Thinking about Company Culture
So my last couple of long posts were really me just laying some background so people could understand some of the things that were already running around in my head when I went to the Agile New England talk last Thursday. A lot of the immediate connections I made with the speaker’s talk have to do with things I’d been thinking about lately. (One of the things you learn as an English Literature major is that often how you interpret a text is not so much what the author actually wrote, but what you, the reader, bring to the text. So to understand what I got out of the talk, I think you gotta have some idea what I was bringing to it.)
I’ve been thinking about company culture and fitting in ever since I started at The Mushroom Farm. Because I really don’t feel like I fit in here. At least not with the people that sit around me (see previous (mostly flocked) posts about Loud Mouth Trainer and Mean Blonde Girl). And feeling like I’m not fitting in has had me thinking about how comfortable or uncomfortable I was at previous jobs. Analyzing it and trying to figure out what I did wrong (or right) when I picked each job.
As a teetotaler I never quite fit into the frat-boy/drinking culture at MRO. But I didn’t know about their drinking culture until I’d been there a while. But I was lucky enough to meet some like-minded people and build some strong friendships while I was there, so the company culture wasn’t too big an influence on how much I liked that job. When I was working at Work, the fact that I was the 1) the only female in the office and 2) the only person in the office between the ages of 25 and 55 always made me feel a bit odd, even if the office dynamics were generally comfortable and the people pleasant. I felt like I fit in a little better at L’Office and Falcon Towers, but I couldn’t really tell you why other than the people were generally pleasant and very bright. Sometimes it’s easier to put a finger on why you don’t fit in. *shrugs*
This has been on my mind almost since I got here in July. So when I saw the announcement that the December Agile New England meeting was going to be about company culture, I was really interested in what the speaker might have to say. And I was so happy that he didn’t disappoint.
One of the exercises was him handing out photocopies of the slide I posted previously, with the four company styles (Collaboration, Control, Cultivation, and Competence). We were supposed to get into small groups and figure out what the culture was at our company. Since my group was two unemployed people and one contractor, we tried to figure out what the culture was at The Mushroom Farm. What we came up with was chaos culture. Ha! But like he said, "This is a model. All models are wrong. Some are useful.” And this chart really got me thinking.
Collaboration
The first thing that I started thinking about with Collaboration is some of the articles I’ve been reading about the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston, and some of the other occupy movements. Without a single leader, they have daily General Assemblies, where everyone gets to speak their piece and be heard. Denied megaphones, the crowd repeats what the speaker says so everyone can hear it. They’ve self-organized into various teams who take care of security and safety, cooking meals, cleaning up their sites, and other things that need to happen for a village to function. From an anthropological point of view, the Occupiers have spawned a truly interesting culture. (*Spock eyebrow* Fascinating Captain).
Agile software development wants to follow a collaborative culture model. The team is self-organizing, deciding what they’re going to code and how they’re going to design it (from the list of priorities provided by the product manager). They have daily meetings. Different team members may take on the Scrum Master role during different sprints. Information is supposed to be shared among all the team members. Sometimes this even extends to doing pair programming, where two developers share a single computer.
In my experience, collaboration cultures are pretty darn rare. I suspect that they got a bad name during the 60s with the Counter-Culture, cause when I look at all the words written in that quadrant on the chart, I have to admit, my reaction is “Damn hippies!” I think it takes a certain level of maturity to be comfortable somewhere where everyone is equal. So many people get their sense of self-worth from their position in the pecking order, being somewhere where everyone is equal would be way out of their comfort zone. Because if there’s no one under you, that must mean you’re unimportant! Eek!
And the problem is, we’re not really trained to collaborate with each other. Because (move over one square to the right now please), most of our cultural institutions are set up with a Control culture. That’s what most of us are used to.
Control
The vast majority of schools in this country follow a control culture. It’s pretty much the only way you can have a system where 30 kids sit in a classroom with only a single teacher. Today’s schools are all about standardized tests, there’s not a whole lot of room for creativity or individuality. It gets worse when you get to college and start having those classes where there are 150 students in a lecture hall.
Our military is definitely a command and control culture, the hierarchy is everything. One of the reasons why I resisted mom’s not so subtle hints that I could pay with college by going the ROTC route is because *I* knew I needed to question authority and wouldn’t fit into the military lifestyle. I totally knew I couldn’t blindly follow orders if I thought they were the wrong orders (you’d think my mother would have known that by the time I was a teenager!).
And let’s face it, most jobs have a control culture. There’s a boss, and all the worker bees do what the boss tells them to do. I think for most people, this seems like the natural order, and they’d be confused if they landed somewhere where the corporate culture fell into one of the other three quadrants.
What I worry about is what happens when a company gets too entrenched in a command and control culture. We’ve got all these systems in place, Six Sigma, ISO certification, that lay down policies and procedures that everyone is supposed to follow. But having everything documented and planned out and standardized leaves very little room for creativity, taking risks, or new ideas. What’s really sad is that a lot of small companies start out in one of the other three quadrants, but once they get to a certain size, they hire management that crams them into Control culture and the innovation stops and they wonder what happened to what used to be a successful and growing company?
We’re starting to talk about being ISO certified at work. Which boils down to 1) we have procedures in place for everything 2) we have documented those procedures, and 3) we actually follow those documented procedures. This sounds just a little bit too much like a Command and Control corporate culture to me. Especially if I have the misfortune of working with someone again that is a rules lawyer. I’m starting to think that ISO certification just might be a red flag for me not fitting in with a company’s culture. And for a variety of reasons, I think that I need to try to avoid companies with Control cultures next time I go job hunting.
Cultivation
I’ve always been fond of the idea that you should “Hire for attitude, train for skills.” And I think this is what the cultivation culture is all about. Hiring good people, and then having the training in place to get them where you want them to go. I know some corporations have really excellent training programs in place. Isn’t that the whole point of that Will Smith movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, that the Dean Witter training program is worth that unpaid internship? McDonald’s has Hamburger University, Disney has the Disney Institute, various other corporations have their own training programs.
I can’t say that I’ve ever worked for a company that had a cultivation culture though, so I’ve got no personal stories to tell here.
Competence
I think a lot of us are idealistic, and naively assume that the whole business world has a competence culture. That all you have to do was work hard and you’ll get raises and promotions and be successful. But in reality, I suspect that competence culture is probably pretty rare in companies (which is why so many of us work hard and don’t get recognized for it). I would expect to find it in places that engage in the hard sciences (aerospace, physics, chemistry, NASA, pharmaceuticals, etc.) and some of the more academically rigorous academic institutions (some boarding schools, Ivy League universities, Oxford, Cambridge).
It probably appears in a few corporations too. HAL has a competence culture. They encourage their people to file for patents. Bonuses are merit based, but only the very top performers get them. And there were rumors that they regularly lay off the bottom 5% of their workers, regularly pruning the low performers. Although the fact that Bossy Lady and the Office Gossip are still there over five years later make me question those rumors. But I digress…
I suspect that most successful computer startups are some form of competence culture, or a mix of competence and collaboration. I mean, why wouldn’t you hire the best and the brightest and then encourage them to excel?
Having had some time to ponder these things this week, I think that one of the reasons why I butted heads so badly with Bossy Lady is because she wanted a Control culture in her department. She interpreted my asking questions as questioning her authority. She was very much one of those “because I said so” type managers. And I’m one of those “but I need to understand why” type people. And there was Boss Fella, with the other half of the team, with a mix of Cultivation and Competence culture. No wonder I wanted to work for him so badly! His style was just a much better fit for me.
This particular set of four company cultures came from the book The Reengineering Alternative by William Schneider, and while it may not be a perfect model, it's pretty damn useful to me. So useful that I ordered the book from Amazon. I’m really curious to see if what the author says actually lines up with the things running around in my head right now. It arrived in today’s shipment from Amazon, so I’m sure there will be other posts on this topic once I start reading it this weekend. And I’m delighted that chapter 2 is a questionnaire to help you figure out your company culture. I’ll be using those questions the next time I job interview somewhere.
This whole company culture thing is a big idea for me. I think it's going to influence my ability to choose a better job for myself the next time I switch jobs. And job satisfaction has a huge impact on my mental health.
Next up - Agile and other Deceptively Simple things…
I’ve been thinking about company culture and fitting in ever since I started at The Mushroom Farm. Because I really don’t feel like I fit in here. At least not with the people that sit around me (see previous (mostly flocked) posts about Loud Mouth Trainer and Mean Blonde Girl). And feeling like I’m not fitting in has had me thinking about how comfortable or uncomfortable I was at previous jobs. Analyzing it and trying to figure out what I did wrong (or right) when I picked each job.
As a teetotaler I never quite fit into the frat-boy/drinking culture at MRO. But I didn’t know about their drinking culture until I’d been there a while. But I was lucky enough to meet some like-minded people and build some strong friendships while I was there, so the company culture wasn’t too big an influence on how much I liked that job. When I was working at Work, the fact that I was the 1) the only female in the office and 2) the only person in the office between the ages of 25 and 55 always made me feel a bit odd, even if the office dynamics were generally comfortable and the people pleasant. I felt like I fit in a little better at L’Office and Falcon Towers, but I couldn’t really tell you why other than the people were generally pleasant and very bright. Sometimes it’s easier to put a finger on why you don’t fit in. *shrugs*
This has been on my mind almost since I got here in July. So when I saw the announcement that the December Agile New England meeting was going to be about company culture, I was really interested in what the speaker might have to say. And I was so happy that he didn’t disappoint.
One of the exercises was him handing out photocopies of the slide I posted previously, with the four company styles (Collaboration, Control, Cultivation, and Competence). We were supposed to get into small groups and figure out what the culture was at our company. Since my group was two unemployed people and one contractor, we tried to figure out what the culture was at The Mushroom Farm. What we came up with was chaos culture. Ha! But like he said, "This is a model. All models are wrong. Some are useful.” And this chart really got me thinking.
Collaboration
The first thing that I started thinking about with Collaboration is some of the articles I’ve been reading about the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston, and some of the other occupy movements. Without a single leader, they have daily General Assemblies, where everyone gets to speak their piece and be heard. Denied megaphones, the crowd repeats what the speaker says so everyone can hear it. They’ve self-organized into various teams who take care of security and safety, cooking meals, cleaning up their sites, and other things that need to happen for a village to function. From an anthropological point of view, the Occupiers have spawned a truly interesting culture. (*Spock eyebrow* Fascinating Captain).
Agile software development wants to follow a collaborative culture model. The team is self-organizing, deciding what they’re going to code and how they’re going to design it (from the list of priorities provided by the product manager). They have daily meetings. Different team members may take on the Scrum Master role during different sprints. Information is supposed to be shared among all the team members. Sometimes this even extends to doing pair programming, where two developers share a single computer.
In my experience, collaboration cultures are pretty darn rare. I suspect that they got a bad name during the 60s with the Counter-Culture, cause when I look at all the words written in that quadrant on the chart, I have to admit, my reaction is “Damn hippies!” I think it takes a certain level of maturity to be comfortable somewhere where everyone is equal. So many people get their sense of self-worth from their position in the pecking order, being somewhere where everyone is equal would be way out of their comfort zone. Because if there’s no one under you, that must mean you’re unimportant! Eek!
And the problem is, we’re not really trained to collaborate with each other. Because (move over one square to the right now please), most of our cultural institutions are set up with a Control culture. That’s what most of us are used to.
Control
The vast majority of schools in this country follow a control culture. It’s pretty much the only way you can have a system where 30 kids sit in a classroom with only a single teacher. Today’s schools are all about standardized tests, there’s not a whole lot of room for creativity or individuality. It gets worse when you get to college and start having those classes where there are 150 students in a lecture hall.
Our military is definitely a command and control culture, the hierarchy is everything. One of the reasons why I resisted mom’s not so subtle hints that I could pay with college by going the ROTC route is because *I* knew I needed to question authority and wouldn’t fit into the military lifestyle. I totally knew I couldn’t blindly follow orders if I thought they were the wrong orders (you’d think my mother would have known that by the time I was a teenager!).
And let’s face it, most jobs have a control culture. There’s a boss, and all the worker bees do what the boss tells them to do. I think for most people, this seems like the natural order, and they’d be confused if they landed somewhere where the corporate culture fell into one of the other three quadrants.
What I worry about is what happens when a company gets too entrenched in a command and control culture. We’ve got all these systems in place, Six Sigma, ISO certification, that lay down policies and procedures that everyone is supposed to follow. But having everything documented and planned out and standardized leaves very little room for creativity, taking risks, or new ideas. What’s really sad is that a lot of small companies start out in one of the other three quadrants, but once they get to a certain size, they hire management that crams them into Control culture and the innovation stops and they wonder what happened to what used to be a successful and growing company?
We’re starting to talk about being ISO certified at work. Which boils down to 1) we have procedures in place for everything 2) we have documented those procedures, and 3) we actually follow those documented procedures. This sounds just a little bit too much like a Command and Control corporate culture to me. Especially if I have the misfortune of working with someone again that is a rules lawyer. I’m starting to think that ISO certification just might be a red flag for me not fitting in with a company’s culture. And for a variety of reasons, I think that I need to try to avoid companies with Control cultures next time I go job hunting.
Cultivation
I’ve always been fond of the idea that you should “Hire for attitude, train for skills.” And I think this is what the cultivation culture is all about. Hiring good people, and then having the training in place to get them where you want them to go. I know some corporations have really excellent training programs in place. Isn’t that the whole point of that Will Smith movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, that the Dean Witter training program is worth that unpaid internship? McDonald’s has Hamburger University, Disney has the Disney Institute, various other corporations have their own training programs.
I can’t say that I’ve ever worked for a company that had a cultivation culture though, so I’ve got no personal stories to tell here.
Competence
I think a lot of us are idealistic, and naively assume that the whole business world has a competence culture. That all you have to do was work hard and you’ll get raises and promotions and be successful. But in reality, I suspect that competence culture is probably pretty rare in companies (which is why so many of us work hard and don’t get recognized for it). I would expect to find it in places that engage in the hard sciences (aerospace, physics, chemistry, NASA, pharmaceuticals, etc.) and some of the more academically rigorous academic institutions (some boarding schools, Ivy League universities, Oxford, Cambridge).
It probably appears in a few corporations too. HAL has a competence culture. They encourage their people to file for patents. Bonuses are merit based, but only the very top performers get them. And there were rumors that they regularly lay off the bottom 5% of their workers, regularly pruning the low performers. Although the fact that Bossy Lady and the Office Gossip are still there over five years later make me question those rumors. But I digress…
I suspect that most successful computer startups are some form of competence culture, or a mix of competence and collaboration. I mean, why wouldn’t you hire the best and the brightest and then encourage them to excel?
Having had some time to ponder these things this week, I think that one of the reasons why I butted heads so badly with Bossy Lady is because she wanted a Control culture in her department. She interpreted my asking questions as questioning her authority. She was very much one of those “because I said so” type managers. And I’m one of those “but I need to understand why” type people. And there was Boss Fella, with the other half of the team, with a mix of Cultivation and Competence culture. No wonder I wanted to work for him so badly! His style was just a much better fit for me.
This particular set of four company cultures came from the book The Reengineering Alternative by William Schneider, and while it may not be a perfect model, it's pretty damn useful to me. So useful that I ordered the book from Amazon. I’m really curious to see if what the author says actually lines up with the things running around in my head right now. It arrived in today’s shipment from Amazon, so I’m sure there will be other posts on this topic once I start reading it this weekend. And I’m delighted that chapter 2 is a questionnaire to help you figure out your company culture. I’ll be using those questions the next time I job interview somewhere.
This whole company culture thing is a big idea for me. I think it's going to influence my ability to choose a better job for myself the next time I switch jobs. And job satisfaction has a huge impact on my mental health.
Next up - Agile and other Deceptively Simple things…