Show Notes
In part two of this three-part series on Culture, Andy and Mon-Chaio wrangle with the question “Is there ‘better culture’ to aim for?” Along the way they delve into bad culture, focusing on values or on outcomes, differences between what people say and what people do, burnout, and pillars of a good tech culture.
Opening quote from “A Strong Market Culture Drives Organizational Performance and Success”.
References:
- Joy at Work: https://dennisbakke.com/joy-at-work/
- Espoused Theory and Theory in Use: http://www.aral.com.au/resources/argyris.html
- Maslach Burnout Inventory: https://www.mindgarden.com/117-maslach-burnout-inventory-mbi
- Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4911781/
- Compassion and Curiosity values: https://cdn.csu.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0008/917018/Eight-Behaviors-for-Smarter-Teams-2.pdf
- A Strong Market Culture Drives Organizational Performance and Success: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227995656_A_strong_market_culture_drives_organizational_performance_and_success
- Squeezing the Orange Podcast “When Time is Money”: https://squeezingtheorange.podbean.com/e/when-time-is-money/
- GLOBE Project Cultural Dimensions: https://globeproject.com/study_2004_2007
Transcript
Andy: What distinguishes a company that has a strong market culture. Leaders and staff of such companies, exhibit different beliefs, values and assumptions from inwardly focused firms. These beliefs, values and assumptions cause every decision within the firm. And all of its functional groups to begin and end with the customer.
Mon-Chaio: Hi everyone. Thank you for joining us for another episode of the T t L podcast. This is part two of our discussion about culture. Last week, we presented some topics about culture. I would suggest that you go listen to it we do think you’ll find it interesting,
Andy: And Mon-Chaio, we do feel better when we see high listener counts on our episodes. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside, like people care about what we’re saying.
Mon-Chaio: It really does. It’s that dopamine hit when a, whenever a counter goes up. I think humans are these days built for that. But in case you have limited time, we will try and do, or I will try and do a real quick short summary of where we ended last time. To give you a starting point for where we’re starting this time.
So the premise we started with last time was to ask what is culture and is it important? And we spent a bunch of time talking about that, and I think we came to a few conclusions. So we came to a definition of culture that we felt pretty happy about. Would you say, would you agree, Andy?
Andy: I really liked the definition. As much as I struggled to remember it in the moment after we came up with it, I did like it. And I feel very proud that we were able to add an n plus one definition of culture to the world. I feel like it’s necessary for anyone who talks about culture to come up with their own definition of culture.
Mon-Chaio: We’re well on our way to writing yet another research paper. You’re right. That n plus one research paper, I think n it’s like hundreds at this point, right? But to remind you all or to introduce you to the first time what we define culture as, we define it as rituals and symbols that are transmitted between individuals in a group that govern their behaviors and beliefs.
And from that definition, in speaking through different types of research and our own experience, we decided that culture does matter, is very important. And we talked a little bit about whether you should hire for culture and what we ended up deciding there. I. Deciding that’s not the right word.
Where we ended up converging there was we believe you should hire for culture, but that culture is just the very minimal set, as minimal as possible, that set of values that you believe in as a company. And that the larger that set grows, the more bias creeps in and the more you end up hiring for things like behavior, things can, that can be more biased than discriminatory or predatory.
So that’s where we ended last time and we talked about a bunch of ways we could continue for this episode. And I think where we want to touch on here is, given that we think culture is important and important enough for us to even hire against, is there a concept of cultures that are better or worse?
Or another way to put it is their quote unquote, good culture. Or is all culture good in some ways? And I think we want to maybe touch on a little bit about why we think culture is malleable. We gave you a sneak preview at the end. We said we have a bias towards malleable cultures, but we never talked about why.
And maybe as we talked through it, we will decide it is less or more malleable. so I think that’s how we wanna proceed this time. Anything to add, Andy?
Andy: I don’t think so. I’m ready to go. I want to get into this. I.
Mon-Chaio: All right. So let me pose the question to you then and you can kick us off. Is there such thing as universally good culture?
Andy: Oh, I thought you were gonna gimme the easy one. Universally bad. But is there universally good?
Mon-Chaio: You could start with universally bad. That’s that, often we start at the extremes, right? And we’re work our way towards understanding In the middle .
Andy: I don’t know if there’s universally good, but I think there are aspects of universally bad that everyone would just agree on, and in understanding what those are, I think they even give us a direction to what better might be. This is one of the, I think, one of the cases where we might be able to take what’s bad and run away from bad, and you’ll probably end up at good.
Mon-Chaio: Interesting.
Andy: That’s my thought at the moment. I might talk myself out of it as we go. So to me, bad culture, and we even see this in the news or H B R or other management articles where they’ll talk about toxic culture, and quite often those are cultures where the individual is suppressed.
The emotions associated with doing things are negative.
You’re not allowed to be who you are at work, and so you have to have a work personality and a home personality.
It’s the culture of work requires a separation of yourself from. The rest of your life. So I think to me, that is a bad thing.
It leads to stress, it leads to anxiety. It leads to fights as well. Because if someone accidentally shows who they are at work, it could get them in trouble. So I think that is bad and I think that would be universally described as bad. Do you?
Mon-Chaio: I think it’s an interesting thing to talk about. I do agree with this concept that the feeling of having to suppress your own individuality, let me put it a different way. The feeling of having to suppress who you are is uncomfortable, and that discomfort I think is poor. And if a company culture requires that discomfort, I think that’s pretty poor. On the other hand, last time when we talked about culture, we did say that a culture does require this concept of suppressing the individual to join the group collective in certain aspects, right? And one idea that we talked about is, hey, at the group we believe in collaborative work and we do pair programming, and that’s what we do.
And as an individual, you buy into that and you do that. When you go home, perhaps you don’t very much enjoy collaborative tasks like that. You’re not pairing with your partner to cook a meal. You prefer to cook it yourself, or you’re not pairing on child duties. You prefer to segment the day I have the child till noon.
Do you have the child in the afternoon? And so how do we reconcile those two and say, look, we can’t have distinct cultures at work and at home. And so in some ways we do have to do a little bit of suppression, don’t we?
Andy: Is it suppression or is it adaptation? I think what we might be talking about maybe isn’t actually suppression, it’s adaptation of your behavior. Whereas the suppression would be more along the lines of now I’m trying to think of one for work. The, it was a very common thing for a long time that you couldn’t be gay.
And so if that ever showed up at work,
It would be a problem. It’s not that anymore. I hope people aren’t saying suppress that aspect of yourself. It can show up. That’s fine. Whereas like working one-on-one, working pairing or something like that, it’s an adaptation to the work behaviors.
Mon-Chaio: And perhaps what we’re really talking about is behaviors versus values. Something we touched on in the last episode and wanted to separate. Maybe what we’re talking about in my example would be something like, we believe in the value of collaboration and the importance of it at work. And so for an individual, you have bought into that and perhaps the behavior that you chose wouldn’t be a paraprogramming, but that is the behavior that they teach.
And do you believe in the value? And so to use your phrase you’ve adapted to it
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: and maybe at home you believe in collaboration a different way. You believe in more, I don’t know what you would call it, throw it over the fence collaboration, right? Like I’m done with the child at noon. It is your turn.
I’m going out to see a movie. But that’s still collaboration. You’re working together
Andy: Yeah. Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: a child. And maybe that’s okay, but maybe what’s not okay is this concept of I don’t believe in collaboration at all. I believe in the power of individual work only. When I go to work and it’s very collaborative, I need to suppress that at all times because I don’t believe in the core value.
I don’t like speaking through it. I’m not sure that’s really strongly resonating with me, but it does resonate a little bit. What about you?
Andy: It resonates a bit. I think there’s something more there. I want to, I wanna take something that maybe is a little bit more obvious, I shouldn’t say obvious. A more agreed between us about what might be toxic,
And a manager who might be described as abusive,
Verbally abusive psychologically abusive.
Verbally abusive, and they berate people psychologically in that they gaslight them. They say, that’s not what I ever said.
And a culture, so that’s an individual, but a culture that would be toxic in that case would be one in which that those kinds of behaviors are rewarded. So it ends up being a bit of a a strong man type management system.
The managers that are promoted are ones who like use force and coercion to have something done.
Would you describe that as a bad culture?
Mon-Chaio: This is very challenging for me too. I want to say yes it certainly isn’t a culture that I would want to work for.
But let me give you a not so tangential, but not tech related example. So this weekend we’re out at dinner with my in-laws. Sorry, not my in-laws. This weekend we’re out at dinner with my parents and my kids are there and my mom starts saying something to my daughter like, how can you eat that thing? Or how can you not eat that thing? You’re so skinny, you have to eat. I can’t believe you’re not going to eat that.
Andy: In a way that created a judgment about her and her choices
That basically said that whatever choice she was making is wrong. .
Mon-Chaio: And of course my daughter has grown up in the states right to, in a very liberal part of the states. She goes to a school that emphasizes S e l or social emotional learning.
And so she has a very. Different idea of what it means to talk to someone and tell them that their choices might be incorrect.
Now, my mother can’t really comprehend that, right? She grew up in a country and in a culture where that was how you were spoken to, there wasn’t a concept of speaking to someone in a different way.
Going back to your example around coercive leadership. Now coercive, I think is, has its own connotations of the word, but we could bring that back and say there are perhaps cultures, I don’t know where people are rewarded for, I don’t know what you would call it, being that strong man, right?
Strong of will, strong of process. Finding any way they can to bring people along to the benefit of the company, especially companies that value this. I’ve heard it called the politburo system, right? This concept that there are only a few people who really know what’s good and everybody else does not.
And those few people that know what’s good, it is their job to get people to adhere to the goodness. So again, not a culture, not a company I’d want to work for, but I am curious, does that mean it’s universally bad? Do we have to segment it into saying, okay, we can’t talk about universally good or bad culture globally for all jobs, for everywhere in the world, but we can talk about tech jobs that require innovation in the us.
Andy: Yeah I could go with that. I struggle. I have to admit, I struggle with the cultural relativism and ethical relativism. But that is also an aspect of that approach, which is that you can only judge things from your own perspective.
And basically that’s it. I can understand that other groups can come to different conclusions and approaches. It doesn’t make me like it.
Mon-Chaio: Right.
Andy: I do however, think that what you’re getting at though is, can we talk about it in terms of a much more specific thing, which will make this more useful to our listeners and I think a more productive conversation for us as well, because we can say things about in certain kinds of work, in certain kinds of, Outcomes that you’re looking for.
There are things that will inhibit it, and there are things that will promote it. So if we’re saying that innovative work of software and engineering the problem solving that they’re, you’re doing day to day, what promotes that and what inhibits it? And we’ve talked about this or we’ve touched on this already in one of our episodes where we talked a bit about the organizing to learn, psychological safety, we touched on. There are things that promote that kind of like thinking through issues, thinking through problems, coming up with different solutions. And there are things that inhibit it which would be like that kind of coercive management that makes people afraid to bring up something that might be different.
Or an approach that says that differences in Thinking, differences in understanding, differences in background are not appreciated, that those will inhibit it as well. So is that maybe an approach that we can take to get somewhere, which is what, where better might be? Should we look at those outcomes within the context of software engineering and say that better culture promotes the outcomes that we want?
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I think that’s probably the only way that we can do it. I don’t want to come off as to listeners as saying that I think all of these coercive cultures are great. And have their place. I, personally, I don’t know if they necessarily have their place, but I don’t think I am ready to basically say carte blanche that no, in my opinion, they absolutely don’t have their place anywhere, for any business at any time.
I’m not sure I’m ready to say that, but I do think that that’s no, not useful for our audience. We’re, we’re not an anthropology class. We’re not here to talk about cultural relativism, we’re here to talk about what does it mean for a technical organization and specifically a more Silicon Valley technical organization in terms of how, you know how to build a better culture, I think,
Andy: I think so I do wanna ask one thing about this though. You were happy with the thing I said about more of outcomes like aiming towards that. If it turned out that suppressing people and being coercive and commanding people produced those outcomes, would you consider that a better culture? Would you want to do that?
Mon-Chaio: Wow.
Andy: I’m not trying to. I’m not trying to got you here. I’m I
Mon-Chaio: oh no, I, and listeners can’t see my face. I’m not, I don’t have the, I don’t have the angry, you got me face. Andy. Please be quiet and let’s move on to something else. It’s a very thoughtful thing. It, it’s something that I talk a lot about when I, I. Talk to other leaders whether it’s coaching or interviewing or whatnot, no, it’s not something that I would want to do and because I don’t think that the end all and be all is business results,
I think there’s a human element to it, and that’s such a central part of our podcast is there is a human element to it.
Some of it is measurable, some of it is not. And sometimes, or we may believe that most times doing better for humans does better for business. I think we do believe that most times. But if in the case we got to the point where doing better for humans is actually more detrimental to business, then I think it’s mostly a personal decision about what you want to strive for,
Andy: Yep.
Mon-Chaio: And for me personally, I believe strongly in the human element and I’m more than happy to give up some business performance if that’s the case. But, oh man, I, I don’t know. Let’s maybe cut this out later. But you can see that great things are sometimes done by suppressing the individual element and by not focusing on all individuals. You can see that all around the world these days. Like there, there are countries that are doing fantastic things and moving way faster in the US because they don’t have to have votes and they don’t have to have democracy and democratic process or whatnot.
What is that? Is that progress? And so if that’s better progress, ’cause they move faster, they can build a train in a week instead of in Seattle Link light rail takes 40 years to go 20 miles, right? Is that better? Maybe, but then they also, put a lot of small farmers out of business.
Is that better? Those farmers aren’t producing G D P you know what I’m saying? So getting back to it, this is way too philosophical at this point to be useful. For me, no. I wouldn’t, I would not trade human betterment for business.
Andy: I agree with you, but I also want to I partly brought it up because I think it’s one of these undiscussable topics
Like it, sometimes it’s very unpleasant if you’re a manager, especially a middle manager, to say look, this thing that we’re about to, we’re, it sounds like we’re about to do. That does not align with my values.
I really don’t like this. I don’t care if it makes the company a few million extra dollars to do it. I cannot bring myself to do it.
And I think that undiscussable issue is a very important one to bring up because it also raises a bit of what is the culture of that organization?
What would better be? ’cause now you can talk about it and you can come to that agreement about maybe the person who’s asking you to do this doesn’t agree with it either. And you’re all doing it just because it’s undiscussable and you won’t talk about it. And you feel, you all feel that through not talking about it.
You have to do it.
Mon-Chaio: I like it. And I like the fact that you brought it up because one from the very beginning we said that this podcast would try to talk about some of those undiscussable issues, or if not undiscussable lesser discussed because people don’t focus on it, or we give too easy answers and it’s buried.
Andy: Yeah.
Mon-Chaio: But I think the other one is that. This starts to get into this concept of there’s, is there university, good culture, bad culture? But there’s also this importance of cultural convergence that I think is really important? Which is the concept that there can be pillars of culture within your company.
And there’s many different definitions. There was an older paper that gave four pillars they said there was something called power, distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism versus collectivism and masculinity versus femininity.
There’s an H B R article that talks about eight cultural pillars them being authority, caring, enjoyment, learning, order, purpose, results, and safety. And in the H B R article, instead of being binary on one side or the other, they have four quadrants between independence and interdependence or stability and flexibility, right?
So there are a number of different models you can use. But I think what is important is that as you hire it is important for the people in the company to converge with the company’s stated culture on whatever those pillars are. And the more closely you converge, I think the better your culture, not universally, but for your company.
Andy: Yes. I do want to get onto that. I wanna go back to the values versus outcomes a little bit. Now I
Mon-Chaio: Okay. Yeah,
Andy: It’s unfortunately a book I haven’t myself read, but I know many people who have read, and I, whenever I say this, I always feel like, oh my God, what am I doing?
I have to read these things. There’s a book called Joy at Work. I and it multiple times was referenced to me as, you have to be very careful about talking about these kinds of things because if you say that what you want is those outcomes, that means that your argument is entirely based on the outcome, and you lose your ability to do your moral or ethical judgements.
The way that you justify doing certain things at work more often. I don’t know if this is all in the book, but this is the way it was all often presented to me. More often than not, you should do it from your values. And that goes to what you were just saying, Mon-Chaio, about the values that more often than not, you should do things based on your values rather than based on that outcome.
And I think there’s actually a very strong philosophical reason for this, which is that your actions based on values are something within your control. You control your actions. You have decided on what you value, and you have decided on the congruence between your actions and your values.
Sometimes you haven’t decided that too. We’ll get into that in a little bit. I’ll bring that up. But the outcomes are outside of your control. So if everything you choose to do is based on it has to get me that outcome, suddenly any action at all is open to you.
People might say is good, but that also ends up leading to what you could call an immoral world. And I don’t think that’s really what any of us want, even in those cultures that you were talking about where you might say, oh, co coercion and control, they have particular values that are selecting those things, and they wouldn’t want to do something else because that’s not how they want to view the world.
So selecting things within your values is the most consistent, defensible way of arguing how things should happen in a group.
Mon-Chaio: I agree with that actually. I think that’s I actually think that fits very well into. What we’ve been talking about with culture, I like the fact that you talked about it constrains the choices of your behaviors because that is what culture does, right? If we go back to the definition, it’s around rituals and symbols transmitted between individuals and a group that govern their behaviors and beliefs.
That govern is that restriction part, right? Based on your beliefs and based on, and if we replace the word beliefs with values, you’re restricting your range of behaviors based on your values.
So I like that. I think it fits in really well.
Andy: Nice. Onto your next thing, which I also agree with about better alignment leads to better culture. I’m I have a couple different things I want to bring up based on that, and they’re all about that gap. There’s a gap between what people say and what people do.
Chris Argyris, is a researcher in organizational behavior. As this podcast goes on, I will reference him many times. I think I’ve already referenced him a few times,
Mon-Chaio: I believe so.
Andy: so he talks about the espoused theory, which is what you would say is what the company says values are.
And he talks about theory and use, which is what you can derive from people’s behavior, or you could say the organization’s behavior, and that there’s never a complete match between those. Now, what you want to do in his mode of thinking is you want to get those closer and closer together.
And his reasons for that is because as they get closer together you actually do better. People are happier. There, there’s better outcomes. Everything just goes better. So you could say one of his values is that self consistency and that’s what he wants to drive towards. And I think most of us operate with wanting self consistency.
I think humans just in general, have a problem with inconsistency.
Mon-Chaio: And it’s funny you mentioned that because I was reading this paper where the author said, so the authors were Berg in 98. They argued, and I don’t know that I agree with their argument per se, but I do think it fits into this model. They argue that instead of striving for a stronger culture, They should attempt to reduce the gap between employees, preferred organizational cultural practices and their perception of the organizational practices.
So again, it’s what’s being done versus what’s being said now. I don’t think it’s, instead, I don’t think you should, instead of striving for strong culture, do this. But I think it’s in addition. And I think it’s
A part of building stronger culture.
Andy: Yes I agree with that.
You have to know what you’ve got before you can affect it.
If there’s a big difference between what everyone believes that they’re doing, which is the espoused theory I should say.
Mon-Chaio: Right?
Andy: One of the things about a espoused theory and use is that quite often people can’t tell you what their theory and use is. They will tell you the espoused theory, but that’s not what actually happens. Their theory and use is what actually happens.
And if there’s a big difference between those, you can imagine what happens if you ask people to behave differently.
Say, our values have changed a little bit since there was no big connection between them in the first place. The changing of what their new espouse theory is will very only slightly change or in random ways, change their actual theory and use what they actually end up doing. So if you want to somehow start moving towards what you’d consider a better culture, your first step is actually to get people to start trying to shorten that gap.
And it may be in just admitting that theory and use is your actual set of values. Start with that and just say we’re gonna replace them. Go to our theory and use, that’s our, that is our set of values, that’s who we are. Or it may be doing that work to start pointing out the differences and getting people to move their actions a bit more towards the actual espouse theory.
So I, I agree. I think the theories that I know support this idea that reducing that gap is necessary to then selecting what you might consider any better culture.
If we took some software specific examples I remember I was talking to someone and I have a value of being fairly certain about the software I’m writing. And what that means is I spend a lot of time testing when I’m writing software. I do lots of tests. I do t d d. I find it strange when I find, when I join places where that’s not the way they approach it.
And I was talking to someone at a meetup and he said, just off the cuff, something about, oh, but no one actually does t d d. That’s just a thing used in interviews because the espoused culture of a lot of organizations in their interview cycles, their kind of espouse culture may come out a bit. As they will test for these things, what he encountered, what he experienced was the espouse culture of most places is yes, we test, we do t d d.
But then when he joined, the theory and use was no one tested first. And often the interviews were also set up as pairing. And no one paired. So their espoused theory about valuing that collaboration and pairing and constant code review, valuing the building of test suites as ways of defining the software, they didn’t actually show up in the actual actions of the individuals and of the organization. And so in something like that, you’d say look, let’s just be clear on what we do and what we don’t do. And stop lying to ourselves and hiring people that think that they’re coming in and they’re gonna do T D D, and it turns out no one here does it.
Mon-Chaio: And I think going back to something we said last time about values being more difficult to change than behaviors, I think we can look at that situation and decide that it’s one of two things. Perhaps the values that they stated are actually correct. The values being we do value tight collaboration and we do value tests and quality but we tricked you with our behaviors, right?
You inferred from our behaviors during our interview that the way we value it is through the behavior of pairing and through the behavior of T D D. But we don’t, we value it through having a gigantic QA department, or we value it through lots of review of asynchronous docs. We’re doing multiple rounds of code review.
Which I think. That’s a little bit easier to fix. You could say, okay, well I guess the values are right, but the behaviors are not, we could talk about the behaviors or it could be what you were talking about, which is that the values were completely incorrect.
Andy: Yeah. Thank you very much. I appreciate getting a different way of thinking about that situation because quite often I get stuck on my one way of thinking about it, and then I’m like, oh God, I can’t believe that they would do anything like that. But I had about a half hour argument with this guy that, yes, no, really people do t d d.
He, he didn’t believe me.
Mon-Chaio: And you said, go work. Here’s a place that does it.
Andy: I said, yeah, I’ve done it in multiple jobs. That’s the way my team’s worked.
Andy: The other reason that I think shortening that gap is beneficial is burnout.
Mon-Chaio: Tell me more.
Andy: So there are just like culture, there’s many different definitions of burnout. However, there is one definition of burnout which is from a researcher named Maslach. And it’s been around for a while. There’s a Maslach Burnout inventory, . And Maslach came up with this idea after researching burnout, that burnout wasn’t simply people being tired and overwhelmed with work, that it had a few other things that happened.
So being tired and overwhelmed was one thing that occurred. Disconnecting from work was another thing that occurred, and cynicism was another thing that occurred. And so the Maslach inventory kind of looks across these areas now so far. That doesn’t sound like it connects too well to this, but the underlying theory of where does burnout come from is a mismatch between the individual and the work.
And a big place those mismatches can come from is in values and approach. So behaviors and beliefs.
And so that mismatch, if you have an organization that has this wide disparity in all sorts of different things going on, you may even look around and say, everyone’s burned out. They’re all saying that they’re overworked.
But you look at it, you look around and you’re like, but really not doing huge amounts.
Is there a mismatch between how they are wanting to work, how they’re trying to work, and how everything around them is telling them to work? And that holding that disconnection that incongruity in their head could just be leading to the burnout.
So by reducing that, You also reduce the burnout in people around you, which is, I think, a humane thing to do.
Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. I have not read what the paper that you referenced, but it totally makes sense in my mind. Yeah, I believe it. I buy that.
So I think we’ve. We talked about some aspects of good culture, right?
We talked about the importance of convergence, and we’ve talked about the importance of reducing the gap between espoused theory and theory and use. And I liked, really liked what you brought up here around how that ties back into burnout, which that may be its own separate episode. So there’s this convergence, but convergence towards what.
Are there specific things that you should converge to? Is there universally good culture within software engineering organizations within maybe the Silicon Valley style of engineering.
So what should we converge towards? Are there pillars that we should converge towards that are better or more universally better than not?
Andy: Maybe we go back and forth naming what we think are good pillars good directions to head
and we can debate each other a little bit, see if we agree or if we just agree, we’re like, yeah, that’s a good one. How about this one? So I’ll kick it off and I’ll say that one good pillar of a good culture is curiosity.
What do you think?
Mon-Chaio: I’m thinking. Right off the bat, I would say I agree. So if we were to dig into that a little bit more and we say, let’s bring curiosity down to a value, how would we state that?
So our value is that we know nothing.
Andy: I think of curiosity as the value.
We value curiosity. We, we value that inquisitiveness that, that seeking to understand.
Mon-Chaio: I might alter that to put more of an emphasis on we value that. We value that we only know a small part of the whole and we should be always striving to know more.
Andy: Okay. I would say, I think we might get into semantics a little bit. I would call that our guiding assumption
Around that value. So we value curiosity and we assume that we don’t know everything and that there is more out there to learn.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah. We’re not gonna the goal here is not to come up with a set of perfect statements. But I think I generally agree with you. Curiosity is really important. A key part of that sometimes doesn’t show up for people that say they value curiosity.
Is this concept of questioning assumptions or really being able to change your own mind, it’s, we’re curious in the way that like we’re all aligned. But when we misaligned, then we don’t care about curiosity. Don’t go in the misaligned direction and start chasing knowledge in that way.
Andy: Okay.
Mon-Chaio: Okay. Okay. Let me try to offer one. And this actually comes from a paper I read, or not a paper. There, there have been multiple studies that have shown this where they say a market culture has been shown to have a strong, positive correlation with company performance. And what they define as a market culture is a culture that’s focused on understanding the market and understanding the customer.
What do you think
That?
Andy: So the value is create things that the customers value. I know I had to use value in that sentence twice with two different meanings, but
Mon-Chaio: Yes. And maybe more basic is the value is wanting to deeply understand what the customer wants.
Andy: Is it deeply understanding it sounded like it was more than just deeply understanding. It was to produce it, to provide it to what they provide what
Mon-Chaio: Yes. Also, yes. I maybe, again, semantics here, right? You can’t provide if you don’t deeply understand, but I think often the understanding part gets lost
and,
Andy: It meshes well with the curiosity, I would say.
Mon-Chaio: it does. There’s a couple interesting things here. One is For a number of these different research methods, performance is defined in different ways, right? A lot of it is dollars and market performance. And as we’ve talked about, outcomes are challenging when you start to peg towards outcomes.
And this could also possibly be a little bit of a toxic culture at times, where you say, Hey, the customer wants something to be released every minute of the day
Andy: Yeah, you never get to stop. But I think that gives you, you can aim for things that balance each other or at least counteract each other. So you could say, yes, we want to do that, but we also have to admit that we are human and we need breaks, and we need that kind of thing. So you can value, something that might counterbalance that.
And I’m gonna go from my cheat sheet. Which is compassion.
You wanna value compassion for. And this goes all over the place. It’s compassion for yourself. It’s compassion for others compassion for your customer and the situations they’re facing.
So it’s about compassion. It’s being able to somehow get out of your own head and understand where others are.
Mon-Chaio: I like that. I have one that also ties to that which might be a little bit more controversial, but let me dive back into the market culture one real quick because I think there’s a interesting thing that we might discuss here that’s tightly tied to software engineering. So I have often seen, especially at larger companies, that there are engineers that.
Don’t appear to care about the customer or the market. Oftentimes, and I’m not saying this is right, they like to brand themselves as deep technical experts or platform engineers, right? This concept that I just wanna work on a challenging technical problem, like I don’t know who needs it or what needs it, I just rely on you to tell me that it’s okay. But if serving the customer requires doing a unchallenging technical problem and serving fewer customers requires us to a very challenging technical problem, I would much more lean towards the challenge technical problem. Is that problematic?
Andy: I think it all comes down to what you value.
Mon-Chaio: Sure
Andy: I would say is it problematic?
Mon-Chaio: and this is in response to if we agree that a market culture is quote unquote, universally good, then is that behavior problematic?
Andy: So is it problematic? I struggle because I know that one of my values is,
That customer engagement, I find it myself difficult at times. So I know that my espoused value and my theory and use differ. But I do personally, I believe that understanding the customer, understanding what it is that we’re there to do what we can provide is very important.
I can see that behavior working well. If the idea is I wanna do something technically challenging, because I think we might find a better way of doing this. Yeah. In the short term, we won’t deliver all of this stuff that the customer wants. But if by doing this, maybe we’re we I think we might find something that does it even better.
So if it was. If the action was taken for that, thinking I’d be fine with it. I’d be like, okay, this makes a lot of sense. We’re valuing our curiosity.
We are trying another value would be making good bets. And it’s not that the bet comes out good all the time, that it’s that we have a reason to think that this might be something to do.
And a highly technical person who’s delved very deep into something, I’m hoping that they have some reason to think that this will happen. But if they’re doing it simply to withdraw from it all, then that kind of goes against all of my values,
which is it’s leading away from the curiosity or guided curiosity’s.
We leading away from the compassion with the customer. So yeah, I think for me it comes down to what is the reason for taking the action.
Mon-Chaio: I think that makes a lot of sense. I don’t, I, I think it was just an interesting little segue. I And that I found interesting when I thought about market culture and instilling market culture by getting back to capa
Andy: no, I was gonna say, it’s a really it’s a really good question, especially based on what we said about not all outcomes, but really it’s about your values, , selecting your actions,
Mon-Chaio: Not because this is uninteresting, but because we are coming up on a time limit here, unless we want to keep going. And I don’t know how many of these pillars we want to go. Let’s see how, where we end up. One that you mentioned compassion. I just recently read an article which talked about studies, which said when people were reminded about money, they were less kind, they less helpful.
Andy: Yes I have an episode of another podcast to link to about this
Mon-Chaio: we’ll put this in the
Andy: yeah, we’ll put that in the show notes. I don’t know if we’re talking about the same article that they were discussing, but it’s fascinating. You put money into the equation and all sorts of weird things change.
Mon-Chaio: Is a good culture then a culture that doesn’t value individual monetary rewards or doesn’t talk about individual monetary rewards, or is there something there?
Andy: Ooh. I don’t think so
because I think we have to acknowledge that we live in a world where money is valuable. So I think a culture where you say we don’t talk about it would be incongruent with the culture that they find themselves in outside of work.
Mon-Chaio: So we talked a briefly about this pre-show just in talking about other episodes we might do, and one of them we talked about was around how do you set compensation standards for teams, right?
It might not be so much not talking about it, but imagine a company where there was no discussion to be had about compensation, right? Every year you’re at the company, you get a certain amount and there’s a
Raise, and it doesn’t matter how you perform or how the products ship, or how the company does or anything like that. Would that be a better culture because you are less reminded about money and you’re less thinking about money just because you’re less able to control it?
Andy: I think to be consistent, I have to say yes. I feel like you’ve cornered me here. You’ve got me logically into a place where I feel like yeah, maybe it is because you can be so completely consistent with it.
Mon-Chaio: I, let me tell you. I don’t know that I have a particularly well-reasoned thing, so this is mostly gut feeling. I haven’t thought deeply about it. I don’t believe that it’s completely fair for compensation to be so structured on the one hand. On the other hand, I do know that some of my strongest dislikes at some companies I’ve worked at is how many conversations I have about money or promotion because it’s tied to money I have with my team. I’ve had really large teams where I would say not exaggerating 40% of my conversations with a team. Around things like, is this a project that’s gonna get me promoted? What are the next projects that get me promoted? What behaviors do I have to show to get me promoted? Do you know the stocks going down?
Is there a way I can get like a refresher because I was hired at this particular time and, my total compensation is not what they promised. 40% of my conversations were about that. How is that valuable to a company? I don’t know. I have two, I’m weighing two different things and I don’t know how to, I don’t know how to reconcile
Andy: Yeah, that it is an interesting one and I think added onto this to make this even more difficult, is that quite often within. American and many other cultures, the that number, that compensation number is interpreted as a value as a person.
Mon-Chaio: Absolutely.
Andy: And so you could say that in some ways, what these people are asking about is, I don’t know if I’m actually valued enough. Am I a good person? Am I a good enough person?
Mon-Chaio: And the other part is, I think a lot of the times it’s also used to gate keep responsibilities,
Right? Let me give you an example. At some companies you have to be a vice president before you can be in charge of say, one of their auxiliary sites, right? Like a London office or something. And if you’re really interested in doing sort of site leadership of site management things, I. Hey, I wanna figure out, what our next space is gonna look like. And I wanna know whether we should partner with other companies to jointly have space. You just don’t get to do that.
That’s not within your responsibility set if you’re not vice president. So guess what? Anyway, that, I think that has much less to do with the money part of it. I don’t know why I got into that. That was just an interesting thing. And I’m sure there’s a whole episode on we could talk about that, the podcast that you’re really gonna link in the show notes as well as the article and talk about do we actually believe that talking about money makes us less kind and helpful?
And if so, are there ways around it? Perhaps that’s an episode. But focusing back on pillars of good culture.
Andy: We’ve come up with a few but we’d really love to hear what others have. What are pillars of a good culture? What are values? Or you could even take it to the behaviors. So what are those things that make a good culture? What is it that you want to add or increase in your workplace to make it better?
A better place to be, a better place to work and be and to be yourself. If that’s a value you have. So I think at that point, Mancha, we can wrap this up and give people their day back.
Mon-Chaio: Yeah, I think maybe give them a small taste of what’s next. To give you an overview of where we’ve ended up as all these conversations are very meandering, but we’ve meandered in a certain path and we’ve ended up somewhere. We’ve defined what culture is, we’ve talked about why we believe it’s important, and we’ve explored what makes a good culture versus not a good culture. So at this point, I think our next episode we really want to talk about , what if you have a bad culture? What if you have a less good culture? Can you change things as a leader or can’t you? And if you can, what are the right tools to go about changing things and what are things that probably don’t work as well? I think is what, where we’re gonna tee up for the next episode.
Andy: Sounds good to me.
Mon-Chaio: All right. In showing you a little bit about our culture, I think this is a good place to sign off. Everyone. Until next time, be kind and stay curious.
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