Culture, Strategy, Brunch?
Hello!
Have you ever sat down and thought about your team culture? Your manager's manager culture? The larger organization culture?
What gets rewarded? What gets punished? What is non-negotiable? Who is promoted? What is discussed openly? Etc.
Starting out
Over the past week, I went through several conversations about "fixing" the culture currently at play. But several of the observations and offered "solutions" were about imposing processes or asking teams to change their behaviors.
While I didn't agree with some of the solutions, I also thought that these come from conversations with their managers or leaders on how we need to "turn the ship" fast enough or achieve X, Y, and Z in specific time frames and current output of teams won't cut it.
These solutions stem from the same culture that is trying to get changed. Sometimes a challenging exercise is to step back and remove ourselves from the current biases in the context, especially if we're all time-bound to some task, behind, etc.
Complex Systems
We need buy-in from both "ends" of the graph if we embark on a "culture-changing" journey. Leaders need to update what gets rewarded and how to approach failures. But also, teams need to get curious and deeply involved in the new activities we want to be doing to improve outcomes.
But even a bit more than that, including all the people, the busiest, the ones that don't know why they need to be doing this, or what benefit this will bring? How do you think I could bring in their needs?
So, culture and cultural change are emergent, and we need to be invested in each attempt to move the needle further, bit by bit.
Especially as systems will tend to the status quo when we try to change them too much at a given time, we need to embark on the journey of changing culture, retaining identity, and reshaping the identity simultaneously.
When people say things like "code coverage is not high enough," but the quality is not rewarded, or even among the values that the organization shows, then asking everyone on a weekly meeting to "Team X, Y, and Z bring your code coverage up by A%" will effectively treat that metric as something to avoid punishment, or being put on the spotlight.
But then, on the day-to-day operations, teams are forced to cut corners to deliver the project on time.
Culture doesn't eat strategy for breakfast, but they need to go out for a bunch.
Your Turn
Let me know how you handle the current culture in your organization. Have you attempted to change a culture? How did that go?
Happy coding!
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