Atmosphere affects our breathing, which affects our work. If you’re working in a toxic culture, then you may be experiencing manipulation by a dominating leader, which will affect your stress levels, your health, and your personal life. We will not thrive under dominating leadership in the same way that the plants will not thrive in the atmosphere shown in Figure 9.3. People need clean, crisp air to be able to work well. They need specific encouragement and they need a vision. We all need these things and your leadership either provides that or takes away. Some cultures can choke some people in a matter of minutes. Other cultures tend to kill people over months or years, causing gradual deterioration to an employee’s well-being. The best cultures are free and clear and produce effective, long-term health.
Figure 9.3 Nothing thrives in a toxic atmosphere.
Source: Photo used with kind permission from Johnny Joo/Stock image.
So, what culture are you currently in?
What culture are you leading in each circle of influence?
Are you currently in the Venus atmosphere where you can’t breathe for even one minute?
Or are you in a smoggy atmosphere, where you know your health is declining over time?
Or do you thrive in an environment with clean air and plenty of sunshine in your culture?
Thinking of culture as atmosphere makes it easier to understand. In a city full of smog, it is possible to trace the cause back to specific political and business decisions or the geographic realities that allowed it to develop. You can actually follow the toxicity back to the ultimate source. So too can a toxic culture be traced back to a leader. Although this is not a witch-hunt, it is true that leaders affect the lives of everyone they lead by their words, actions, or lack of action.
Certain leadership decisions are built on short-term fear to produce results, and this can lead to a divisive culture, especially if the leader is more focused on vision (or profits) than values. As an employee, you can only rely on your influence to help clean up areas of leadership pollution. But if you are a leader, you have the opportunity to create an entirely healthy atmosphere for your people to live.
Toxic Realities
Do you want to see change in your culture? Would you like to improve the health of your organization and people? How about reducing turnover cost and improving efficiency?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then a Columbia University study holds great insight and hope for you. A healthy company culture, the study shows, marks the key difference in employee retention and productivity. According to the research, organizations with rich company culture experience a mere 13.9% turnover rate, whereas the average job turnover in unhealthy company cultures reaches an astounding 48.4%.4
The reason for such disparity lies in the simple chain reaction of a poor company environment: unhappy employees rarely do more than the minimum, productive workers who feel underappreciated tend to quit, and poor managers adversely impact workers and their productivity.
Additionally, a study by Towers Perrin further detailed the stark difference between actively engaged and disengaged employees. According to the study results, companies with low levels of employee engagement suffered a 33% decrease in operating income coupled with an 11% decrease in earnings growth. On the other hand, companies generating high-level engagement produced a 19% increase in operating income as well as a 28% increase in earnings growth.5
The research is clear—healthy organizational culture matters. Not just for the heart of your company and its employees, but also for the bottom line. And the Sherpa is the key to getting employees engaged and getting to the highest levels.
Subculture, the Secret to Organizational Change
If you want to experience a culture overhaul, then there is a secret passage to do so. It starts at the subculture level. Since leaders define culture, the same is true of subculture leaders—they define subcultures.
What is a subculture? The answer is any team of people or division inside an organization that has influence. A subculture leader can be someone with influence but without a powerful title—maybe someone with years of experience who could be influencing a small group of employees because of their seniority. Or it could be a small division with well-established employees who like to do things their way. There might be a subculture of new employees or support staff, a group in the accounting department, a group that gathers for coffee, and so forth.
Each leader creates an atmosphere that other employees live in. In essence, each subculture leader is also a gardener inside the greenhouse that they tend. To be a green thumb is to liberate by assessing when the employees need more support or more challenge, helping them see the areas that are undermining their influence and helping them get to the next level. When you pair the Support-Challenge Matrix (see Figure 9.4 for a reminder) with the Leaders Define Culture tool, you can analyze your current sub-culture health and make some key decisions.
Figure 9.4 The Support-Challenge Matrix
Source: © Pub House/GiANT Worldwide.
Now, look at your subculture leaders. What is their tendency? Do they tend to liberate, dominate, protect, or abdicate? Since leaders define the culture, then their influence will tend to shade the group that they lead, and that is how subcultures are built (see Figure 9.5).
Figure 9.5 Leaders define cultures and subcultures.
Source: © Pub House/GiANT Worldwide.
Imagine what your subleaders will look like when plotted on the Support-Challenge Matrix. The subculture leader who dominates creates a toxic culture of manipulation and fear and while producing short-term results will most likely harm the effectiveness of their small team.
The protecting subculture leader will create a culture of entitlement and mistrust as they bring loads of support, but no clear expectations. Thus, challenge is seen as a negative, and the team carries on in whatever way they like. When the leader gets frustrated because of the pressure upon them, they can suddenly move to heavier challenge and cause mistrust because they are being inconsistent.
The abdicating leader can produce an apathetic subculture, because there is no support and no relative challenge. People are free to do what they like, and the culture is just gray.
Dominating or protecting or abdicating gardeners can create all types of atmospheric issues that won’t allow the people to thrive or grow properly. They are not bringing liberation.
That is precisely why the subculture leader is the secret to overall culture change because subcultures are a culmination of the entire culture. If you want to change the culture you must change each subculture. If you are leading your organization, it starts with you and your senior team; you can’t outsource culture. However, that isn’t enough, you must also change each subculture. The subculture will be the primary experience of your employees.
After a recent conversation with a client, he mentioned that he was trying to make some decisions on whether to sell the business or keep it. Ideally, he wants to sell it to his employees, but they have been so busy running the day-to-day that he hasn’t had time to effectively multiply. After the conversation, he finally seemed to realize that he must build up the subcultures to build a healthy culture enough to be successful once he was gone.
Manage the Subcultures or Lose the Entire Culture
If you don’t manage the subculture you will lose the entire culture, and that takes years to get back. In fact, we believe it takes between two to three years to produce a true culture change because of the levels that must be reached to do it well. The larger your organization, the longer the process takes. This is why many leaders are tempted first to look for a silver bullet—“Surely HR can find a culture-building program we can roll out?!”
The truth is that historically most leader development happens to the top 15% inside an organization, and it rarely trickles down to the rest of the employees. We believe it’s vital to impact as much of the culture as possible, and so we train organizations in multiplication by impacting 90%
of the organization not just the top 15% (see Figure 9.6).
Figure 9.6 The Engagement Bell Curve shows how culture often develops versus how it should develop.
Source: © Pub House/GiANT Worldwide.
Usually, the top 15% (the executives) go on a course and start using ideas that they just heard but that aren’t relatable or useful to the rest of the organization. It usually leads to resentment. The normal reaction is, “Just give them a few weeks and they’ll forget everything they learned,” which is usually true. Only by creating a multiplying language that everyone can learn and having a clear focus on the subculture leaders do you have the chance of creating a liberating culture, where 100X leaders are multiplied.
Are there any subcultures that are dominating your entire organization or team? Is there a department that is trying to be the hero of the company? Or is there an individual who is clearly out of line and dominating the flow of work or efficiency of a department because of their ego? These subcultures are not meant to rule the entire culture, but rather play their part in the growth and health of the entire organization. Most are unconsciously incompetent because no one has ever held a mirror up and helped them understand what it’s really like to be on the other side of them. Tools such as these create an objective language that allow people to have the honest conversations that in many cases should have happened years ago.
If you are the leader of the organization, then it is your responsibility to support and challenge each subculture as you move forward for the greater good of the whole. If someone is out of line, then it is your role to get them either moving in the right direction or moving out the door. Liberating leaders challenge people to the agreed standards/values and the vision of the organization. If your culture is out of control, then it is up to you to lean in and deal with the situation with clarity, challenge, and proper perspective.
Sometimes, culture clashes occur because people are not supported correctly.
Other times, culture clashes need to be addressed head on with proper challenge.
Subcultures are not meant to dominate the entire culture, but rather help the organization to grow for the good of everyone.
Subcultures are meant to help the organization grow for the good of everyone
If you want to be a 100X leader and lead an organization that everyone wants to work for, then it is imperative that you set the tone and create a culture that celebrates subcultures but does not allow them to lead the entire organization.
Transplanting People into Your Culture
Every growing organization hires new people, and those people are transplanted from one culture to another. In many ways it is similar to the process/technique of moving a plant from one location to another. Some organizations can focus so hard on their own greenhouses that they forget about the transplanting (onboarding) process.
Taylor Doe, founder of 3East.io, explains it like this:
In horticulture, transplants are used infrequently and carefully because they carry with them a significant risk of killing the plant. I see schools/organizations/businesses fire people too soon because “they aren’t the right fit” when actually the organization(s) weren’t careful enough in the transplant process. They didn’t know the employee or athlete or student or their last greenhouse well enough for the transplant to be successful. I’ve seen the “death” of plants in companies happen too soon. The plants were actually potentially adding huge value, but the gardener gave up too soon. It was such a huge atmosphere change that it ultimately killed the plant because the master gardener wasn’t patient enough or aware enough to grow the plant in the right ways. Each greenhouse is slightly different, and all plants react differently.
Goals for a Healthier Culture
You cannot change your destination overnight, but you can change your direction overnight.
—Jim Rohn
Just as Rome was not built in a day, neither will the organization or team you lead reach its ideal culture overnight. Progress and change take time, but reorienting your goals, adjusting your aim—that only takes a moment. And it’s the recalibration of your trajectory that ultimately determines where you land.
Most leaders want to get better, but improvement happens when leaders start with clarifying vision and values together. When these are clear in every subculture, you have the beginnings of a solid foundation.
Knowing the challenge that lies ahead, the following are a couple of goals to consider for the journey.
Becoming Healthy
Although we generally understand what it means to be healthy physically, many of us find defining organizational health and care to be much more elusive. We know the steps to physical health, such as exercise, eating right, eating less, and so forth, but the key factors to organizational health are not as clear as we would like them to be. Although there are many potential answers to the question of effective indicators, Pat Lencioni provides a convincing summary of cultural success factors inside organizations in his book The Advantage:
Minimal politics
Minimal confusion
High morale
High productivity
Low turnover6
The reality is that healthy things grow. If your organization is healthy then you will experience the growth that you have dreamed about. In order to achieve that, however, it is pivotal that you slow down enough to work on the cultural pieces that sustain a healthy, thriving organization.
To Be Productive
Productivity is more than working long hours and securing short-term financial results. Healthy people produce. It is that simple.
When we first started working with Ford Motor Company after the 2008 financial crisis they were asking vendor partners to help them create customer engagement so that they could turn the company around. We debated whether the focus should be on employee engagement first because customers become engaged to the degree that the employees are engaged. It made sense and they made the focus on getting employees engaged first, which drove production to significant financial highs.
Get the first part right and you are halfway there. Productivity usually occurs when people have a proper balance of support and challenge. However, when leaders create a culture of resourcing and equipping their people in conjunction with providing the appropriate challenge to encourage communication and alignment, productivity goes through the roof. As a leader, your example will set the tone.
Another word for productivity is fruitfulness—the concept that one seed can produce hundreds of fruits. That’s influence at work within nature. So make multiplying influence the ultimate goal of both your leadership and organization to bear fruit in the lives of your team, family, organization, and community.
Culture Every Day
To be committed to becoming a 100X leader, then, you must be committed to the overall culture, starting with the subculture and seeking change from this level. Once you commit to being intentional with subculture leaders then you can use the tools in this book to help you build a liberating culture every day. When you decide to do this then you will most likely be on your way to becoming someone worth following.
Notes
1Quote courtesy of Ricardo González, author of The 6 Stages of Cultural Mastery (Bilingual America, 2017).
2“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” quote attributed to Peter Drucker and made famous by Mark Fields, president at Ford.
3Aristotle, Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics.
4Eliabet Medina, “Job Satisfaction and Employee Turnover Intention,” (Master’s thesis, Columbia University, 2012).
5Source: Towers Perrin Engagement Gap Study (2007).
6The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (J-B Lencioni Series, 2012), used courtesy of author Patrick M. Lencioni.
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Someone Worth Following
A Sherpa on Mount Everest has authority. Climbers listen to their Sherpas intently and respond to their instructions. Why? Because they have been
to the top—the Sherpa know the mountain like the back of their hands, and the respect they have earned gains them influence. With this influence, the Sherpa responsibly and diligently guides their climbers, who are grateful, for without the Sherpa their chances of success are much smaller. The Sherpa are rightly revered and effectively lead people to make the right decisions in very challenging circumstances.
Climbers trust the competency of their Sherpa—their very lives are in their hands. Climbers trust their integrity, and they know it’s not an ego issue. Because Sherpa have no personal agenda or need to win for their own glory, they are free to help people fulfill their potential and stay alive on the mountain.
We all need Sherpas in different times of our lives to help us get to the higher levels in our leadership journey. We need leaders who will not shirk from calling us up, nor will they abdicate when we need to climb harder. A few of us have been blessed to have a Sherpa at times in our lives, but most of us haven’t, which is why we need more of the right kind of leaders in our world.
Sherpas are a prime example of leaders worth following. We simply need more examples—more people committed to fighting for the highest possible good of others.
Healthy cultures require this.
High performing teams thrive on it.
The 100X Leader Page 14