Don't try to be cool
When I first started working on company culture - before I knew about "organisational development" or had heard the phrase "high performance" - it seemed to me that the most important thing to do was to be a really cool company.
I knew this didn’t mean “ping pong and bean bags”, but I thought that organisational greatness was all about people, and how they felt. That is, it meant focusing above all on what we would now call “employee experience”.
I can vividly remember the "aha" moment when I first realised that this was not true.
I had “culture” in my job title, and I was trying to “work on culture”. But then, one summer evening after work, I went on a trip to Brighton to watch a band. I was sat on the beach watching the sunset when it hit me (I know this sounds ridiculous, but it genuinely happened).
The next day I went into work and presented my new ideas to the team:
The goal is not to be cool (IE to have a “good culture”)
The goal is to remove the BS that gets in the way of doing good work - and let a good culture emerge
So: find the obstacles to doing great work….
…and destroy them!
In the intervening decade since I wrote this, I have come to see how important this revelation was. You don’t end up with a great culture by trying to have a great culture, you get there by becoming a place where people can do great work. In other words: culture cannot be an end goal.
That's because it's doing good work that makes work worthwhile. We want, and need, at a deep level, to see ourselves engaged in meaningful activity. To look at what we have made, and feel proud of it. This is what makes going to work a source of joy1.
All of this isn’t to say that there is not valuable work to be done through an “employee experience” lens. You should have attractive benefits, and you should make dealing with organisational bureaucracy (eg holiday booking) as easy as possible. Attracting and retaining people is important. But these are window dressing if you do not address the fundamental question of how the work gets done.
Next week I'll be developing this theme further, and linking it back to how I think about organisations now, through the lens of high performance.
For now, some questions to consider
What are the obstacles to doing good work in your organisation?
Who is looking for them? How are you finding out about them?
Who is responsible for destroying them? Who has the authority to?
One of the many reasons why we should be worried about machine learning. In the techno-optimist future where machine learning technology does evolve into generalised artificial intelligence, and the benefits of this are not concentrated with a powerful few but are distributed more widely - what are we going to do with our lives? Sit around and navel gaze forever?