How To Design And Build A Healthy Company Culture: Melissa Daimler (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of author Melissa Daimler’s talk titled “How To Design And Build A Healthy Company Culture” at TEDxBocaRaton 2024 conference.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Early Sailing Lessons

I grew up sailing with my dad on a 23-foot boat on Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin. Every Saturday morning, we would get on that boat, and despite doing this hundreds of times before, my dad would ask me the same questions. Where is the wind coming from? And based on that, what sails are we going to use? Are we going to use two? Are we going to use one? Are we going to reef the sail? And about those sails, what are your lines doing? Are they all untangled? And where is your crew, your experienced crew? My sister, does she know what her role is and how you want to bring in the sails today? And where are we going? What is your course? And are you prepared to change course when the winds change and the tide comes in later in the day?

My dad taught me that everything on the boat is connected. You can’t just focus on one part, and you have to keep adjusting along the way. He gave me a master class in systems thinking, and as I started my career, I realized that organizational culture, like sailing, is a system. You can’t just focus on one part, and you have to keep evolving it along the way, because culture is a set of interconnected actions and behaviors that happen across the organization.

Understanding Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is how we work with each other. I have a 25-year, 360-degree view of organizational culture from some of the fastest-growing top technology companies in the world. I have seen, as an employee and a leader, what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to creating culture.

Speaking of what doesn’t work, I joined a fast-growing unicorn company in 2016. In hindsight, there were definitely some red flags. The co-founder interviewed me without any shoes or socks on and asked me when I was going to have children. Yes. I just took that as validation that they needed me even more.

Common Misconceptions About Culture

What I realized very quickly, within a few weeks, is that they defined organizational culture like so many other companies define it. Fully stocked refrigerators of beer, ping pong tables of people playing in the lobby, and having, “Thank God it’s Monday,” employee mandatory parties with tequila shots flowing on Monday evenings. Tuesday mornings were very quiet at the office. They got culture wrong, like so many other companies. They thought culture was perks and parties, things we have versus things we can do. I realized that culture is, in fact, a system.

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The Importance of Culture

It’s been around for so many years and we keep getting it wrong. There have been thousands of research articles about the importance of culture and how healthy cultures are correlated with successful business outcomes. Just this last year, there was a study done and they asked executives about culture and they said almost 70% thought culture was even more important than strategy. So why do companies keep getting organizational culture wrong? They don’t know how to do it. It takes a long time and it’s hard.

The Evolution of Organizational Culture

Culture as a concept has been around for 70 years. A social scientist by the name of Dr. Elliot Jocks first coined the term culture when he was working in factories in 1951. And he said culture just happens by default. It’s based on employees’ assumptions and beliefs. And while we have evolved the definition over these 70 years from the factory to our hybrid workplaces, it still hasn’t been defined in a way that you can codify and operationalize culture in the way that we can design it together.

Reculturing: A Playbook for Modern Culture

So I wanted to define it in that way. I decided to create a playbook for modern culture. And I call it Reculturing. And it’s made up of three steps:

Define your values-based behaviors.
Integrate those behaviors into your processes.
Reinforce those behaviors in your practices.

And I’m going to go through each one of those now.

Step 1: Defining Values-Based Behaviors

Most companies, when they start to define culture, end when they define the values. And it is a great way to start because you can define what’s important to you. But you have to also go further with behaviors. On the boat, safety was a big value of my dad’s. And he could have chosen hundreds of behaviors with that. But one of the core behaviors was to follow safety guidelines no matter what. So regardless of the conditions, we always had to wear a life jacket. And while annoying, we always felt safe and we always knew what he expected.

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Most companies have values like this on a wall. You’ve seen all of them or you’ve seen them on websites. But how would I know if you were doing teamwork? How would I know if you were having integrity? What would you be doing? What would you not be doing?

I actually worked with two different companies who had the same value of innovation. But one company wanted to speed up that innovation process and one company wanted to slow it down. They wanted quality ideas. So that company that wanted to speed it up, they wanted more messy first drafts out there, they created a behavior that said, “We get version one out there quickly.” The one that wanted more quality ideas, they created a behavior of asking more questions. They asked “why” a lot more. So one value, two different behaviors with two very different expectations. So you have to define your values-based behaviors first.

Step 2: Integrating Behaviors into Processes

The second step is your processes. How do you operationalize and integrate those behaviors into your work? Processes are things like how we hire, how we onboard, how we develop, how we make decisions.

On the boat, there was a process that we always did and it was called the pre-sale checklist. Life jackets for everyone, check. Flares that weren’t expired, check. And fuel, check. Again, we were annoyed every single time, but we felt safe because we were following those safety guidelines.

You take that same concept into the organization that wanted to speed up ideas, get to version one quickly through that behavior. They integrated that behavior into their hiring process. So when they interviewed candidates, one of the behaviors that they asked in a question was, “Tell me about a time that you launched something and it wasn’t quite as far along as you wanted it to be.” So they got a sense of how a behavior that was important to the organization showed up with that person, how they would exemplify that behavior themselves.

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Step 3: Reinforcing Behaviors in Practices

So you have defined your values-based behaviors, integrate them into processes. Now you have to do the practices. So practices are things like having meetings, communicating with each other, making decisions. On the boat, one of the practices that we always did was we folded the sail. Sails last longer and are ultimately safer when you don’t just keep them stuffed in a sail bag. So when we would get home from a long day of sailing, my dad and I would lay out the sail on the front yard and we would start doing what we called flaking the sail.

And sometimes my fold was uneven or I would get a piece of grass that would slip into the sail and I would avoid all eye contact with my dad because I did not want to start all over again. But I would look up and he would smile and say, “We have to start again.” We diligently took care of equipment on the boat because we followed safety guidelines. And if you take that into the organization again with that company that wanted to speed things up, they created a practice that in those first brainstorming meetings, they made sure that at least five people were in the meeting from various departments so that they could generate as many ideas as possible.

Conclusion

Re-culturing is a system of defining your values-based behaviors, integrating those into your processes and reinforcing those in your practices. I believe that we can and must design healthy organizational cultures and communities, one behavior, one process, one practice, and one perfectly folded sail at a time. Thank you.