Tactics for Tech Leadership Podcast

S1E9 – Demystifying Corporate Culture (Culture Series – Part 1 of 3)

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by

Andrew Parker
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Show Notes

 In part one of this three-part series, Andy and Mon-Chaio attempt to provide a research-supported answer on whether culture is important for your tech organization. They also dig into the details of whether a company should hire for cultural fit.

Opening quote from “A Review Paper on Organizational Culture and Organizational Performance”.

References:

Transcript

Mon-Chaio: Research of the link between organizational culture and performance has increased substantially during the past two decades.

In the 1980s, there were ‘obsessions’ by researchers to focus on the Strong Theory – a search for strong shared values in organizations which were supposed to result in performance for the organization. Perters and Waterman claimed that high performance firms could be distinguished from low performance firms because they possessed certain cultural traits and ‘strong culture’.​

Andy: Welcome to another episode of the TTL podcast. Today we’re gonna tackle a large topic, in fact, such a large topic that we are gonna be splitting this across several episodes. And that topic is culture.

Mon-Chaio: Wow.

Andy: Is that big Mon-Chaio? Is that a big topic?

Mon-Chaio: It’s really big. I think you’re right, we need to split it up over multiple episodes ’cause there’s so many aspects of culture, and much like a lot of the topics we cover, I feel like people want to simplify culture so much that they want to be able to describe it in 200 word blog post. And it’s the end all and be all.

Andy: Culture is the food that you eat, isn’t it?

Mon-Chaio: Is it breakfast or is it lunch? What was the famous quote? Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Was that it?

Andy: Yep. That was it. That was uh, Peter Drucker, I believe? But the thing was that we were gonna start out with on this, and you were starting to get to it, does culture matter? Now, Peter Drucker, we just heard, said yes. But let’s explore that a little bit. Does it matter? What is it?

Why should we be talking about this? That’s where we’re gonna start. You can see though, audience, that we’ve got a bit of a bias in saying that we’re gonna be doing multiple episodes, that we believe culture does matter. But let’s see if we can get you there. You might be skeptical of this or maybe you agree with us, we can give you some of our arguments, but we are going to explore this from multiple angles.

We will try, I think, to argue the side of culture doesn’t matter.

Mon-Chaio: Right

Andy: We’ll see how successful we are in that though.

Mon-Chaio: But if you are one of those folks in the audience who thinks it doesn’t matter, I would say that you’re generally running counter to, what people believe these days. I did a quick search on my favorite search engine and my prompt was, “is corporate culture important?” And all these search engines are using AI these days, right? And so up pops a little box that’s a summary of the top search results. And it says, in big letters: “yes, according to 16 sources.”

But let me give you all maybe a more believable reason of why it matters beyond just search engines. There have been actually a lot of academic studies, those dense studies that we talk about, that say culture does matter for a organization’s performance.

Now, again, of course, we haven’t defined culture or we haven’t defined performance, right? And we will attempt maybe to do that at some point. But the number of studies are quite large. I’ll just read off some of the authors and dates and you can get a sense of it. There’s Denison and Mishra, 1995; Gordon and Di Tomaso, 1992; Kotter and Heskett, 1992; Heck, 1993; Petty, Beadles, et. al., 1995; Rousseau, 1990; Calori and Sarin, 1991. So you get the sense right, the amount of literature, academic, peer reviewed literature, for what that’s worth, that says culture is important to organizational performance is quite large and has been studied quite a bit.

So from that I would say that there’s at least some inkling that culture is important.

Andy: And I would say that it goes back further than that. So if you go further back in time, you start hitting things like Trist, who was a researcher, wrote a very famous paper about longwall coal getting, which is where sociotechnical systems comes from. Sociotechnical systems comes from this analysis of this, and a lot of it had to do with the culture of coal miners in the way that their culture impacted their ability to run in different systems.

Mon-Chaio: Interesting.

Andy: And that was 1951 in England.

Before that you had Lewin who did research and thinking about how to change people’s behavior, which is an aspect of culture, people’s behavior. And that was pre-war. So the thinking about culture and how that impacts what people do has been around for a very long time.

Mon-Chaio: It’s interesting that there’s so much research that says it’s important and yet, recently we hear a lot about the fact that we shouldn’t hire for culture or that maybe it’s unimportant.

Doing, again, my search engine search on “should I hire for cultural fit?” I get titles of articles like: “Hiring for Cultural Fit, More Harm Than Good”, “Is Hiring for Cultural Fit Perpetuating Bias?”, “The Dangers of Hiring for Cultural Fit” by the Wall Street Journal, “Stop Hiring for Cultural Fit” from one of my favorite publications, HBR, Harvard Business Review. So on the one hand, there’s a large corpus of research that says culture is important. We should research it, look at it, study it. And on the other hand we’re saying, look, we’re culture is so unimportant that you shouldn’t even hire for it. Don’t hire for cultural fit.

I think that’s a challenging place to be in. And I think the first step is actually to agree on what we’re talking about when we’re talking about culture.

Andy: Yeah, I would agree. I think getting to a shared understanding of some important words, and in this case the most important word is “culture”. When we say this, when we’re talking about this, what are we saying? And it’s not necessarily that everyone that we read when they talk about culture will mean this same thing.

But for this discussion, and for us to be able to then evaluate these papers, we need to be clear between ourselves, and with our listeners, what is it that we are trying to convey when we say culture. So I’ll give it a first stab and then we can debate it back and forth and see if we can make that a better definition, something we can work with. How’s that sound?

Mon-Chaio: Sounds great.

Andy: All right. So I’m gonna give it a first stab and my definition will be fairly encompassing. I will say that culture is the sum total of people’s behaviors and thought patterns. And a very important part of it is that it is for the most part, unconscious and unquestioned.

So culture is a lot of these things that you just do without thinking about.

So that, that’s where I would start with “what is culture.”

Mon-Chaio: Okay. I like it. I have written down somewhere shared beliefs and behaviors. So I think that ties well into what you just said. I think the one thing I might add to it is this concept of it transcending the individual.

Andy: Very good point. Yes.

Mon-Chaio: I think culture only exists in group settings. Now we could question that, maybe you disagree, maybe our listeners disagree. But I tend to think that culture only exists in group settings, that you have to have more than one person.

Andy: I think that makes sense. You could argue that yes, it exists with an individual without a group involved, but that becomes uninteresting to us. So I would stick with the interesting part of it to us, because we’re talking about teams and technical organizations. So it’s the group, it’s about what that group has as shared beliefs and understandings, and shared actions.

And I’ll loosen mine a little bit, rather than it being unconscious and unquestioned, some of it will be unconscious. I think the most core parts of it will be unconscious and unquestioned. But some of it is something that can be discussed and understood and talked about, and that’s one way in which culture gets transmitted from person to person.

Mon-Chaio: And I think the transmission is important too. This definition is starting to get long. So maybe these are details that aren’t important for sort of the top level definition, but I do think culture is transmitted, one, from person to person or from peer to individual, is how I would put it. And two, that it’s primarily transmitted and reinforced through rituals and symbols.

Andy: So maybe we say that our definition, trying to bring this together into that tighter package, ’cause as you said, we’re getting a little long, culture is the rituals and symbols that are transmitted within a group that inform their behaviors and patterns of thought.

Mon-Chaio: I like it. We might even want to make it stronger. I don’t think that it just informs their behaviors and thoughts. I think in some ways it governs their behaviors and thoughts.

Andy: Ooh, that is a good point. Yeah, it’s not simply … yeah, ’cause that goes back to that kind of unquestioned, unconscious. It governs. It’s a governing variable. It governs what they are going to do. So I think maybe we’ve arrived at a definition which is that culture is the transmission of rituals and symbols, among a group, that govern their …

Mon-Chaio: … behaviors and beliefs.

Andy: … behaviors and beliefs. Thank you. There we go.

Mon-Chaio: It is still a little long and wordy, but I do believe that each of these pieces that we have in our definition now is really core and I don’t think can really be left out. So I like it. I like that as a starting point. Sorry, not a starting point, but the foundation to our discussion.

Andy: Yeah. And I think that will serve us well later because we can take each part of it and say, what does that mean for what we come to? Alright, so now that we have a bit of that definition, where does that take us? Is it important or is it not important? Is it something that we can just ignore?

Mon-Chaio: This is super challenging. In some ways when you let the definition digest a little bit, it sounds hokey, right? Ooh, rituals and symbols. What are we talking about here? And in the same vein, it almost sounds like we are advocating or talking about group think or cult-like behavior, where you have a whole group of people that have the same behaviors and beliefs and they’re expressed and passed to each other through a bunch of different rituals.

But I think that’s okay.

Andy: I think it’s great that within our definition, that can all exist. Because it means we are talking about something that I can imagine existing in the world and I can now start thinking about it. So, for instance, one of the things of the groupthink, yes, it does mean, absolutely, that one thing that can happen from culture is groupthink, that the entire group starts thinking in the exact same pattern, and it’s a dangerous thing.

One of the cultural mechanisms that could be important in an organization is thinking about how do you break that groupthink, if that’s an undesirable thing. I think there is another important aspect of this as well, which is to recognize that people are not part of a single group, and so every person has a mixture of cultures within them.

And they’re all interacting. That’s an interesting thing to work with as well. So for example, let’s talk about rituals and beliefs.

You could consider extreme programming a culture. There are rituals and beliefs of extreme programming.

You’ve got your standup, you’ve got your onsite customer, you have TDD as a ritual. You’ve got all of the various aspects of that. At the same time, we’ll talk about like American culture. You’re in Seattle for instance. There’s a Seattle culture that sometimes people talk about

And, you are then, if you are working on an XP team in Seattle, you are embodying both the Seattle culture of its rituals, of drinking microbrews and wearing plaid. You’ve got the Seattle culture combined with the XP culture. So you’ll bring that Seattle culture to work when you’re doing XP. But say that you’re on a team with someone from Germany. So they’ve got a German culture. Let’s say Bavarian, which, beer fits very well into that and so does plaid. So it, it fits it fits very nicely with Seattle culture. A little bit different. There’s some differences there, but they’ve got their own beer and plaid culture, and leather pants, that combines with XP.

So, just from that, there can’t be, within that company, a completely consistent culture among it, but they can share things. They still can share a lot of those rituals and beliefs.

Mon-Chaio: I agree with that. I also think that when we talk about groupthink, I feel like, in the American culture, there’s this pushback because of this strong sense of individualism in the American culture, right? You’re talking about what cultures you bring to work. And so groupthink tends to convey this sense of there is a lack of individualism. However, I think it’s important to think about the value that groups bring, right? You hear the phrase “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” But that can only be true if there’s some sort of systems dynamics happening here, right? Where as the groups come together, there’s a systems behavior that is able to lift everyone up.

I think when you think about it that way, that you must say that there are some things that you have to subsume your individuality for when you’re in a group, in order to get that behavior, that systems behavior, that lifts all boats or whatnot.

Andy: Say more about that. What is it in that, that readiness to give up a bit of yourself?

Is that …

Mon-Chaio: Yes. A readiness to give up a bit of yourself for the group. And so when we talk about these rituals and we talk about these symbols, you don’t have to necessarily fully say that those rituals are symbols define you as an individual. In fact, maybe they don’t. Let’s use your XP example of being super collaborative, right?

That’s a huge XP thing about doing everything together, more eyes, more heads are better.

Andy: Pair programming.

Mon-Chaio: Now when you’re at work, you can subsume yourself into that culture and say, look, this is for the good of the group. This is what we do. We deliver more value. But when you go home, you don’t have to embody that ritual or that symbol there as well, to your point of living in different cultures.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: And so I think, individuals willingly, or in some cases unwillingly, when we get into the dangers of culture, we talked about cults and stuff, but hopefully at work, the culture is something that the individual willingly gives themselves to, even if it doesn’t necessarily align with their individual beliefs or behaviors.

Andy: Okay. Yeah, I think I can see that. And that actually touches on a paper that I found about culture. It was a study of healthcare workers and their tenure at an organization. Now, what the study was, is that they looked at these workers as they joined these hospitals or care homes or wherever they were working, and they wanted to see what was the best predictor of them lasting a year. That was just the length of the study, that they would last a year at that place. And what they found was that the strongest predictor of this was what was called person-organization fit. Basically what it means is that the person was aligned with the culture of the organization, that the beliefs and patterns and rituals that they had fit with what that organization did.

And that was the strongest predictor of whether or not they would be there after a year. Because when that alignment isn’t there, what you have is lots of friction. You have others around you, performing rituals or believing, thinking, in particular patterns that cause them to take actions that don’t align with what you do.

So for instance, if you have someone come into a software team that has never done a standup, they don’t have that ritual, and you come into a software team that does a standup, say twice a day, that is a ritual that they’re not accustomed to. Now it might be one that they can pick up pretty easily, but there might be another ritual, pair programming, that is harder for them to pick up, and then another ritual, retrospectives, that’s another hard thing for them to pick up. And the more of these things that you layer on , the bigger gap, you could probably even quantify this, in fact, I think they did for this study, the bigger gap between that person’s beliefs and the beliefs of the organization, the ones considered shared among that organization, the more friction there will be. And what this paper found was the shorter gap being a stronger predictor of them staying there longer.

Mon-Chaio: And you know what I love about that is I really like when you have something more rigorous that kind of reinforces something that you feel in your gut, so I like that.

So I think we have some indications that culture is important, right? We have an indication maybe due to performance. We talked about the studies of the past. We talked about this concept of ” the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.” That’s a performance thing if you wanna perform better than the sum of the parts. And you also have this idea of retention or a person’s satisfaction with the organization, which is due to culture and cultural fit. So I think we can agree that there are now multiple vectors, which show us that culture is important.

Andy: Yeah. And now let’s start discussing how culture is detrimental, and how hiring for culture for that fit causes problems, because it does.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, it absolutely does.

Andy: So, let’s talk about this a little bit. All right, so, here’s the thing. You’re leading an organization. And you wanna know, who should I hire to make sure that this organization is performing at its best? A natural way of thinking about this is that the organization has already done really well. So that means that we have the rituals and beliefs already within this group that gets us to that performance. I think everyone could say, there’s a fairly clear connection between the way that you behave and the performance the organization gets. And they could say that their culture is there and that’s how they’ve gotten their performance.

So they seem completely justified in hiring people, and I’m gonna signal a little bit of the problem here, that look and behave like themselves already.

Except right there is the problem, isn’t it, Mon-Chaio?

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. We have so much research that tells us neurodiversity is also really important to performance. Right now, I haven’t really seen a paper that compares culture versus neurodiversity. So I don’t think we can examine it as rigorously as we would like, but yeah, absolutely.

Then when you start to hire people that look and behave like yourself, I think it causes two problems. One is certainly that groupthink problem that we talked about earlier, , that you’ll have to work much harder to overcome. But an even more insidious problem is the prejudices and biases that can slowly or quickly start to creep in. Because remember, our definition of culture was around their behaviors and beliefs. Which can be pretty high level. Oh, I want to hire someone who believes in collaborative work. But as you narrow down the tunnel, you can all of a sudden say, collaborative work means being in the office all the time and being there late at night and going to late night happy hours and who speaks the language so I can understand them without having to try and who have mannerism just like me so I can understand their body language and … right.

Andy: And to add onto that, Mon-Chaio, the article from the London School of Economics that I was reading that was talking about this, they talk about this as, making the mistake of cultural fit being equated with similarity. So they say that the issue is actually coming down to what they call the similarity bias, and here’s a quote:

“If an organization hires for culture fit, it is recommended that they steer clear of similarity bias and try to measure culture fit through psychometrics, looking at the core values rather than the interview questions, which might conflate values with behaviors”.

And that’s one of the things that they want to be careful about. So we define culture as these rituals and beliefs, and those are absolutely part of culture, the rituals and beliefs. But the core important part for hiring and for getting that diversity, with still having a cultural connection, they say get rid of those superficial behaviors and focus on the underlying values.

So for instance, you might also value collaboration, but not have the ritual of staying late at the office. Or you might value collaboration, but not have the ritual of working remotely and sitting on a video call all day.

Mon-Chaio: Right.

Andy: You might have a different ritual of being very present in Slack rather than on video calls, but you still have the same underlying value, the same underlying belief, of the importance of collaboration on these things.

Mon-Chaio: And I think it’s interesting because, we talk about on the one hand behaviors, and on the other hand we talk about values and beliefs, right? Remember that we also said that culture is transmitted. Transmission of culture to me means that you can model or teach certain aspects of it, right? Andy, if you come into my organization and I value being collaborative, but I do pair programming, you don’t, I can teach you how to do pair programming. I can teach you my rituals, I could teach you my language, right?

For example, if I was like Uber and every time I brainstormed, I said something like, “let’s jam on this”, I could teach you that language. Now you may accept it or not accept it. This comes into subsuming your individual behavior, right? A small tangent. When I was at Uber, I’d definitely say “jam” to fit in at work. I would never use “jam” in my normal everyday life. No way.

Andy: So you’d say “jam” was not your jam.

Mon-Chaio: “Jam” was not my jam. Unless it was strawberry. But I think it’s much more difficult, if near impossible to, teach values or teach beliefs. I think these tend to be more ingrained.

Andy: I think I’m gonna disagree with you.

Mon-Chaio: Okay, let’s talk about it.

What I was gonna say is, and that’s why I think you hire for those, because those are more ingrained and longer to change, if changeable at all. And so they represent more of a risk to your organization when you don’t have them immediately. But let’s challenge this!

Andy: Well there I will agree with you. I will agree with you that they are harder to affect and change. But you can do it, which means that. A hundred percent connection on values in hiring isn’t really necessary. And one of the things that this article talks about as well, is, they don’t say it quite as explicitly, but it’s really the spend some time thinking about what are those very hard to change values that are at the core of how you want this group to be operating.

Those are the ones that you wanna be looking for, and others that are a bit more peripheral to that, you can be a bit laxer on. And then the exact behaviors you can be a bit laxer on, because as you said, teaching a different behavior can come pretty easily.

A non-core value, you can just let it go.

Teaching that core value, which means that there would be a disconnect from the very beginning, you’re gonna struggle with. I think you can teach values. I think you can, but this will be very much in the, I think that the most effective way of doing it is a CBT like approach, cognitive behavioral therapy. By changing the way people act, it will change what they value and what they believe. So you’ve got like this feedback loop happening between the values and those behaviors. They may not have all the behaviors that you’re hoping to have. They may have others, and actually those others you may look at and say those actually are our values even better. And so people may pick up those and reinforce your value or they may pick up the group’s behaviors. And pick up that value that they didn’t quite have as strongly as the group wanted. I would think about it in that fashion, which, the values can change through changing the way people behave.

Mon-Chaio: That’s interesting. I think I agree with most of what you said. I, it takes longer to change values.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: And core values, the reason that they’re core is because they’re so important and misalignment at the very beginning causes a great rift at the beginning, and I think it slows down everything. It slows down your ability to learn the processes of the organization. It slows down your ability to communicate with people in the languages and rituals they like to use. All of that sort of stuff.

I don’t know how I would think about non-core values. I suppose we all have them, but I think … you’ve seen these companies where you go to their webpage and they have 30 cultural values …

Andy: What company are you talking about?

Mon-Chaio: I’m not talking about the one that you think.

Andy: Oh, really? Okay. You’re not talking about The Rainforest Company?

Mon-Chaio: No, no. Just recently I’ve been on some webpages of companies where they say their culture’s really important and unique, and it’s 13 or 15 cultural values, which I think makes it very difficult. And, I was told by a recruiter once, these values are very important to them. And so if you’re in an interview, always go back to these values and really show how you’re living up to each of the values.

But again, to your point, Andy, I think where you wanna align, is with the small set of two or three or four maybe core values. Because once you get beyond that, you’re never gonna align. And then you get into this problem of, oh, we’re gonna use behaviors perhaps as a proxy into those. And you start to get into prejudices and biases in hiring.

Andy: Yeah. And I think that’s a good point. The more that you’re asking of that core, the larger you want that to be, almost by definition, the less diversity of thought you can accept within your organization.

We do know that more diverse groups perform better. They have more ideas to draw from. They have less likelihood of groupthink. All of that. That’s just gonna happen. And so if you have so many core values that you say everyone has to have these, you’re gonna really struggle to get people who are a bit different into your organization.

Mon-Chaio: And it’s always a balance, right? The question may be asked, then why have core values at all? You just welcome everyone in as long as they can do the job.

Andy: Ooh. Yeah, that, that’s a good thought exercise. Why say that there’s any criteria on that kind of a level. If they can do the job, why not hire them? Make it purely behavioral about the job.

Mon-Chaio: I think research can tell us this too, right? So research does say the more diversity of thought, the better the performance, but specifically in innovative fields where you have to come up with new ideas and new information and brainstorming. Research also tells us that when you’re in a non-innovative field, when you’re just execution focused, where you could tie back to something we talked about a few episodes ago around execution mindset., the diversity of thought is actually less conducive to performance, right? You want everyone who does things the same way. You want it to be repeatable, like a factory in some ways.

So it’s always a balance between those two. Gut feel tells us this too, right? Like when you’re more aligned with someone, it’s easier to move fast in the areas in which you agree. But I think it’s dangerous when everyone is aligned because you always agree on those areas and nothing gets challenged.

And so you have to find those core areas of which you can agree and say, look, we’re not gonna question this. We’re not gonna challenge this. This is so important and core to our foundation. We can’t just say every six months we’re gonna dig up something new and say, oh, we don’t believe in this anymore, now we believe in that.

But to your point, again, Andy, we have to keep those things small, lest we fall into the pattern of we can’t be innovative because we’re not valuing other points of view.

Andy: Yeah. I think when I was hiring last, this was several years ago, I haven’t been hiring for a while. When I was hiring last, I didn’t have this language to think about it. Now that I think back on it, I wish I did. I could’ve thought much more clearly about this, but I still think that I did okay in getting to this point of a minimal set of values is what we were looking for. And that minimal set of values was a person being very collaborative because we did a lot of pair programming and we were self-organized so that people had to take that initiative to collaborate a lot.

And I think a second one, and I think it was only these two values that we were like, yeah, that’s absolutely what we have to have. And the second one was … this will be stated more as a behavior, but there’s a value behind it that I can’t think of how to say right now, but it’s like guided by the scientific method.

Collaborative people who basically looked at the world as a series of experiments and testing their hypotheses and theories of the world, and that’s how they moved forward through it. Those were the two things that we valued and that’s what we wanted to hire for. And all of our interviews were about can we see that in this person. Now, did we completely do it? Probably not. I think we had some problems, other biases crept in. But I think we weren’t looking for 13 different values and for someone to explain to us how they fit those 13 different values.

So yeah, I think it is possible to cut your hiring down to that very plain level. And it doesn’t mean that we suddenly let everyone in. We didn’t. I had a hard time hiring. I remember at one point I did the stats. I was interviewing 60 people to get one hire. So yeah.

Mon-Chaio: The flip side to that is not hiring for culture at all. I see that through a lot of companies that are going through hyper growth. When they were small, they had a pretty tight knit group.

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Mon-Chaio: And maybe they were too similar. I would say oftentimes tight-knit groups in smaller companies can be too similar …

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: … and part of being too similar meant that they didn’t really have to explicitly write out their cultural values. A lot of them did, but a lot of those values ended up leaving nuance between that. And there wasn’t a lot of thought or visiting of this is a core value or an ancillary value. Sometimes there were too many.

And the behavior I see is a lot of these companies, when they go into hypergrowth, they end up not hiring for cultural value at all, or it gets misplaced. I’ll give you an example. One big cultural value for, I would say most companies, and we might talk about this in a future episode when we talk about what is good culture versus bad culture, if you can even define good versus bad, but one value that the companies had a lot was around being customer centric. And so they would say that, and when they do the interview process, they would ask some questions to get a sense of whether this person was customer-centric or not. But I actually think the reason a lot of these companies end up slowing down is they lose that customer-centricity, entrepreneurship, innovativeness when they start to scale their hires because they didn’t put that as a core piece of their cultural values. And that’s really difficult to teach to the point of, how easy it is to teach values versus behaviors, right? And so you get an influx of these people that are coming in, and for a lot of these folks, especially folks that have worked at large companies all their life, that have never really thought about how can I as an individual be innovative? They’ve never talked to a customer in their life, they didn’t even think that was important. Now all of a sudden you’re getting a bunch of people that think that way into the company, and the culture changes, right? Despite what you espoused.

Remember, culture is transmitted from the group to the individual much more than it is individual to individual. As one group gets larger, that culture can subsume another culture, and so I think it’s also very important to look at the other side where you are not hiring for cultural fit and what it can do to your company and the way you operate when you don’t find those, to your point, two, three or four core, core pieces that you really have to align to.

Andy: Yeah. So can we bring this to a conclusion about, a bit about culture and a bit about hiring for cultural fit?

Mon-Chaio: So we’ve defined culture as rituals and symbols that are transmitted between individuals in a group that govern their behaviors and beliefs.

Andy: So we have that and we have this discussion about does it matter? And I think the conclusion there is it absolutely matters ’cause it’s everywhere. It’s everything. And then on the, should you hire for it or should you not hire for cultural fit? I think what we’re saying is, you wanna hire for the minimal fit – what is that very tiny core defining thing that you want to retain and allow other things to vary.

Is that kind of a good summary of where we are?

Mon-Chaio: I think that’s a great summary of where we are. So now that we know that, what are some of the questions that we might want to answer around culture or that are still interesting to discuss?

Andy: I think one of the things you brought up just a little while ago, is, what does it mean to be better? What is a better culture? Because we can probably imagine, and this is, I think, the big fear that people have, when it just drifts, like you were saying, or that they sometimes think I have the wrong culture, that there is a better culture. And I think there’s something to discuss around that, what makes something a better culture. So I think we’ll have a topic on that.

And another thing we can talk about is the malleability. How much can you impact the culture of your organization? And now we’re gonna be talking much more about as leaders, what can you do? We’ve hinted at a few of the things, I mentioned CBT, and we’ve talked about the hiring. Those are absolutely levers that you have, but there’s many more levers that you have to do this.

And I will foreshadow this a little bit. They’re hiding in that definition.

Mon-Chaio: Yeah, and I think you hear our biases and you can certainly challenge us on this, but we do believe culture is malleable. We do believe that there are cultures you can aim for, and that leaders have tools within their toolbox. Some folks would argue that culture is just the sum of the individuals in an organization, and as those individuals come, culture is sort of this river that’s rushing through, and, as an individual pebble, how are you gonna affect the flow of the river? And so we can touch on that too. What are the forces that govern cultural change?

Why do so many cultural change initiatives fail? What does research tell us about that? Or what does research tell us about the forces that oppose cultural change and how can we understand those better in order to put more tools in our toolbox to change culture.

So I think those are some of the topics that we can touch on over the next couple or few pods.

Andy: Sounds good to me. I’m looking forward to it, Mon-Chaio. So, till next time, be kind and stay curious.

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