Never reward the single effort when collaboration is what creates the win.
Q: Last week you wrote in “50 Ways to Change Your Culture” about how culture is activated and experienced, not taught or told. My question is this: as a leader, how do I enable a culture that helps, and reduce what doesn’t?
I know I have a crucial role to play, but what is it to lead or activate, as you say, a “good” culture. How do we take the good that has come from this pandemic virtual world and learn from it? I know it can’t all be virtual happy hours and Zoom dance moments like we were doing in March. But, how do we create or craft a culture without regular office hours and offsites, or lunches and beanbags? What is it I can do to help my team to do good work together?
A: Dear Goodness,
We often diss the “small” things, like zoom dance-a-thons.
It’s easy to say culture is not about these frivolities. But even these interactions tell us something about the culture. So, can I ask you to recall, why were you enabling them in the first place? Yes, they were ways to be together. But were you attempting to signal that despite our physical distance, we would be all in this together? A “we got you” sign? Or, maybe you were signaling, “hey despite it being a scary pandemic, we’ll all need to put on a happy face?”
Which was it? I dunno. But you do. Or, at least, Goodness, we need you to. Which is to say… know what anything says or signals about who we are to one another.
THE “INVISIBLE HOW” SHAPES OUTCOMES
If you don’t know how to shape the invisible, you can’t actually lead change.
I learned this during a project I did ages ago for HP. The charter? To figure out how to get more stuff to make the jump from HP Labs (the group that invented cool stuff) to the Business Units (the group that figured out how to turn cool stuff into solutions).
I studied, what felt like, everything. Tracing first how the scientists worked in the Lab, then how the transfer to the BU’s happened, and finally how the business units did their go-to-market work. And after tracing something like a dozen specific projects with incredible detail, I couldn’t detect any pattern of what wasn’t working. Neither could anyone else. None of us could see what was causing the gap between intentions (create good stuff) and results (not very many things became viable commercial products).
Once I acknowledged how defeated, how absolutely stumped I felt, I remember closing my eyes and laying my head down on my desk. And I just laid there, wondering… what is this thing that is affecting just about everything and yet equally invisible?
Good people were working hard, processes of the handoff were clear, marketing strategies were solid, etc. Everything I knew to measure wasn’t it. It wasn’t any “who” or even “what” that was failing. So what was it? It took me another many years to easily name the gap, the in-between space, that which connected the who and the what was the how. Or, culture.
But, back then, the invisibility aspect of “the how” inspired me to ask a better question, to everyone, what was it that is affecting all of us (but wasn’t named in the workflow, not visible or measurable or assigned?)
It turned out that the Lab’s scientists got paid based on the sheer number of patents, regardless of usefulness. And those same scientists got paid far less if that patent was shared. Similarly, the business unit could get the solution from Labs or anywhere.
Everyone was doing their best, but *not* working together. And, it was by design.
The head of Labs at the time, Dick Lampman, was genuinely surprised when I reported all this to him.
He now knew that the goal should be to reward market outcomes, not just market inventions, but he also said he wanted to reward the “highest creativity” in the Lab. He now knew he should encourage collaborations, not just solo efforts, but he was worried that he wouldn’t have “accountability” if that were true. He now knew that the future of HP relied on everyone working together, but he himself had responsibility for just the output of Labs.
“If we were smart, Nilofer, we’d do as you suggest,” he said.
(Now picture me banging my head on that desk…)
He then argued why absolutely nothing would change. He thought his job was to “focus” attention on each part of the invention, or person or marketing mechanism….but not shape the invisible interactions that were affecting the outcome.
BAD MISTAKES, WE MAKE A FEW
Sadly, Dick’s response is not atypical, as measurement, attention, and rewards are often directed towards isolating and separating rather than connecting the parts.
(Which is me saying that your boss or boss’s boss likely doesn’t get it, either.)
This management model, FWIW, is a holdover from a bygone era. When putting together a car on an assembly line, for example, each person could be assigned a measurable task and be assigned a minimum threshold—say, 123 widgets per day. Those who failed to meet their benchmarks could be identified and penalized. (When I read the 1619 Project, I could see this management model originated in the cotton fields.) It’s also the business model of extractive firms like Uber, Doordash, et al.
But you know better. What brings out the best in people and the best work by people?
Shared purpose.
In our modern economy, an ideas economy, this emphasis on isolating and more importantly rewarding individual output defies all logic. For three reasons.
One: the bedrock finding from innovation (i.e. outcomes) research is that unlike invention or scientific discovery, it emerges from connections between previously separate elements.
Two: research shows us that teams outperform individuals as they form a collective intelligence
And third, not to repeat ourselves, but we’ve shared before (in the piece on “Gladiator Strategy”,) that it is a team performance, not individual “stars” that create an outsized market performance.
REWARD HOW WE INTERLINK TO CREATE CONNECTIVITY
So, Goodness, think beyond the what and the who, but how we want people to work together. Be intentional and then reward/recognize/celebrate that.
Some examples:
Instead of valuing “hardworking” people who are always responsive 24×7 to your texts, celebrate the person who picked up a dropped ball and made sure a newbie was onboarded well, knowing that the first few weeks of someone’s new job sets them up for success with the team and onboarding is even harder and yet more necessary in today’s digital life. One signals the value is time spent pleasing you, the other that you value how we help one another to succeed.
Want another one?
If you want an idea co-owned, you might ask the team, do you understand the strategy of the company? It’s a great question because no one can deliver on their part of the strategy if they don’t know it. But an even better question is what do you need (and from whom) to deliver on your part of the strategy. This could be a fill-in-the-blank response then sent around so we get better at naming those “in-between” spaces.
WHO WE ARE IS WHAT WE MAKE
High-performance cultures, the cultures of innovation have 3 parts.
- Each voice is worthy of being heard. No small or subjugated folks.
- None of us create value all by ourselves. So no one person, regardless of how “superior” their thinking, is the key to outsized results.
- Connected individuals can now do what once only large orgs could. As we each contribute that which only one can, and join together in purpose, we can make that “dent in the world.” So new ideas become marketplace realities.
Far too many of us manage and reward individual performance; it’s old school. Yet when you celebrate, reward, and recognize the parts that hold us close, you help us to co-create. Celebrate that which makes us feel connected — first to ourselves, and to one another — that’s what you want to measure and reward for a culture of innovation.
