Longtime readers will know that I consider The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz among the best Business Bro books I’ve ever read. He has a new release coming out soon about culture in business, What You Do Is Who You Are, and I consider this book an early candidate for next year’s TOA Book of the Year award.
My only concern about this book is that the title will convey 90% of the relevant learning. At my core, I believe ‘culture’ is a buzzword that encourages people to over-complicate what I consider a very simple idea – culture is the set of things that people do because other people are doing them. A 300-page book written by a bestselling author and famous business personality will certainly contain a few good tactical insights but I worry that reading so many words to confirm that good cultures follow good examples might end up being a waste of my time. I don’t mean to dismiss the idea of reading the book and I certainly don’t want to discourage anyone else from picking this one off the shelves. If it matters to you, I will definitely read it. I just worry that this book could turn out to be a classic example of someone explaining to me how to do something that already comes naturally to me.
I’ll share a recent example from work to help explain my thought. Our division recently had a session that broke us up into small groups to discuss the broad topic of what makes for a diverse and inclusive workplace. The groups were brought together into three subdivisions to share highlights before the entire division was reconvened to close out the session. My impression was that my group had an interesting conversation about what we might do, should do, and could do to make our organization more inclusive. However, as our discussion wrapped up, it occurred to me that we hadn’t reached the most important point – what we would do – and this meant we were going to leave the session in more or less the same place we were when we started the session. The initial comments from the other groups in our subdivision seemed to echo this same pattern.
At the end of our subdivision’s sharing session, the floor was opened up for general comments. One of my colleagues took the microphone and explained to our third of the organization that from her experience seeing pronoun preferences in email signatures made the organization more inclusive. Great, I thought, there’s a concrete step I can take to push our culture forward a tiny bit. Later in the week, I did a little half-assed internet research just to make sure I understood as many points of view about pronouns in signatures (he/him/his were fine, but vosotros would have to wait until my comedy career took off). Once I confirmed I wasn’t going to offend everybody, I finalized the change and joined the colleagues who’d already included pronouns in their signatures well before the diversity and inclusion session.
Now, in the four weeks since the session, I can confirm that very few signatures in the division include pronoun preferences. I would estimate it's around three to five percent. I only bring this up to state a fact, not to feel superior or point fingers or make subtle suggestions. I certainly don’t bring it up to suggest we are not an inclusive workplace. The number of signatures with pronoun preferences is just a fact. It’s also a fact that after one-third of the division heard a colleague explain a very simple thing anyone could do to make the workplace more inclusive, far less than one-third of the division went ahead and did the very thing. This is culture. Culture isn’t a hat you can wear on Wednesday or a list of thirty-seven Core Values like ‘be nice’ or the team potluck that happens once a month or some video you can watch on the careers page or dogs being allowed in the office. A culture is the set of things people do because other people are doing them.
Or to put it another way, in terms of culture what you do is who you are. That’s kind of what I’m expecting to read in this upcoming book. I’m expecting to read that cultures just kind of happen by accident, perhaps guided by a set of arbitrary decisions that everyone imitates, and that over time a collective reluctance to change locks these behaviors into place. One day, a bored Business Bro wanders around with a notebook, writes down what everyone is doing, and calls it Company Culture. I’m expecting to read that the only way to change a Company Culture is for a small subset of people to set visible, easy examples that can be followed by even those who are the most reluctant to be seen stepping out of line. I’m expecting, in a sense, to read about the various things I’ve done over the years. I'm expecting to read about some of the things that have seen me both succeed and fail at work, the common root of these otherwise opposing outcomes being my initial belief that if everyone did what I did we would become a stronger organization.
As I think back over the past few years and reflect on some of these incidents, I marvel at how easily my present self could have predicted the failures that blindsided a younger me. It just comes down to how easy the example is to follow and whether colleagues interested in making a change have the support they need to overcome the inertia of routine. This leaves no room for seemingly important concerns like whether the new behavior is profitable, interesting, or ethical. Even if your entire organization is comprised solely of fascinating, moral people who relentless pursue value, these people will lose money, propagate dumb ideas, and fail as people if the culture encourages costly, stupid, and immoral behaviors. These behaviors will continue if the people who can increase revenue, creatively solve problems, or inspire colleagues to do the right thing demonstrate their ideas in ways that others people are simply unable, unwilling, or too risk-averse to imitate.
This brings me back to the diversity and inclusion session I participated in and why I sense people are jaded about the effectiveness of such sessions as catalysts for cultural transformation. I see two big problems. First, people think a little too big and come up with ideas that no one can reasonably implement in the near future. Second, they demand an initial investment of effort that is simply too risky for teams or individuals. These are especially significant obstacles in workplaces where people are being paid to carry out well-defined sets of responsibilities. Big ideas are often great ideas but most people will settle for a good idea if they are asked to take on too much of the work or a disproportionate risk burden for a delayed reward.
One topic my group discussed was job descriptions and how updating those to remove certain restrictions unrelated to predicting job performance would increase the candidate pool for open roles. This is a great idea. But how many people actually get to write job descriptions? And then there is the matter of training interview teams – there isn’t much value in removing college degrees as a minimum requirement if the presence of those qualifications means the candidate is preferred to a newly eligible candidate who lacks the same diploma. And suppose that all these changes do go as planned, how long would it take to see the effects? It takes years for hiring rounds to transform most organizations.
The risk obstacle is much more subtle than the ‘idea is too big’ problem. Modern workplaces working in tandem with shifting social norms and progressive government policies have made notable strides to reduce many forms of risk that once encouraged employees to toe the line, punch the clock, and collect a check. But the risk consideration remains very real, whether it is in terms of endangering alliances in the organization, potentially missing required benchmarks for earning a bonus, or merely the social implications of being on an island. A cultural change can be presented in ways that appeal to everyone’s most rational sensibilities but when it comes time to be the first one to stand up almost everyone worries about inciting a game of whack-a-mole.
I think there is a lot of potential for leading cultural change by thinking about how these two considerations work together in a tactical sense. The big ideas are important but once the vision is set there is probably very little need to revisit the goal. The next step is to look at the day-to-day and look for simple, easily imitated behavior that doesn’t transfer risk to the most vulnerable members of the organization. It’s a matter of thinking about inclusion not as a question of what to do next but rather what has already happened and making it possible for as many people as possible to imitate the same behavior. If your big idea is to make your organization so inclusive that anyone of any background will apply for your open roles, the first thing to do isn’t to speculate about what makes a workplace more inclusive, the first thing is to collect evidence from people who can identify behavior that made the workplace more inclusive.
In fact, it isn’t just the first thing, it’s the only thing. You just do it over and over again. If you want to make the culture more inclusive, you find out by asking people – what made you feel more included last year? Last month? Last week? And then you try to get as many other people to do those same things. It sounds easy, but of course it isn’t. You could call it the hard thing about easy things, I suppose, even though the most logical person to say so chose to do otherwise.
