Culture Fix

How to create a great place to work

Colin D. Ellis

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780730371496
• eBook ISBN: 9780730371441
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

** Finalist AUSTRALIAN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS - BEST MANAGEMENT AND HR BOOK 2020

The playbook for building a great culture

Culture is the key to success for every organisation, but what do great cultures do and what makes them successful? In Culture Fix, author Colin D Ellis shows you how to change the way you do things and create a winning culture that will keep your organisation relevant today and into the future.

No matter your business, industry or country, your culture's success depends on the emotional intelligence and engagement of people within it. Whether you're a CEO, a manager, or a team leader, this comprehensive playbook provides everything you need to build self-motivating teams capable of delivering great value and great employee experiences for your organisation.

Many organisations lack the knowledge for creating cultures that are uniquely suited for their people. Culture Fix offers real-world solutions to problems of culture change in organisations and teams of all types and sizes.

• build an aspirational vision for your organisation or team
• create a set of values that mean something
• enhance the communication between your people
• adopt the mindsets and behaviours for a successful culture
• create the right environment for innovation and creativity.

Practical, insightful, honest and funny, Culture Fix: How to create a great place to work will show you how to create a workplace where great people can accomplish great things.

The six pillars of culture

PILLAR 1
Personality & communication

The way into any culture is through its people. The more vibrant a culture, the more its people open its doors, roll out the welcome mat and make new people feel part of it. The less vibrant the culture, the more its people either have to force their way into it or are left on the outside, wondering what it will take to get an invitation to join.

The behaviours of an individual in cultures is driven by:

• how self-aware they are
• how self-aware others around them are.

It’s the capacity to be self-aware that allows people to understand the things they’re good at, the things they need to work on and how to utilise the feedback they receive in order to continue to grow as a person.

The big problem, however, is that many people lack self-awareness and therefore cannot regulate their emotions, and consequently cultures never move forward. In her excellent book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Dr Carol Dweck notes, ‘Studies showed that people are terrible at estimating their abilities. And those with a fixed mindset made up the inaccuracies.’

Indeed, in a ground-breaking study in the early 2000s (whose findings were published in a paper titled ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’), Cornell University students David Dunning and Justin Kruger demonstrated through research and experiments that unskilled employees who lack self-awareness often overstated their abilities and competence at their job.

And there are plenty of these people in organisational cultures. I’ve worked with a few myself, and probably even qualified as one early in my career.

Every cultural evolution program has to start with self-awareness. It must give people a window into who they are and what they’re about, their personal strengths and their opportunities for improvement. After all, without an understanding of ourselves, it’s hard for us to develop an understanding of others and be empathetic to their needs.

To be clear, I’m not talking about authenticity. Well, I am, but not in the way others talk about it. Authenticity is (according to my friends at Wikipedia) the degree to which one is true to one’s own personality, spirit or character, despite external pressures.

Nice.

Researchers Erikson (1995) and Weigort (2009) found that it has more to do with a commitment to values and motivation and therefore is deeply personal and (crucially) ‘incapable of challenge by others’.

And there’s the rub.

Everyone’s view of what is authentic is different and if I believe I’m authentic regardless of how I behave, well, that’s just what I believe. There are no rules as to what it is. Since people’s values, behaviours, motivation and communication styles differ, there can be no hard and fast rules.

There are misogynists, racists, and people who harass and bully others who believe themselves to be the most authentic people on the planet. Of course they’re not, and I can say that because my view of authenticity is different.

Being told to ‘be authentic’ isn’t altogether helpful; however, anyone can become the person they want to be through continual self-awareness and feedback. And often the latter will compel the former.

Some of the most self-aware people I know take the time to ask others for their opinions on their values, behaviours, motivations and communication style. They spend time thinking about what it is they stand for and whether that is in line with the way the world currently thinks and works.

These people never use age as an excuse; they don’t put people into a box based on their gender, race or opinions; they stay on top of the skills they need to be good at what they do; and they strive to behave in a way that positively influences other humans around them.

They think before they speak, challenge rather than conform, listen when they want to talk, make time for learning and play, rest and recharge, and are productively busy with their time. They consistently practise at being the very best human being they can be, which requires resilience, courage and reflection.

This is the kind of authenticity we need to see, and we need people to share how they got there in a language and style that doesn’t alienate or confuse.

What questions did they ask? What barriers existed and how did they remove them? How did their lifestyle change? And who are the people who helped them get there?

Although people’s views of what authenticity means might differ, often the actions they need to take, and the behaviours they need to demonstrate to achieve a status where they can be a positive influence on others, are the same.

To become the best version of ourselves requires support, education, feedback, discipline and personal change. The culture should support all of these things.

Okay, where was I? Oh yes, self-awareness.

Emotional intelligence

In 2013, researchers Zes and Landis found that ‘Poor-performing companies’ employees were 79 percent more likely to have low overall self-awareness than those at firms with robust ROR.’ And that companies with a greater percentage of self-aware employees consistently outperformed those with a lower percentage.

So increased self-awareness produces tangible results. But wait, there’s more.

Daniel Goleman determined that self-awareness was a critical component of emotional intelligence, which is a key contributor to cultural success. He found that ‘what makes the difference between stars and others is not their intelligent IQ, but their emotional EQ’.

Readers who have worked in or seen great cultures know this to be true. The people we learn from, the people we spend most time around and the cultures we enjoy working in know how to behave, have discipline and focus, know how to get the job done in difficult circumstances and understand the value of continuous improvement. These are all traits of emotionally intelligent people, and when people like this work together the cultural results are the envy of others.

In his book Emotional Capitalists: The New Leaders, researcher and author Martyn Newman says,

In the last 10 years, the most sensational strategy for achieving goals has been to focus on developing emotional intelligence. It is an indispensable set of social and emotional competencies for leveraging knowledge and emotions to drive positive change and business success.

The importance of EQ in cultures has been downplayed for far too long. Quite how the hardest thing to develop and change has been classed as ‘soft skills’ is beyond me. Technical ability has taken precedence over how humans treat each other in cultures for most of my lifetime. Now the balance is finally shifting, and about time too.

High emotional intelligence has been proven to lift productivity, sales and overall team performance. This is why it is a core component of vibrant cultures.

Cultures that demonstrate low emotional intelligence (stagnant and combatant in the culture model in the figure on page 12 of this book) are almost always toxic, and nothing good is toxic.

The people within these cultures behave poorly and aren’t aware they are the problem. Their actions include dissention, anger, gossip and silent resistance. They refuse to be part of the team or the solution that the team is looking to find. They are wedded to the ‘way things are done around here’ and will tell you ‘it is what it is’. In an insightful blog in February 2019, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s David D’Souza described how their thought-terminating clichés ‘kill thought (and probably useful action)’.

From someone who doesn’t want to do the job they were employed to do, to someone who shows disrespect for authority or their team/classmates, these low EQ people like to focus on their own agendas and obstruct progress. They believe in ‘I’ not ‘we’ and stand in the way of evolution.

If the research is to be believed, however, their days are numbered.

A 2018 Harvard Business Review article titled ‘The Rise of AI Makes EQ More Important’ reported that researchers had found, ‘Skills like persuasion, social understanding and empathy are going to become differentiators as AI and machine learning take over other tasks.’

According to Dr Toby Walsh, Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Sydney University, machines will slowly take over jobs that are considered dull, dirty, difficult and dangerous. However, human beings who are high in emotional intelligence will always be required to lead other humans.

After the Global Financial Crisis the world changed, and the ‘Greed is Good’ mantra advocated by ruthless corporate raider Gordon Gecko in the movie Wall Street in the late 1980s is now called out — not championed — in media outlets and reports around the world. Sadly such greed still exists and many CEOs still place their personal interests far above those of their staff.

That said, emotional intelligence, with its focus on empathy, has never been more valued. It’s a cultural investment that, with self-awareness, disciplined application and continual feedback, provides payback in almost every part of a culture. Indeed, achieving a vibrant culture as described in this book is only achievable with high EQ people.

The way most organisations force self-awareness in the hope of creating more emotionally intelligent staff is through the often-maligned personality survey.

Traits, empathy and stories

In the spirit of full disclosure here, let me say that I love a good personality survey. I love to read a report of who a set of algorithms thinks I am, based on spending 20 minutes answering questions that on the face of it look exactly the same. BUT, and it’s a big ‘but’ (hence the caps), only if the language ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Preface
• The culture challenge
• The six pillars of culture
• Making culture stick
• References
• Acknowledgements
• Soundtrack
• Booklist
• About Colin
• Index
• End User License Agreement