Latest / Integrity at Scale™ / Why Culture Was Never Just Culture
Transcript
- All righty, folks, we're gonna get into it today. We're gonna talk about culture, one of my freaking favorite topics ever. I'm Dr. Tara Vossenkemper. You are listening to the Culture Focus Practice podcast, and thank you, of course, for spending time with me today. I appreciate your time. Okay, so a lot of people think that culture problems are, like, soft issues on the side of the real business with quotes, you know? But culture problems are more than often system information. They're about the operations, the infrastructure, the expectations we have. I've spent a lot of time... I, man, I mean, this is the sort of thing I think about in my spare time is just culture and how do you, build it into what exists so that it becomes just an honest representation of what happens on a daily basis. Like, it's not something we give lip service to. It's not something that we treat separately. I think the longer that I've spent time leading an organization, but also working with folks related to their practices and culture especially, the less useful it feels to treat culture as this separate item that we fix with something like values language or morale work or another freaking conversation about how people should show up. Like, all of that stuff, when done well, can feed into culture. When done in a vacuum or as the, quote, "fix," end quote, is useless. It's futile. It doesn't make any sense to do. So whenever I hear a leader say, "We have a culture problem," what they're really doing is saying that they have an issue with people not speaking up or consistent issues returning again and again and again, or people not owning the outcome that they should own, or one specific person keeps rescuing, oftentimes the owner or the visionary, they keep rescuing what is falling through the cracks. All of that is good information because that's underneath the label of we have a culture problem. If culture isn't the soft problem beside the real business, then what does that mean about accurately reporting how we've designed the business as it relates to cultural impact? Okay, so we have four agenda items for the day. One, culture as a system output. I love this. I love all of these items, so I act like I just love this one. No, I love all of them. Two, behavior follows conditions. Three, values and infrastructure. Four, culture as an integrity signal. Agenda item number one, culture as a system output. What does this mean, you ask? What does this mean? This means that culture is the result of roles and decisions and incentives and consequences and resources and leadership behavior. Any leader you have at your practice, including you, it's your behavior. That's culture is the result of your behavior. So think about culture being the outcome of whatever your system consistently makes normal. For example, I think this is a good example, and this probably could be applied across a variety of these agenda items, but let's just use it here. Let's say you are really wanting to increase the candor of your team. You want more feedback. You want more transparency. You wanna hear from people. So what do you do? You say, "Okay, well, let's start inviting feedback in meetings," and you open the door. Let's say this is your first time, so you just say, like, "Any feedback is welcome. Just, whatever you want. Yeah, like, give it to me." And then immediately after, let's say you're starting to get the feedback, and then the next outcome, the next result of that is defensiveness or shutting people down. And I would say that's kind of a little bit of defensiveness, but let's say defensiveness in terms of, "No, that, that's not exactly right." Like, "No, I, I... You're kind of misunderstanding," or, "Well, that's not really true what you're saying," or just physically, if you're in a visual meeting, like a virtual meeting or in person, you know, not just on a phone call, your affect and your body language, if you, go sort of flat in your face and you, like, obviously you're turning in on yourself, that looks like withdrawal. It looks like a form of defensiveness. That is going to impact the people who are speaking up, and it's also what you're designing then, if we're thinking about culture as a system output and being the lived result of decisions, incentives, resources, consequences, et cetera, you're not gonna get more of that thing. Effectively what just happened is that you invited something that you want for the culture. You want us to have a candid, transparent practice or business, and then your response is defensiveness or withdrawal or shutdown or getting a little bit argumentative back or who knows what. Maybe something a little bit retaliatory later towards the person who spoke up. I hope not, but I mean, uh, you know, worse things have happened, so none of that is gonna get you the thing that you are purporting to want. You're saying, "I want this thing," but your behavior would indicate otherwise. That is a system output now. Now your culture, this is the system that we have set up that X person invites feedback, then gets defensive and shut down. So, that is the system. So your culture is gonna be reflective of that, and the outcome of that being a system is that you're gonna have a culture where people aren't speaking up, where you're not getting real, authentic feedback. The beauty is that you can change things like this, but, over time, especially something like defensiveness with feedback. 'Cause that's also, you know, if you get defensive whenever you get feedback, that's your own shit to deal with. Of course, a character attack is not feedback. So someone saying, "You suck," that's not feedback, you know? But somebody saying, "Yeah, this system isn't working for me, and here's why." And if you're the one that designed it, then you get all up in arms. "Well, I I thought about... I was trying to do blah, blah, blah." It's not fucking working, man. Just take the feedback in and figure out can we fix it. If so, how? Not everything is a personal attack, even if it can feel that way. As a side note, I just built something out, for just supervisors and trying to automate, consistent evaluation processes that are bidirectional so supervisor and supervisee both completing evaluations on a consistent basis throughout the year about the supervision process and experience and, you know, their development and all that. And I sent this out to the team. I built it out. It's awesome. It's freaking awesome, especially 'cause I don't have to manually do it, you know? And in the email that I sent to supervisors and supervisees, I said, "This is gonna have hiccups, and I need you to tell me what gets messed up, because I have no way of fixing it if you don't tell me." That's the sort of thing, like, if they then reach out to me later, I have to hug them metaphorically or physically if I'm in person and they want a hug, you know? But, like, metaphorically, I have to say, "Awesome. Thank you so much for telling me that. Let me figure out what's wrong." But my expectation is that there's going to be hiccups, and there's always gonna be feedback from people Not everything can be fixed, not everything should be changed immediately based on the feedback you get, but still important. I am really getting stuck on feedback, and let me just bring myself out of this and move on to agenda item number two, probably related actually. Behavior following conditions, I love this one. What often happens is that we see a behavior and we are frustrated by it, or we're just agitated, frustrated, like, "Ugh, this is not what I wanted it to be," and we go to correct it. You know, maybe we just tell the person, "Hey you need to do more of this thing." Here is what I think should happen instead. Whenever we have a frustrating behavior, almost always, like the majority of the time, it makes sense within the context of it occurring or within the conditions surrounding it. So instead of judging the person, I'm saying judging, not exactly the right language, but let's just go with it. Instead of judging the person and saying, "You're doing this wrong," instead we're saying, "Okay, this is not what I want. What is happening that leads this person to thinking this is the behavior that was expected? What is going on around them that they are then, doing X instead of A? And I want A. Why are you doing X?" This is incredibly powerful because whenever we go to solve a problem with a person, immediately if I say to the person, "Hey, this is not what I want. I think somehow our wires got crossed. Can you help me figure out where?" Now we are collaborating on how do we fix this? What are the conditions that led to you doing this thing? That's the problem that we're seeking to solve. It's a puzzle. , It's just widening your lens with I see this problem, but let me zoom out and get a five-mile radius around the center point. What else is going on? So for example, if we say something like low ownership, cool. That's really... I mean, I would say that's a very consistent problem across a variety of businesses. Whenever that happens, my first thought is not, "That's the wrong person. They don't have the oomph. They don't have what's needed to take ownership of something." My first thought is actually, is the role clear? Have the expectations been communicated clearly, verbally and in writing? Is the outcome, like the expectation in terms of what's the expected outcome of this role or this thing I need done, has that been clearly communicated? Is there like overlap where I'm asking Person A to do something, but Person B also has aspects of that something, and sometimes they intersect and they overlap, and it's confusing? And who's doing what? I don't know where my role ends and this other person begins. Whenever you or I, whenever owners continue to step in and then override a decision that's being made or a process that's being developed or something that's happening, that creates low ownership. That's us. So when we think about there's a behavior that we don't like from a person, again, low ownership if we go with that, don't stop there. We need to expand and think about, what are the conditions that are in place right now, what's the context that create low ownership in this person? That's what we're after. That's one of my favorite things. Okay, agenda item number three, values need infrastructure. Man, I love this. Okay, first of all, I love values. Ooh, I just do. I really like 'em. However, values by themselves are just a fucking waste of time. Don't waste your breath. What's the point, I could say anything. I could say that, you know, we really value self-starters. Okay, like how does the infrastructure of the business support that value? What are we expecting to see from that value throughout the practice, you know? So when I say values need infrastructure, values should be lived. Like they are not static. They are alive. They are interactive. They are malleable. They bump up against other boundaries. I always think about pigs at fence lines, how they consistently will like walk a fence line and push against it, you know? Your values should kinda do the same thing, where they're like kind of testing, "Okay, do I fit here? Is it... Am I held here? Where do I start to leak out and disappear maybe?" They become real. They, by they I mean values. Values become real through decisions. They become real through resources, through consequences, again through expectations. So if we have a value for authentic and candid, then I'm gonna reward that whenever it happens. If somebody speaks up to me or says, "Hey, I need to meet with you about something," and they have a conversation that's candid, maybe hard to have, but they're being forthcoming and they're being upfront about this is what's up, like, this is what's bothering me, or this is how I feel, or this is something on my mind, or here's this process that sucks. Again, I need to thank them for doing that, and I need to... What I also probably will do is shout out to the team, to the rest of my team like, "Hey, shout out to this person for living out this value in this way. Here's what they did. Here's why it's living out that value." So that's values, or values becoming real through, again, decisions, consequences, et cetera. Additionally, if you have a value but you have no way of making it practical or assessing what it looks like, it's not really useful, because then you have no way of assessing if it's happening, you know? So if you have your values, let's say you have core values, and we have, of course, have core values. We have five that we, love and have had for a while. And here's what I would say you should do for each of your values if you haven't done this already, you for sure need a clear definition of that value. So you have to operationalize it. What does it mean? How do we define this value? That can be problematic if you don't, because then when you go to do values-based assessments or you have people self-report their, you know, like how well do you live out this value, everybody is self-reporting based on their own understanding of the definition rather than on a shared definition. This has happened to us. I just know this happens. And yeah. Anyway, so you need it to be operationalized is my point. Further than that, though, you want a handful of examples. Like, what does this value look like in practice? How would I know that this person was living out this value? These can't be specific to any provider. Like, they can't be specific to a clinical team, for example, because your operations team or your support staff, they're not gonna have the same ability or opportunity to live out values in the way that the clinical team does because the clinical team is seeing clients and the support staff are not seeing clients. So the living them out, the examples cannot be specific to one role. They need to be sort of practice level. You might have some, you might have additional examples that are role-specific, but in terms of the practice values, for example, not only what is the definition of this, but also what are some higher level, like broad examples. By broad, I mean, the full practice, you know, examples of these values. And then if you really wanna dig the fancy, you could do role-specific. That might be kinda cool. All right. We're gonna move on. Again, that was wrapping up values need infrastructure. I will die on that hill for the record. You can't pay lip service to values and then expect people to respect them or know them or try to live them out without any sort of infrastructure to support that happening. Again, tying in with the behavior following conditions. It's all linked. All this stuff is sort of circling the same culture being a system output. It's all like circling the same drain, but I hate that 'cause it's not going down the shitter. Like, it's a good thing, you know? Okay, last one. Culture reveals integrity. Again, I really, really like this one, just like I really, really like the others. Here's what this means. If you are saying something and then doing another, that is the absence of integrity. Basically, the culture revealing integrity, think about integrity as the visible consistency. So what do we say, but then also what do we do? So for example, if we say something like, "We strive to be queer-affirming and anti-racist," okay, cool. But how do we do that exactly? Like, what does that look like in practice? What does the language look like on our website? What do the visuals look like from start to finish? All of our marketing materials, what does this look like? What's our stance on things? How do we assess policy that we're creating through the lens of being queer-affirming, being anti-racist? Like, it has to show up through consistent behavior, not necessarily through... You could have some sort of committee if you wanted to, but for us, I like things baked into what exists, because then it is part of something rather than thought of Consistently. It's not something you have to consciously, constantly remember. It's just baked into the cake. Like, the flavor's gonna be there because it's there everywhere. You can't not live this thing out now. Ultimately, again, integrity is just that consistency. What I say, what I do, we're consistent across the board. As an example, if you're naming something like care is a value, we care, you know, care comes first, but then you are pushing your support staff or your clinicians to hurry up and get something done, is the expense care? Because if that's the case, that's not integrity. And so there's something about what are the things that have to be in place, what are the values that have to be in place consistently, what are the expectations we have that need to be in place consistently that trump anything else? I know for me, there is a three-point, you know, it's like a three-dimensional triangle, and a little half ball underneath, and the triangle rests on top, and the three points are autonomy, business structure, and culture. I'm saying this because that is something that I am constantly weighing in my mind. And it's always moving. It's always shifting a little bit. So the game is I can't put too much on autonomy. I can't overemphasize that, 'cause these other two then fly up. You know, now we're off balance. I can't overemphasize culture without structure and without autonomy, and I can't overemphasize business structure, 'cause now I'm de-emphasizing culture and autonomy. So that's an example of this to me is not necessarily a value, so it's a way of operating a business. You know, it's a way of maintaining integrity across time. So anytime we go to make a decision about something, especially as it relates to the clinical team or the support staff, I am constantly filtering, does this align with our culture? How are we living out our core values? How are we living out our core focus? But also, how much am I going to take away autonomy, if at all? If we're adding this structure in, what's the impact gonna be? Is it worth the cost? If the answer is no, then we're not gonna do it, or we're gonna do a modified version of it. Let's just bring this all home. If I were to ask myself, why this topic? Honestly, I feel like it's really obvious. I already told you I love culture. But I think that For me, culture is the foundation for the rest of the entire business. So all of the other components of a business are required and necessary, but the foundation on which we build the rest of it out is culture. It's not structure, it's culture. And I think culture can also be baked into structure, for the record. I don't think that they are separate. I just think that one is foundational in terms of this is where we sit, and then, you know, we can build everything else out from there. And if I were to place this on my Integrity at Scale model, which is formerly the Living Practice Framework, but it's now Integrity at Scale, this is where culture is interacting with leadership structure and feedback systems. Like, that's what's at play in this conversation from today. So if I had one takeaway for you today, I would say choose a current culture problem, expand the view. So again, if your culture problem is a dot on the map, let's expand the radius. Like, okay, how many more miles do we need to go out? Let's go out five miles. What's the behavior that you're seeing? What are the conditions that make that behavior make sense? This is where you, again, look into the systems, you look into the infrastructure, you look into your own behavior, you look into a bunch of things. And then change a condition. Don't just go after the behavior. What's the condition that has the biggest impact on the behavior? That's the condition you wanna try to change. So that's your task, should you choose to accept. Okay, that's all I have for you today. Of course, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already, or share this with a friend who needs to hear it. Additionally, in the description, you're gonna start to see some related episodes. So if you like this episode, then scooch on over to the description, and you can see some related ones to listen in on. All right? Peace out. I'll see you next time. Have a great day. Thanks. Bye. Thanks for hanging out with me today. If this episode got your wheels turning, I would love for you to stick around. You can, of course, subscribe wherever you're listening. If you are interested in more ramblings about leadership culture, EOS, and all the weird fucking ways humans make organizations harder than they need to be, head over to my website and join the email list. Until next time, make sure you take care of yourself and the people around you. This shit is hard, and we are better together. See ya. Bye.