Psyched For Business Podcast Episode 16
Episode 16:
Improving Business Culture in 2023 with Paula Brockwell
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Episode 16 - Transcript
Voiceover 0:00
Welcome to Psyched For Business, helping business leaders understand and apply cutting edge business psychology principles in the workplace.
Richard Anderson 0:12
Hi, and welcome to Psyched for Business. I'm your host, Richard Anderson founder at Evolve Assess. In today's episode I'm joined by Occupational psychologist Paula Brockwell, who is a specialist in helping HR teams improve culture across their business. In this episode, we talk through all things culture and employee experience. And Paula offers some brilliant insights in how businesses can look to improve this in 2023. I hope you enjoy the episode. Thanks again for listening.
Paula Brockwell. Welcome to Psyched For Business. Thanks for joining me.
Paula Brockwell 0:45
Thanks for having me.
Richard Anderson 0:47
It's a pleasure, pleasure to have you on this lovely Friday, overcast Friday as it is in England. And you just told me before we started recording, Paula, that culture is your favorite subject, your favorite topic to talk about? So I plan this all around culture. So you'll be pleased to be pleased to learn that we have a little chat about culture. Why not? But I think what, and obviously I've done an intro kind of separately to this, of course, Paula, to introduce yourself, but I'm never going to introduce you as well as you can introduce yourself. So if you'd be happy to, would you mind telling the audience kind of who you are or what you do?
Paula Brockwell 1:22
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so my name is Paula Brockwell. I'm an occupational psychologist. And honestly, I've been kicking about this stuff for a long time, you know, kind of doing everything from leadership development, to culture fit assessments and things like that over the years, but I find my home probably about 10 years ago, in culture change, and really trying to look at how you influence behaviors and influence whole organizations to get people to behave how they want. So I'm a bit obsessed with it. Really, I just love creating kind of happy, healthy environments for people to really succeed at work.
Richard Anderson 1:57
Well, it's a fascinating subject. And I know that you call yourself on LinkedIn, the Culture Cultivator. Is that Is that right? Yeah, it's a really, really catchy title, I think. So culture is something that really interests me. It's something that I've always, I always like to think that I've prided myself on building a great culture in my business. But I'm always going to say that Paula, of course, I guess, the real, honest people will be my employees. But I guess if we take a step back, and maybe kind of start with a bit of a blank slate, what do we mean by culture? In a company organizational culture? What's it all about?
Paula Brockwell 2:30
Yeah, well, for me, it's about how it feels to work here. In all honesty, if we ask the question of what does it mean, it's that added up bit of what does it mean in terms of how it feels to work here, and how is culture defined, it's all the systems, the processes, the ingredients, habits, beliefs, behaviors that make people feel as they do, but also act as they do. So culture is this weird kind of self reinforcing thing where it encourages people to behave certain ways, but how we behave also influences the culture. So it's this strange kind of feedback loop that happens in terms of encourages people to be a certain way. But then how we are actually influences how it feels, which in turn encourages people to behave in a certain way.
Richard Anderson 3:13
It's really interesting. So if we were, again, blank slate, obviously, great definition of culture, but what if I wanted to, for my business, start to define the culture, I don't know whether that will be the right term. But if I define my culture, what would be? So if you were to, you know, come into my business? Or if you would even be a fly on the wall? What would you be recommending that I do to define a culture that I want? So the ways in which I want my employees to behave and the spirit or whatever that might be across the team within a culture? What, what should I start by doing?
Paula Brockwell 3:45
Yeah, well, for me, I think, you know, a lot of a lot of the cultural models out there are really complex around looking at different kind of micro pieces of the ecosystem and saying, you know, we've got to look exactly, our leadership's got to look exactly like this, etc. For me, though, the starting point really is harnessing that the idea of employee experience and having a conversation with people about how do we need it to feel here for us to be able to deliver our business results. So I think there's a big thing about simplicity, that idea of everyday experience, how does it feel is massively uniting easy for everybody to access and really easy to measure and stay accountable against? But I think there's also a big piece about, how does it need to be here for the business to succeed? So we've got to understand that culture isn't just a nice to have, it's a tool for the business to thrive and succeed. And so understanding where you're going with your business, what your goals are, what does that mean in terms of the type of talent, the tone of behavior that you need? And then translating that into the experience that will help that type of talent and that tone of behavior thrive is really important. So understand, where you want to get to and what you're trying to deliver and what your people need. Yeah, and then connect well, how does it need To feel here for people to feel really happily excited about making that happen. That, for me is the magic of culture. And I think a lot of times we overcomplicate it into lots of different models and measures, but just how do we make it fit on your what does it need to feel like for people to do, what we need them to do is really what it boils down to?
Richard Anderson 5:18
Yeah interesting. So how much of it and again, this might be the one of the maybe the overcomplicated models that you've just referred to, but But how much of it kind of ties in to company values?
Paula Brockwell 5:31
Yeah, so I think values are really interesting, you know, if I'm completely honest, and maybe I'll be a bit contentious here, but I've never really seen new values or imposed values work in an organization. I think company values, people try to use values to say this is the intent, this is how we would like you to behave. So it's trying to direct that tone of behavior, but they're massively broad words that we can all interpret differently. So you know, what you think is innovative, as a head of a tech company might be really different to what I think's innovative. As a psychologist who's, you know, digging into the past and things potentially, maybe not. Probably is different in turn, particularly thinking about innovative tech, we'll have very different views on that. I'm excited that I've got a Calendly link at the moment, let's be honest. So but, you know, so how I describe innovative will be really different from how you describe it. And so, if we're trying to use those words, to unite, we're not going to be able to because everybody brings a different frame of reference to it. So they're interesting, they're great if you can capture what's if the values have already aligned, and you can capture what's already existing in the business great. But for true kind of culture, transformation and cultivation, I didn't really think that that helpful, because people get excited about building them, but then they don't really know how to enact them, and they don't know how to evaluate them, or encourage them because there's such a big concept. So for me, that peace around, how does it feel here? That's our values alive? You know, are they acting I? And are they having an impact on people? So they're almost like, that's the back of the same equation. It's just at the back end of it values and input that's really difficult to quantify the outcome, the employee experiences the outcome. And I guess I, for me, that shift is massively important within culture change. It's a bit like the evolution that performance management took, say, 10 years ago, when we stopped saying you need to make 10 widgets an hour and said, and said, you know, make 10 amazing, you know, whatever microphones that people want to buy, or get 10 People buying these things. So inputs versus outcomes, a lot of the HR world and the performance and business world has shifted to outcome focus. But culture still focuses on inputs and values in a lot of places, which for me, is a reason why it's not doing what it needs to do a lot of the time.
Richard Anderson 7:51
Culture should all be kind of governed by that whole output or outcome focus, or even though the example that you gave before that we might have a different idea of what's innovative in technology. So presumably, that doesn't much matter, as long as we're heading and aiming towards the same goal. And it feels the same for both of us. Absolutely. As far as the vision of the company is concerned.
Paula Brockwell 8:11
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, you know, if if the goal in fact is that we feel that we are, that we're both kind of trying new things that we feel like we're experimenting, that we feel open, you know, that we feel other people are open to new ideas and approaches. So if you if we were working in the same business, and you came to me and said, I've got this really great bit of tech that I think would fix things for you. And you should be holding me accountable to say Yes, sounds amazing. Let's apply that let's take an innovative approach. But that's more about making, making you feel like I'm open to ideas and open to your views, and that you're valued and considered and driving that innovation through input rather than me being something that I probably don't need to be in the system. Really, it would be your job to bring that to me and me to adopt it.
Richard Anderson 8:59
Of course, but yeah, it's a really interesting way of looking at like it. So when when, okay, so we're talking about how it feels to be here and outcome kind of generate? And is that something that is typically kind of, I was going to use the word dictator, that will be the wrong word. But is that something that's kind of implemented by the owners of the company's senior management initially? How does that how does that in your experience, how does that typically work?
Paula Brockwell 9:24
Yeah, you know, I think there's a really interesting thing, again, that's happening within the HR field, where often culture is seen as something that's owned by HR and a lot of HR functions are transforming themselves into the people and culture function. That seems to be the the next iteration of, of HR. My view, in all honesty is that HR or the cultivators, the owners, I guess, the champions of culture, but actually the people who really make it happen are everyone you know, it's got to be owned by the leaders in terms of the tone that definition of what group looks like because they Are the people who are setting the strategic direction, but they've also got the ability to influence the infrastructure, the systems, the business model will impact the culture. So if on one side a business model, a tone of decision making resourcing is being set by business leaders, but then they're asking HR to set a culture that is totally counter to what's happening operationally, it's never going to come together. So really, those two pieces of the system need to come together and say, This is what Britain needs to look like, while listening to everyone else, listening to colleagues about what they need to be able to thrive. That's the magic comes from everybody being part of it, but leaders and HR leaders really coming together and owning that and HRs being enablers of culture, rather than the owners of it, I think,
Richard Anderson 10:46
Yeah, of course, presumably, for businesses who maybe don't have an independent HR function, it would just be those leaders because I think one of the one of the areas that I've got real interest in as in you know, this already is kind of small business and businesses that are growing from being kind of startups or microsized business, particularly in the tech space. Often, you'll, you'll see, you'll again, you'll notice yourself that a lot of tech companies are global get VC funding investment, and then they'll scale rapidly and they'll be recruiting lots and lots and lots of people that can imagine that for those types of businesses, maybe just before they've they've brought in an HR function, a specific HR function. But then all of a sudden, they're bringing in a lot of employees, I can imagine that culture drift in that type of organization. And I'm not just saying tech, this will be the world over no doubt. But do you see that quite often that the culture will will drift completely from what it was when the company first started out?
Paula Brockwell 11:42
Absolutely, because I think often in that kind of small startup kind of starting to scale up situation. You don't have to naturally cultivate it. The team is small enough that direct leadership impact how you recruit the team makeup will self regulate, and set a culture that works. So where it becomes needed to more consciously cultivate it, I think is particularly as well in a systemized way you consciously cultivate it when you're a small team Anyway, don't you? But in a more systemized way, if you're going to do that, as you grow, often what you find is you get dilution or drift as it's absolutely right. And I think one of the things that great leaders can do is if they know they're going to scale as capture the magic while you're small, so define what has made you great, understand that systemize it define that bit around how you want it to feel around here. And then you can start to make conscious efforts in your growth about how do you consciously cultivate that, and I use the word cultivate, because I think culture is a bit like, a culture is a bit like gardening, almost, you know, you choose if you know what flowers you want, you choose the soil, you decide how often you need to water, you figure out what plants go beside each other to complement each other. So if you're doing that piece, as you scale, you're giving yourself a real chance to succeed. But you've, you've got to, well, you don't have to do it early, but it's helpful to do it while the magic is still really clear. Because then you can say, This is what our magic recipe for growth is. Let's see how we protect that as we work our way through.
Richard Anderson 13:12
Yeah, brilliant. So, so just again, just to maybe use me as an example. So I've got, there'll be about six of us. And there is six of us in the team. But let's say that we want to turn the team into nine or 10 people by the end of this year, I mean, that's ambitious, like not gonna happen by the end of the year, but still, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a big growth almost, you know, 100% Extra members of staff probably over the coming, you know, let's say nine months or whatever. Now, obviously, I love my team, we've got a you know, what, how I, what I feel is a brilliant culture, again, you have to double check that with them and I hope that would say the same thing. But but for me, it's massively important that that culture is maintained, because it's going to be it'll be it'll be horrendous if we have a completely different culture, not just for me, but for the employees that have been there up until this point. So if you were if you were supporting me Paula, it will be, you know, presumably after hire for for cultural fit, but what are the maybe what, what's the what's the biggest or the most important thing that you would tell me to do in order to make sure that the next four employees that I take on mirror the culture that we've built so far,
Paula Brockwell 14:18
What I would suggest is less about culture fit in all honesty, and more about culture. And so thinking about where you're going and high how your tone needs, because what you do as a team of six versus what you do as a team of nine or 12, or 24 Some of that you'll really be able to keep and protect, but some of it might need to shift a little bit to ensure that you don't get you know, small group, there's a risk as you scale of in group out group etc. You know, that kind of informalness of family that can become with small group becomes difficult when you think about performance management and goal alignment as you get bigger. So recognizing the small bits that you might need to evolve, not let go off but evolve and look at how they might play out a bit differently in a bigger team. I would say is the first piece. And then I would start to think about, well, how do my new hires add to that? How did they help me evolve that systemize that prepare for enacting that in a bigger team and bring my current team along on that journey? Because there will be a transition and an evolution for them? So, for me, I would say the first step is more about, well, where are we at the minute what's really working, but how might that be challenged? Or, you know, stress tested a bit with a bigger team? Is that really going to deliver what I need? Or do we need to evolve any bits? And then start to think about in that ideal culture moving forward? How will these people really compliment and flavor and build build to the magic that we've got, rather than just kind of slotting in perhaps to what we have already? Because it will invariably lead to change a little bit at least?
Richard Anderson 15:47
Yeah, of course. No, that makes complete sense. And I guess I'm just looking at through the lens of a small business owner, there are lots of inevitably huge organizations that this affects massively, I would imagine, how has and so how I'm just trying to think of how to phrase this question, but how has remote working or hybrid working or everything, you know, the the new way of working since the pandemic, has that affected culture across organizations? Or is that just not that isn't just not coming to play? Maybe I'm overthinking that? Well.
Paula Brockwell 16:23
I think it has massively. A lot of the clients that I'm working with now are really grappling with that sense of connection and communication. You know, those are being really shy for them in terms of how do they support people in that, I suppose I've got a bigger question. I've always got a bigger question than I. But, you know, for me, I think the pandemic fundamentally shifted people's connection to work and their expectation of how work fits into the rest of their life. And so some of the challenges around connection are about remote or flexible, working and less, you know, just face time with each other. And the fact that businesses maybe haven't evolved, how they use that time together, or how they create meaningful connections, they've just tried to do it, as they've always done and it's not working. So there's some evolution that's needed on that. But I also think that there needs to be an acceptance that work isn't the be all and end all for a lot of people now and actually creating that more balanced deal and making it feel helping people identify what's in it for them, and what work helping them really see what role works needs to play for them line moving forward to support that reconnection is important. I think this kind of tendency to just try and pull people back into the office and get them back to the good old days, you know, everybody's around the water cooler, the magical happen again, I think that's really missing the mark, because it doesn't pick up on the fact that actually for some people, their view of work, and their view of how work fits has just fundamentally shifted. And that's not going to answer it is going to make them go and find a job that's more flexible, where there still be the same challenges. Really, I don't know, there's some businesses here doing it really well. I don't know if you've seen this as well. But you know, like, I used to work in, in recruitment in the very early stages. When I worked in a recruiter I was, I was part of the kind of big scale Assessment and Selection teams for for building government, big government departments at the time. And so I know a lot of people from that time who know I work in big kind of recruitment process outsourcing businesses, and a lot of them do work and have worked for 10 or 15 years virtually, because it's, you know, multinational accounts, working across the globe. And they do a great job of creating that connection in that team sense. And I think what we actually need to do is look at where it's already working and learn some lessons from that, rather than deciding it isn't working. Really. Yeah, no, I my flexible working soapbox.
Richard Anderson 18:47
Well, it's a really interesting topic. And we can probably talk for ages on it because it's, it's, it's been a challenge for me personally, because when I when I first started, and I've talked about this a couple of times on podcasts previously, when I started doing doing the business that I'm done doing evolve, I started and I did it from home exclusively. And it was kind of six years ago, just just six years, I think to the day tomorrow, randomly enough, but um, but at that time, I was working exclusively from home because I couldn't afford an office that was the reason that I didn't choose to have an office that was that was the reality at the time. And it wasn't a choice but but the funny thing is Paula at the time, it seemed to me that every single person I was speaking to was in an office and they were having a good time with colleagues it was just me by myself and as an extrovert naturally, I really struggled and when I started the company out of the first couple of employees Ashleigh who you know for example, she She's exactly the same she wanted to work in an office and then the next person wanted to work in an office and it was really tricky because when I've interviewed recently it's been very much you know, what's the flexibility here? You know, can can we work from home and it's not a problem to work from home we do. I mean, I'm at home as we say no, I normally do kind of three and two, but it's a really tough one as well because I'm going to have certain People that want that level of Well, everyone wants flexibility, of course, but certain people who want to work at home, some people want to work in the office. And it's just, yeah, it's a really interesting, interesting one, what you said, and as you rightly say that there are loads of people who are doing it really well.
Paula Brockwell 20:14
I think there's a bit in there about curating correction connection point. So I've been I've got one client who I've worked with through the whole pandemic, supporting them in terms of creating that calms and connection, the like, and, and they did very much make the choice of trying to get people back into the office setting a minimum number of days, and they only said two days a week. But one of the things, we got a lot of feedback on that whenever it first started to help them evolve the approach. And one of the things that they heard and responded to really quickly was people being massively frustrated that they were coming into the office to spend a day on teams calls anyway, when they felt like they could have done that at home. And so we were really talking about that definition of how do you use your office days? How do you manage team or cross team diaries to make sure that people have have those connection points. So I think there's a thing about a healthy dose of purpose and curating your contact with people to build that connection. So if you are, if you have got a team with different preferences, you're being really clear about what the benefit of coming together or not coming together is so that then people can make the right choices about how to connect or not to connect really?
Richard Anderson 21:21
Absolutely. So So one of the things I've you know, as you know, poor off, I follow quite closely on LinkedIn, where we've been connected for a little while, it's nice to see an active poster on LinkedIn, I always try and do the same myself and getting better than I was brilliant. But you talk a lot about employee experience and kind of how that ties into culture. It's not something I'm hugely familiar with. In truth, I'd love to learn more. But why have you? Why have you chosen the route of employee experience when it comes to your posts and the work that you do?
Paula Brockwell 21:50
Yeah, well I think, you know, having worked in culture for a long time, I think that, you know, I started to really focus on this breadth of culture, while working within the wellbeing space. And I think that, particularly 10 years ago, when I started to work, there, still probably quite a lot, now, people wanted interventions that were just focused on changing individuals behaviors, rather than thinking about how you support people to really be the best they can be. So, you know, kind of, it just frustrated me that culture change often focuses on what individuals need to do rather than the whole system, how it influences them. And I think the lovely thing about employee experience is it uses user centered design to really put colleagues at the heart of figuring out what's the best thing to do, and what's the change that what's the change that they see needs to happen. And for me, there's a whole thing about you've got to activate the whole herd, if you want to make that whole change happen. And employee experience does that like a big part of it? In all honesty, I think there's, you know, there's a massive movement happening within it. And a big part of it is about taking the employee lifecycle and designing the key contact points with colleagues to maximize value around those using that user centered design approach. I'm less interested in that if I'm honest, I feel like you know, that's something that organizations can do pretty independently with a bit of process mapping. What I'm more interested in is all those other moments that people have, and how do you really set your organizational ecosystem to allowing people to succeed, and really kind of those moments to encourage people to behave the way that you want them to? Because they feel motivated and excited to do so. Really?
Richard Anderson 23:29
Yeah. Interesting. So user centric design, would you mind just explaining what what that means for the layperson?
Paula Brockwell 23:35
All right. So yeah, sorry. Yeah, the idea of it really is, is that you, you put the user and their experience at the center of anything that you do. So often, whenever we design processes, we think about the process owners and how things are easy for them and how they get the information that they need. But that really, that design process flips that on the side, or, you know, when its head and thinks about, well, how do the end users of this process? Or, the ultimate recipients of this? How will this make them feel? And how can we maximize positive impact for them? So it comes really from Tech Design kind of user interface, process design around that, it then headed into the customer experience in terms of driving customer experience? And it's beautifully making its way into the employee experience space, which I think is absolutely right, because we need to think about how we're making colleagues feel, if we want them to feel like if we want them to behave, how we want them to really
Richard Anderson 24:29
bring brilliant. So I've read a little bit, obviously a little bit of preparation, of course, for this podcast, but seen it previously on LinkedIn, the EX index that you've that you've recently bought, there is a reason I've seen it recently. But would you tell me a little bit more about that?
Paula Brockwell 24:49
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It is pretty recent. But to be honest, it's kind of come from that last, you know, 10 years of working with businesses and I think being in a lot of boardrooms, where I'm talking to leaders and really trying to get them to see that connection between the business and the environment that you create through either your own behavior or the choices that you make around operating models, strategic priorities, whatever it may be helping them see how the environment that you create impacts the behaviors that you get. So trying to break through that narrative of being brought in on a consultancy project. And somebody said to me, you just need to make those people more personally responsible, and helping them break down and say, Look, all of these things in your environment are telling those people not to take responsibility to ask you for permission to double check things that it's risky to make mistakes, because they're negatively impacted, or whatever it may be, to help people see how the system is encouraging people to behave in different ways. But that conversation can be really loopy and muddy. And people can feel quite defensive in it, because you're encouraging them to look at themselves, as well as everything else. So I kind of used all that experience and all those conversations and a shedload of research around, you know, what drives certain behaviors and work to say, let's just break this down. So what the EX index does in short, is it it allows you to kind of say, these are things that are acceptable to us around here, this is the sort of this is kind of what we do, and then gives you back an indication of well, what does that mean across five cultural pillars? How would we, how are you likely to describe your culture? But what does that mean in terms of how people are likely to feel and therefore how are they likely to behave? So it's a great way, if you've either got some really great behaviors that you want to get a sense of, how do I replicate these you can see, probably what's driving it. And it's useful to do some more stuff that enables that. But also on the other side, it allows you to identify what I call your culture killer. So the things where maybe it's personal responsibility, maybe it's risk aversion, maybe it's a discomfort with change those things that no matter what you try and do to get rid of them just seem to hang around, what that's probably telling you is there's some unconscious stuff in your environment that you're not noticing, that's encouraging those behaviors to stay. And the EX index kind of helps you identify those so that you can start to kind of say, right, well, this is the stuff, you know, this is why it's happening. So I've got to go back and look at my system, if I want those behaviors to change, I've got to stop blaming those people and tweak my system to get.
Richard Anderson 27:20
So yes, it sounds really interesting. So the cultural killers or the culture killers that you talked about before? Do you ever find that? Are they completely unique on a kind of case by case basis? Or do you find that some are more apparent than others?
Paula Brockwell 27:34
Yeah, do you know, it's pretty common? To be honest, you know, there, there were some things that, you know, very similar, you know, it really, really is, a lot of human behavior can be bundled into categories. And I think there's a range, there's probably, there's probably four or five other are there for me in my model. Anyway, there's kind of five categories of, of culture killers that drive things through that are likely to impact things. So, you know, I think people different organizations will have a different mix of those things, because it all comes down to legacy history and those inherent systems and norms that are in place. But I've never, I don't think, well, for a long time, I haven't been surprised when I've seen certain behaviors, because I normally see where they're coming from and the ecosystem. So it's a bit like, you know, individual human behavior, we're all quite predictable sausage is really, you know, you can codify it. So, organizations work the same way, when they're just massive. They're just big systems, you know, that. If you push one lever, you can't, you know, you get something like the other end. So once you start to look at it as a whole system, suddenly, it makes sense, where a lot of I think the challenge that a lot of businesses have is they look at one part of the system. And they're like, Why, either Why are my leaders doing this? Or why are my colleagues doing this, and they look so much at the individuals that they can't understand what's driving it. But as soon as you step back and look at that bigger picture, suddenly you can see what's influencing through the whole system. That's, that's so important to me in my approach is that I just think you can, you can try and train stuff, I have people, but it won't work. Because the system is encouraging them to do stuff, you know, that bit around stepping back to make a difference, I think is massively important. And I've got to a point in my career, where if somebody's not asking me to do that, I just say no thanks, because I'm not interested in squeezing and squeezing one part of the system that hasn't got the capacity to change by itself.
Richard Anderson 29:28
Not I quite agree. And I was just thinking of a bit of a random and probably quite a basic example. So when I think and again, it's a little bit abstract to me, because I've never worked in a big organization with lots of different departments, but I hear anecdotally from other people when they have the challenges that maybe they have in terms of culture, and they might have a team are a bunch of teams and you know, nine out of 10 teams might be adopting and you know, have a fantastic culture and then there's one team there. You have a you know, a middle manager, Team Leader. or whatever, that's a bit of a bully, that that's not treating the team very well. And then all of a sudden, that entire team that they've got their heads down when they go to work, they're leaving left, right and center. And if you were doing like an audit kind of culturally, and it was one particular individual, you know, is that is that something? Is that often part of a bigger picture? or can that often just be that one individual?
Paula Brockwell 30:21
Yeah, so sometimes it is just an individual. I think the question then comes when it when I do things like cultural audit, what I will look at is each part of the system, what's going on and influencing this. And typically, you'll find that, that you can get isolated behavior, where it's the challenge for me, the more systemic issues come if that thing has been if that behavior has been tolerated or permitted for a long period of time, then that's at that point, you might step back and say, right, systemically, you need to have a think about this in terms of how you manage performance, or high, or, you know, one of the things that can often happen in cultures is performance, performance is prioritized over behavior. So a very high performing manager who delivers a huge amount of commercial return to a business or whatever it may be, their behavior is tolerated because of that value. So where that's normally one of the reasons why those behavioral challenges or those team difficulties are tolerated for longer problem for longer issue or longer time points. But that doesn't taking that systemic approach doesn't mean that you don't sometimes you see that there is something going on within a particular team. In my view, looking at that manager, you would want to think about, well, what's driven that behavior? What's encouraged it? Is it is it personally driven? Is it something about the the way they've been led? Is that something about the way the system is set up in terms of the pressure of the priorities? Is that about the business model? And what they're exceeding what is being expected of them, etc. So you'd want to ask some bigger questions to avoid popping another manager in there and finding that the circumstances encourage the same behaviors for them?
Richard Anderson 32:01
Yeah. And if that's been tolerated for a long period of time, then the issue is far more deep rooted, and it's culturally across the business rather than that, that one particular individual? Interesting. Yeah, go on, sorry.
Paula Brockwell 32:13
I was just gonna say, I think there's a thing is there, you know, from that example, it's a good example of, you know, not complicating it for the sake of it understood, like, absolutely be curious and understand the root cause. So take a broad enough perspective that you understand the root causes, but always look for the simplest answer and the simplest solution. And I think that's important. You know, it's yeah, looking broadly doesn't mean overcomplicating it, it just means making sure that you're excluding all the possibilities to get to the true answer, I think.
Richard Anderson 32:40
Yeah, quite agree. I think that's it. That's exactly here. In terms of cultural audit, I think that's what we said cultural audit, a culture audit, and do a lot of this sort of thing for businesses, how you know, how we how do you typically go about that polar view, we're going into a big organization who's got a few issues around culture, or they're experiencing cultural drift, and they want to get back on track? What what would be the typical thing that you would that you would do with these organizations?
Paula Brockwell 33:12
Yeah, well, so typically, I kind of use cultural the cultural audit, for me is more about kind of shorter, sharper issues and what's going on within, you know, either teams or individuals. So I do like remediation work. If If, as you said, you know, a manager or leaders is behaving in a way that's unhelpful, then often, I'll do some one to one work to really understand what drives them, what motivates them, what's going on to drive those unhelpful behaviors and give them some feedback and coaching to support them to move into a different mode, as well as helping the business to support them differently? So I think it depends on what you're auditing, really, when I work in a larger, cultural, you know, larger organizational level, I try to avoid, avoid, if I'm honest, the the kind of culture audit approach, what I much prefer to do is support businesses to be focused more on Well, where are we going on things? So rather than where, you know, let's come in and use a standard model to evaluate the gaps because no culture, you know, no culture for me should evaluate against a single model. For me, what we should really do at that whole business level in particular is say, the right back to the start of our conversation, what does good look like for your context, your business goals, and where you want to go set your ideal standard? And then let's evaluate the gap in terms of where your current businesses so technically, do I then do a cultural audit against that standard? Yes. Do I like using that language? No, because it sounds like we're just looking at it's probably it's probably more about the opportunities. But if you see the journey that people then need to take, what you can then start to do was really say, right, well, let's have a look at your heaven forbid your whole ecosystem. I love it, don't I? But I've got like a tool that I use, which I've grandly titled The Cultural Catalyst Map, but the idea is that it's estimize that ecosystem kind of creates like a dashboard that saying, Let's go across all the parts of your organization that are likely to influence where you are live versus where you want to get to. And let's red, amber, green those against your ideal state. And then basically, what you're doing is given a single dashboard, that's saying, well, here's your reds, and here's your Amber's, let's figure out which ones are gonna give you the most bang for your buck to get closer to your ideal. And then clients really use that to pick off the bits they want to work on, but then continue to evaluate their progress. So for me, it's really important to support self sufficiency. So I set that up so that they can evaluate that reevaluate themselves and their progress over time. So then they can just use that, you know, again, kind of going back to the tech space, you know, learning lessons from what's worked, and really big implementations, taking a more sprint based approach. So let's do a few things, evaluate progress, see where our dashboard is, try few more things that keep going in that way, which I think really, really keeps that focus and clarity in terms of what's important and where we are knowing rather than, Oh, God, we've got this massive thing to do in the next five years.
Richard Anderson 36:08
Yeah I was glad that you mentioned that about kind of monitoring and evaluating as time goes on as well, because it's one thing to put in these grids, implementing the grid, you process or kind of intervention when it comes to kind of cultural alignment and fit. But if you're not monitoring that, and make sure that you're not drifting again, in three months time, or whatever, that's that's got to be the most important thing.
Paula Brockwell 36:30
It's a bit like gorilla warfare, like you, you must find this in leading your own team, you know, sometimes you think something's going to be amazing, and really take hold, and they go, Oh, yeah. All right, then. And it's exactly the same in culture, you know, you've got to go with where, you know, if you want to move the masses, you've got to go with what catches their attention. So often, if you try and create a single linear plan and cultural change, you're going to be disappointed and frustrated, if you take small bursts, you can see what fires light, and you go with those. And for me that agile approach to finding where what builds momentum and pushing them as that as that ball rolls down the hill, giving it all the support, it needs to gain momentum and direct to get that, for me is the way to make the magic happen.
Richard Anderson 37:12
Yeah, love it. Yeah, really love it. So Paula, I can't believe the time I can't believe we've already done almost 40 minutes really enjoyed speaking has been really, really interesting. And just to give you the opportunity to tell any of the listeners how they can get in touch with you, if they want to speak about anything relating to their organizational culture. How will they do that?
Paula Brockwell 37:32
Yeah, well, so as you said, I'm lurking on LinkedIn a lot. So if people want to connect to my LinkedIn profile and send me a DM, feel free, I'll give you have a copy of my, either the free link to my EX index. So if anyone's interested in just having a look at their current culture, and making that link through then I'll provide that. And the only other thing is I'm doing a webinar actually in a few weeks time, the 18th of July on Culture killers. So if you check out my LinkedIn profile, you'll find a bit more on that if you're a bit interested in hearing a bit more detail about that.
Richard Anderson 38:07
Fantastic. Can I come to that as well?
Paula Brockwell 38:09
Yeah, absolutely.
Richard Anderson 38:12
Get myself signed up. But yes, we will put a link to the E x index and the information about the webinar all in the blog post that this goes out. As part of yes, we'll make sure that we get it up before that before that date of it. Absolutely. And then we'll we'll do by the brilliant while. I'm Paula Brockwell. Really, really enjoyed having you on Psyched For Business. Thank you very much.
Paula Brockwell 38:33
Thank you. Appreciate it.
Voiceover 38:37
Thanks for listening to Psyched For Business for shownotes resources and more visit evolveassess.com
Notes and references:
1. 'Confront your Culture Killers: Unlock Great Culture Cultivation and Change' Webinar -https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/confront-your-culture-killers-unlock-great-culture-cultivation-and-change-tickets-668675736127?aff=oddtdtcreator
