develop those norms locally.
Tell
Bruce Daisley: me what, one of the things that I think. Things people are often saying frequently now is that, oh, their culture doesn’t feel the same. That things maybe since the pandemic have got worse. And I just wonder if we’re getting any evidence of that. Has culture diminished, has its importance for people changed in a world of more flexibility?
I wonder as we head towards the end, I wonder if you’ve got a perspective on that.
Charlie Sull: I think there are two things going on. One, one is the sheer effect of the pandemic on. Everything about people’s mental lives and professional lives. And the second is remote work and hybrid work. So both of those kind of happened at the same time.
The first effect to the best of our knowledge actually really improved how how employees thought about culture. So it’s something called the COVID bump. And it’s a fairly substantial bump that you can see across Glassdoor data. And also if you look at internal data from companies where during the pandemic, especially the first year and a half of the pandemic employees perceived leadership much more favorably.
And also other aspects of the employee experience like integrity and what we think might be going on there. We’re not sure. It’s a little bit mysterious, but. We think that could have been a crisis effect. COVID was this time of great uncertainty, and employees were looking for something to clinging to.
They couldn’t necessarily clinging to their the government so much. So in a lot of cases, they turned to their employers the source of stability. So in, in that sense, we actually see culture becoming more important and perceptions becoming more favorable in the advent of COVID.
Then the second thing going on is hybrid work, which certainly has an impact on on on culture. And I’ll we’re actually working on a paper about that right now. I’ll let Don give the basics on that one.
Donald Sull: Yeah, the two points I’d note, I think Charlotte analysis is spot on, that, there’s the kind of COVID effect and then there’s the remote work effect.
And it’s, we’re just now starting to be able to disentangle those. And on the COVID effect, I think. The, which I said is precisely right, that there was this, COVID bump. What’s interesting I think in the post COVID era is that a lot of leaders that we talked to, their assumption is we had a healthy culture pre COVID.
Then there was this dise equilibrating event or bundle of events really because there were political issues and geopolitical issues and social issues combined with the pandemic and the lockdown. So it was really this cluster of, of shocks to the system that occurred simultaneously.
And so we had a healthy culture prior to all of that going on. And then if we just do nothing, we’ll come right back to the culture X Andi. And I think that’s a bad assumption. I think really what leaders should be thinking about now is a window of opportunity is opened to reinforce your.
Your cultural values and your social norms. But that takes active management and attention and focus on the part of leaders. It won’t just happen on its own, and if it, if you don’t actively manage it as a leader, don’t be surprised when you don’t get what you want. So that’s the first point on the.
On the remote work. That’s super, super interesting. As Charlie says we have an analysis and a paper that we’re working on right now. The big picture finding is that there are certain attributes of culture that. Seem to are consistently work less well in organizations where people are very positive about their remote and hybrid work, to flag a couple of those.
One is around collaboration perhaps not surprisingly and particularly cross unit collaboration seems to suffer. A second is around recognizing, rewarding performance, which again it’s people I think, tend to forget. One of the benefits of having co-location of employees is that it’s easier to see who’s working on what and get a sense of who’s putting a lot of effort in and who’s maybe shirking a little bit more when folks are remote.
That’s, those signals are harder to gain, and so you need a a better measurement system in place in terms of, objectives and progress against those objectives. And many organizations don’t have those. It looks like there may be some there’s clearly some impact on coaching and mentoring, and we have this data from other research as well that managers just.
Spend less time coaching and mentoring remotely than they do when they’re face-to-face. And this happens, this impacts disproportionately younger employees and female employees on average. So you know, what we’re not arguing is that remote and hybrid work is bad, or that it’s going away or that it should go away.
Of course not. But what we are saying is. And what we will be saying in this paper is there are some empirically demonstrable elements of culture that tend on average to suffer in organizations that are really fully committed to remote and hybrid work. And so as leaders, you need to manage those.
So watch this space. I think it’s gonna be a pretty it’s shaping up to be very interesting. PI
Matt Cook: did have one question you talk about, when you’re talking about kind of the much SMO in a particular team, it made me think about you have as many cultures as you have teams across the company, so there isn’t just one kind of culture that permeates everywhere.
It shows up differently. I just wanted to get a sense of whether your own research. Shows a similar thing.
Donald Sull: It’s a super, it’s a fantastic question. I think one that hasn’t been explored in enough depth, at least among academics is it culture singular, cultures plural? And the answer is, it’s both, right?
So what if you go back to, jenny Chapman and Charles O’Reilly’s Definition of Culture. It’s a set of shared val of values that are widely shared, deeply held or translated into social norms where there are sanctions for violating those norms. But the interesting, or the relevant bit there for this discussion is deeply held and widely shared.
And so what we observe in organizations is there will be some norms. That do tend to be shared across the organization. And then there will be other norms that will be more team specific or idiosyncratic. And YY we don’t know a lot about this. I, we personally don’t know. I think collectively as a field we don’t know a lot about this.
Some of the things that we see as tending to be norms that are more unit shared across the organization are around cross unit collaboration. Like the extent to which the silos, we work well across silos or we’re very independent, that is something that tends to be a an organizational norm.
Risk tolerance tends to be quite organizational, which is. A problem for a lot of companies because, they may have one. If you’re in banking for instance, you’ll have some business parts of your business where compliance is super important and you want really low risk tolerance.
And then, you have asset management or investment banking where you want merit experimentation. If you have a kind of one size fits all approach to to risk tolerance, you may not be experimenting sufficiently. There’s some elements of culture that tend to be tend to be more more global.
And then as we talked about, for instance, psychological safety is one where you can get at the local level, respect you can get at the local team level. And also, to further complicate the story, there are some organizations where a lot of the values are shared universally.
And you have other organizations where very few of the values are organization-wide. Typically companies that have grown through mergers and acquisitions without an active mechanism for integrating cultures will have very disparate cultures across the acquired units. So it’s a super, it’s a really interesting and important question that, but, we don’t know as much about as as we should
Bruce Daisley: chaps. I’m so immensely grateful for the time you’ve taken today and what we’ve given a few links to some of the things you’ve written in the show notes. But look, we’re looking forward to those new papers that you’ve talked about as well.
It’s it’s great to get someone who really a team that have really unpicked what we understand about culture and can give us so much insight on it. So thank you so much for your time today.
So thank you to Donald and Charlie. Intriguing stuff, and definitely if you are responsible for values at your organization, it makes a really critical point. I found myself really thinking about the way that values might be a flawed way of doing it. And I saw something recently obviously that that talks about how the importance of having.
Prescribed actions and rituals is a more effective way of bringing culture to light. In the context of that, it really struck me that it’s, it might be a discussion worth having in your own workplace.
Matt Cook: Yeah. We never talk about values without also having corresponding behaviors. ’cause you’re absolutely right.
It’s gotta show up meaningfully in what we do day to day in our actions. So I think you need that pairing kind of the values. Behaviors that illustrate that in action.
Bruce Daisley: I think listening to it, the bit about social norms being more impactful in some ways in the like strict rules was fascinating and I think exactly exemplifies why values actually need to be embedded in the culture of your organization.
You can’t just go, as they said, everyone has to wear hard hats. You have to make it not cool to wear hard hats, but socially approved.
Matt Cook: Yeah. The idea of kind of social incentives and then. Yeah it feels almost bad to think about kind of social sanctions, but essentially, that’s what they are.
When it’s someone behaves badly and everyone basically goes, nah, not cool. That’s not how we do things. And the idea of bringing in sanctions seems very or well in, but social sanctions almost emerging. Organically because of the values you’ve created and the type of atmosphere you want. Yeah, totally makes sense.
Bruce Daisley: Really benefited from the discussion. I think you’re going to find most value by pairing it with the article. So do check out the articles in the show notes, which I think it’s probably gonna bring even more context to, to what we’ve discussed there. Thank you both to both of them for joining us.
Thank you for listening. We’ll be back next week. For now, I’m Bruce Daisley.
I’m Ellen Scott. And I’m Matt Cook. And we’ll see you next time.
