Doug Houser:
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These days, company culture is everything, especially with so many businesses competing for top talent. We are hearing that in some instances, winning company culture is what will ultimately seal the deal when a prospective employee is considering multiple opportunities. So what are you doing to improve your company culture? Culture design strategist Steve Chaparro has helped companies transform their workplace culture through intentional co-creation and communication, and regularly speaks on this topic as a keynote speaker. Today, he's going to share his insight with us. Welcome to unsuitable, Steve.
Steve Chaparro:
Doug, I appreciate it. Thank you so much for the invitation. It's an honor to be here.
Doug:
Absolutely. This topic is near and dear to my heart. It's something certainly that we don't think enough about in our daily lives in our workplace. So tell me a little bit about how you got started, how you got interested in workplace culture and improving culture.
Steve:
It's a path that I think sometimes will beg a question from folks when they understand that I actually started my career in architecture. I went to architecture school and was in the field for about 10 years. And at the last firm that I was at, I was a VP of strategic design, and that's where we truly helped our clients tell their cultural stories in their space. We called it spatial storytelling. And so we would do a deep dive into who they were as a company, what were their values, how did they express those values? And we looked at their physical environment as one way to embody those values, it's literally a container for activities to embody those values. Or it actually served as a shaping mechanism to actually facilitate certain types of interactions that they were trying to espouse. So it's an aspirational move. What I found there was that there were a lot of companies that actually did not have a good sense of what that cultural narrative was.
Doug:
Sure.
Steve:
They hadn't had those conversations. And what we started to see when we would facilitate some of those initial conversations to really extract what that story was and extract what were those values. We did see tremendous value in holding those conversations. And in fact, in some cases, we felt that that was so necessary to describe the story before we even started shaping the space. And so we would actually, in some cases, suggest to them, either one, let us facilitate some of those discussions, or work with a consultant that can really help, in a sense, reshape your culture before we can reshape your space.
And then I started to have a real passion for actually focusing on that part of it, of shaping or designing the culture. I was very inspired by the words of Winston Churchill, who said, "We shape our buildings thereafter they shape us." And so that on one case the space side of it, but then I started to attribute, what if I inserted a different word for building? We shape our culture thereafter it shapes us, became a really driving focus for me. And so that's when I decided to take all of those learnings about leadership, about business, and about design, to really focusing on helping organizations redesign not just their culture, but also reshape their culture as well.
Doug:
That's fascinating. And when you think about the connectivity, for example, as you suggested with the physical space, and I think of certainly some companies and even industries that the physical space is such a part of their identity and how they design that. You see that quite a bit. That's an interesting connection.
Steve:
Yeah. I've worked at companies where there was such a misalignment between what they said that their values were in the type of activities or behaviors or interactions that they espoused with their team. And then their facilities were so stark, they in no way helped to facilitate that. In fact, it almost looked that it was a way of diminishing that type of thing. And so being that I was so attentive to that alignment when that misalignment happens, it's so apparent. And I think the younger generations are actually more in tune with that desire alignment. Whereas maybe the older generation say, "You know what? I've never seen that alignment happen, so I don't expect there ever to be that connection."
Doug:
Yeah. And how does that play into, we've seen this trend over the last 10 or 15 years to the open workspace, and more collaborative and things like that. And it seems like in recent years, pre-COVID, there was a little bit of, started to be some pushback on some of that. Maybe for either lack of personal space or it was too distracting, things like that. How do all those types of things play into that culture scenario?
Steve:
Yeah. I think one major downfall of just seeing, in the conversation about the open plan is when we look at one approach to space as a silver bullet. When we say that the open plan is going to work for every employee, for every department, for every function, I think that we're in danger of it just blowing up in our face. And it may work for a while, and it's just because of the novelty of it. But when we start to really dig into it, and as new generations enter into the workplace with their own expectations, we start to see that there is no silver bullet. Now I agree that there are some problems with the open plan. And in fact, there's some research that shows that the open plan is not necessarily a 10 or 15-year thing, it actually went back to when they started at the beginning of the 20th century of the 1930s when they had these administration farms if you will.
This open plan with a lot of typist or clerical folks that would work in this big open space, or even the newsrooms of the day. So this open plan is not a new concept and they actually moved away from it at the end of say, the fifties or sixties as the modular system started to happen with Herman Miller and things like that. And then we went back to it because the Facebooks and Googles of the world started to espouse it. Now, I think that there is a place for the open-plan today, but if it is part of what I call a spatial diversity approach, meaning it is one type of space within a toolkit of spaces that are used in any given office. And so I think what you really need to do is really identify what type of activity, what type of work, what type of interaction is being done for what type of person. And then you say, "Okay, then maybe the open plan is going to work." But for other folks, it may not work.
Doug:
That makes sense. That's a great perspective that you provided there overall. But if we think overall about culture, and obviously you work with a lot of organizations with regards to their culture, and I just think to my own experiences, the different organizations that I've worked for, and the clients and prospective clients that I know, almost to a T they would say, "Well, yeah, we have a good culture." Everybody thinks that. It's like, "Yeah, I got a good deal on my car." Nobody's ever going to say they got a bad deal. So where do you start when you first meet a company's owner, our audience here, obviously owner-managed businesses? And so how do you start with that to help identify ground zero and where do we go from here kind of a thing?
Steve:
Well, I think one of the things to think about is, I think many times organizations will have in fact a strong culture already, but it may not be the one they want to have. It may not be a positive one. It could be strong and be bad. And that's actually, one of the things that I found out is sometimes a strong culture can be a detriment because it's strong in the worst of ways. If you have a top-down hierarchical command and control type of structure, that's a very strong culture. It's just, it's not going to facilitate health moving forward, at least in the ways that things need to move forward.
So I think one of the first things to do is that a company at a leadership level needs to evaluate, what is their appetite for change? Because we can do all of these other things with surveys, we can have these workshops, we can have all these other things that bring the employees into the process of evaluating the structure. So I generally like to do a session or two with the leaders to really examine, what is your appetite for change? Because generally, most of the change doesn't need to happen out there, it needs to happen in the boardroom.
Doug:
Sure.
Steve:
At the leadership C suite. And so how much are you willing to change? How much control are you willing to give up to a process? Because I think so many times leaders think that they have to determine what the direction or what the change will be, and for them to place that power into the hands of others is really hard. So I think one, leadership examine, what do we need to work on? What appetite for change are we willing to have? How much trust are we willing to put into the process? Because the process from the process will emerge the right answers if you're asking good questions, but you have to ask good questions. And even to the point of, what is really the challenge here? And not go into predetermined insights as to what is really wrong, because I think when you deal with culture, you almost have to go into it with, "I don't know what I don't know."
Doug:
Yeah. So you have to be willing to evolve and let that happen organically as you go through this fact-finding process if I'm reading it correctly.
Steve:
Yeah. I use approaches and methodologies from the design world. So I think of it as the first thing is framing the problem. It's like Einstein says, I forget what the exact quote was, but if you gave me an hour, I'm going to spend 55 minutes determining what is the right problem to solve.
Doug:
Okay. Yeah.
Steve:
And so in the same vein is let's be professional question-askers first, and let's ask people for what they think. Because so many times the gap between the leadership executive, what they believe is a problem, and what the folks on the front lines believe is a problem, there's such a disparity.
Doug:
Yeah.
Steve:
And I think if you want to really hire or really enlist a subject matter expert on the cultural challenges of the company, it's not consultants and it's not executives, it's people on the front lines. And if you're willing to listen to them, I know I've been long-winded, but it goes back to the French physician who was the inventor of the stethoscope. He was teaching medical students how to use the stethoscope, and he said, "Listen to your patients, they're telling you how to heal them." And the same way with employees. If you want to heal the culture, then you need to listen to your employees because they're telling you how to heal your culture.
Doug:
Interesting. Yeah. And how do you get the employees, though, to open up and be really transparent and honest, without fear of reprisal? Say if there's been perhaps an unfortunate event or, or there's now maybe a change in ownership or a change in management, and you want to start fresh, how do you get that process to happen?
Steve:
There's been so much talk and written about this idea of psychological safety, and it's creating an environment in which people feel safe to express their opinions, to push back, to complain, to offer ideas, without the fear of some sort of retribution. And so a lot of times people will fear speaking up in a candid way because they believe that they might lose some professional capital favor or whatever. So I think the first thing that leaders must model is their own vulnerability, their own willingness to solicit feedback that may be uncomfortable, to express some of their own fears about the process. To say, "Hey, you know what? I'm used to taking things by the horns and giving answers and giving directions. This process is going to be different because I am trusting the process. And there may be observations, there may be solutions that come up that I may be uncomfortable with, but I'm trusting the process." And so just that modeling of vulnerability as just one example is a way to solicit vulnerability in candid feedback because I think candid feedback should exist in the conference rooms and not just in the hallway.
Doug:
Yeah. No, that's a great perspective. So if we get management, if they exhibit that behavior, as you said, and show some transparency and vulnerability and just say, "Hey, I don't know, I don't know where this is going to lead us, but we want transparency." Then that hopefully helps everybody open up a bit.
Steve:
Yeah. And some people hearing this might say, "Oh, that sounds so Willy nilly. It seems like you're just shooting a dart and seeing where it lands." No, I'm saying, "Let's have a pretty clear idea of the direction that we want to head. Here's the desired outcome. But how we get there, I'm inviting you to help me shape what that looks like." And even if that direction is just a direction, it's not a finite destination. If we go in this direction, I'm open to where we land, but I'm setting a direction. So that's where the leadership and the visionary comes in is to say, "Let's go in this direction. We're making a decision to go in this direction, this is where we want to be. But what that looks like and how we get there, join me."
Doug:
And I think it's important to get a cross-section. I know we do this in our firm where we take, certainly executive leadership that's had long experience, some folks that are new to the firm, also some young folks. We try to get a cross-section of groups, and we get their opinion on how things are proceeding. What are they feeling? Because as you said, you can be very vulnerable to groupthink and those types of things if you don't do so.
Steve:
Right. And groupthink is definitely not the intention, it's not leadership or decision-making by consensus. But when you do invite people into the process, even if you don't act on their specific individual feedback, the fact that you're hearing them and involving them, but you have to avoid, don't patronize me by inviting me and then just completely ignoring what I suggested, because you already had your mind already made up. People will sniff that out after a while. Or even being invited into these discussions and then realizing that nothing is ever done. There's definitely a lot of fatigue that I see around that. Where it's just a tease, you're getting people's hopes up, but then not acting on anything.
Doug:
How long in your experience, Steve, does it take, say a company through a really, let's call it a successful transformation of their culture?
Steve:
Yeah. I would say it's going to take at least two or three years. At least two or three years. You can have a lot of small wins along the way so that you're not waiting for that two or three-year mark before you see any results. You're going to see wins along the way. But I think when you think of making significant culture change akin to turning a big ship, sometimes you need to send out little pilot lifeboats out ahead to get some wins and be a little bit more agile and to lead some of that interaction. So it does take time because a lot of times, these cultural norms are deeply embedded. And who knows, depending on the life cycle of that particular organization, how long it took to get there.
Just as they say, when you're experiencing the death of a loved one, the amount of grief or time that you spend in grief is going to be directly proportional to the time that you were in a relationship with them. Maybe not the year for year, but at least there's going to be some times. So I think when you're going to do some change, there's a lot of loss that is experienced. Even if it's for good reasons, and allowing that organizational grief to happen and to work through making some of those changes. Yeah, so a long-winded answer to say two or three years.
Doug:
Yeah. That's interesting. So we always want to build connections and create this community within our organization. So how do you stay on that path during this really interesting time, obviously, where we went virtual and then there's some hybrid and now we're moving back to office and workplace settings, but still with some certainly some differences. How do you navigate maintaining that consistent culture through all of those changes?
Steve:
Yeah. That definitely has been a conversation. And I think it takes intention, I think it takes imagination in order to do that, and understanding that you can't necessarily replicate virtually what you can do in person. You just have to understand, those are very different. And so you have to approach those things very differently. And when you try to have a silver bullet that addresses both at the same time, it's not going to work for the most part. That's the easy way. I would say that's the lazy way of trying to kill two birds with one stone, as they say. So I think being intentional about creating one-on-one interactions, allowing space for that. Being intentional by allowing for group sessions, whether it's team sessions and having rituals.
And that's one word that really comes to mind for me is creating rituals. Whether it's a check-in, whether it's a check-out at the beginning in the meetings. Whether it's virtual water coolers, whether it's happy hours, whether it's bringing people in on a quarterly or monthly basis so that they still do have that in-person. Because I think if you combine the virtual with periodic in-person if a team can manage that, I think that does wonders. I've seen healthy virtual culture skyrocket in their health when they actually do have those intermittent gatherings together. So I don't think you can always... Again, depending on the size of your company, the size of your team, may or may not be manageable. But I think it's being intentional and being imaginative about what can be. Those are two things.
Doug:
Yeah. That's awesome. One last question I wanted to ask is, we've all been in workplaces where you have this maybe individual that's deemed, I hate to use a cliche, but cancerous to the culture.
Steve:
Toxic, yeah.
Doug:
And they may be a high performer in many cases, and that's why they survive. But in my experience, that person does more damage. Even though they may be a premium high performer, to everybody else's psyche. Has that been your experience [inaudible 00:22:22]?
Steve:
Yeah, that's a very important point that I don't think people realize enough. And I think even the Gallup employee engagement, I think they just came out with their new one for 2021, has said, so I don't know what the number is now, but they say that 20% or so of employees are actively disengaged. And another way of saying that is actually toxic. Meaning that they're actually working against the culture. And so if you were to remove those people, just by virtue of their removal, the culture would become healthier. And so I truly do think that if there are toxic people, even if they're high performers, even if they're executives, that you truly have to understand, what are the opportunity costs or what are the downsides of having that person there?
They're actually potentially doing damage versus just... Some people say, "Well, they're not as productive or not as helpful." No, they're actually below it. They're in the red. They're actually working against the culture. So I think those are the tough conversations that you need to have and ultimately the tough decisions that you need to make. But generally, my experience has been, is when you choose to rid any sort of toxic element, behavior, person, practice, process, in short term, you might take a step or two back, but in the long run, you're going to propel yourself forward as a culture and as an organization.
Doug:
Yeah. Very well said. Well, Steve, I would love to talk about this all day. But you've got some additional resources for us too, for folks that are listening in and might want to plug into some additional resources. Can you go over those for us?
Steve:
Yeah. Well, thank you for the opportunity. So a lot of my focus at an individual leader level is what I call frustrated visionaries. And it's those people who encounter resistance to their vision, which basically turns their visit into frustration. And so I have a free five-day audio course that people can sign up for. They'll receive a daily email with a link to an audio course along with some homework to bring about some self-awareness and think about how they can improve in the areas of culture, communication, and co-creation. So they can go to stevechaparro.co/frustrated, and Chaparro is one P and two Rs.
Doug:
Excellent. Well, thank you, Steve. And if you want more business tips and insight, or to hear previous episodes of unsuitable, visit our podcast page at www.racpa.com/podcast. And while you're there, sign up for exclusive content and show notes. Thanks for listening to this week's show. Be sure to subscribe to unsuitable on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to us right now, including YouTube. I'm Doug Houser, Join us next week for another unsuitable interview with an industry professional.
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