But culture is not just a millennial thing. Workplace culture shines through to the parents who are deciding whether to send their kids to your school (or, perhaps more importantly, keep them there). Workplace culture drives behavior internally, which has a direct impact on the experience of your “customers,” both children and their parents. As Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh has been known to say, your “brand” is really just a lagging indicator of your culture.
Recognizing the importance of culture, of course, is the easy part—the hard part is doing something about it. Workplace culture is one of those things that feels out of our grasp. It feels hard to define and hard to manage directly, and when we try to address it, we often find ourselves opening up a Pandora’s box of issues that had been lurking beneath the surface, or struggling to make a diverse set of employees all equally “happy” at work.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Culture work is certainly not easy (though who said leadership would be easy?), but it’s not impossible and with the right data and approach, you can start to see positive change fairly quickly. There are three basic steps: what is, what should be, and what will be.
Step 1: What Is
The first step in culture management is always understanding what your culture really is, yet too many leaders want to skip this step. Instead, they want to immediately identify their ideal culture. They’ll start with a core values exercise or conduct a culture or engagement survey that is already biased toward a specific solution. Most culture and engagement surveys tell you one of two things: how “good” your culture is, based on whatever criteria the consultants think will impress you, or how happy your employees are with the way you run things. Those data can be useful, but they do not help you understand the nuances of how your employees experience your culture right now—and you need that before you can take the next steps.For example, a lot of surveys will tell you whether your culture adequately supports things like innovation and agility. After all, in today’s environment, we all need to be able to change quickly and come up with new ideas, right? Not if you’re a nuclear power plant! If you’re a nuclear power plant, I not only want you to do things exactly like you did them yesterday, I might pay some people to follow after you just to make sure that’s what you did.
Instead of trying immediately to define your ideal culture, take some time to understand exactly what is valued in your current culture. What is your approach to agility and innovation? Do you distribute power “down” the hierarchy, giving teachers, for example, the ability to make decisions that stretch outside of their teaching curricula? Do you give people at all levels the ability to test ideas, by running experiments or developing prototypes—again, not just in lesson plans but in broader organizational contexts? There’s not a right or wrong answer to those questions, but you need to know how you do those things inside your culture. It has to be clear and granular down to the levels of experimentation and other key areas, like authenticity, cross-functional communication, managing conflict, and bringing in external voices.
You need a clear picture of how your people experience your culture right now, because that is always the starting point for your culture-change efforts. If you start moving in a new direction without clarifying and acknowledging your starting point, you’re bound to get more resistance. People tend to resist simply being told to go in a new direction, but if you can tell a more complete story—showing them the culture as it is right now, and then making a case for why changing it would make people more successful—then they are likely to support the change efforts.
Step 2: What Should Be
That “making the case” part is the heart of step two. Once you understand your culture as it truly is, you have to be able to show people how that culture either supports or gets in the way of what makes your school—and all the individuals inside it—more successful. Culture is not about being cool or cutting edge, and it’s not about people being happy or satisfied. Or, at least, it shouldn’t be. The whole purpose of having a culture is to make your people and your organization more successful. The happiness, the employee engagement—those are all results of a culture that is tightly aligned with success.This presumes, of course, that you know what drives both individual and organizational success, and that, honestly, can be a challenge for many organizations. The business world often points to what I call the “culture cool kids” like Zappos and Netflix, as if we should all copy their approach to customer service (Zappos) or standards of high performance (Netflix), but what this fails to recognize is these companies chose to develop those cultures based on their specific success drivers. Zappos made incredible customer service a priority specifically because the online retailer felt it was the only way to hit (absurdly high) growth targets in the early 2000s. Netflix felt it needed incredible technical expertise to be first-to-market with video streaming, so that’s why it fired all its “adequate” performers.
Instead of copying the cool kids, start asking yourself some key questions:
- What makes you stand out from the schools you compete with?
- What are you already admired for internally and externally?
- What are your superpowers?
Step 3: What Will Be
That short list of cultural priorities is key to making culture change work. Instead of having the daunting taskof completely transforming your culture, you can actually mobilize people around a handful of key priorities, and that makes the action planning more manageable.
In fact, to use a boring sports analogy, all you need is a simple playbook of culture-change efforts to address those priorities. Let’s say you realized that one of your superpowers is your ability to constantly innovate your methods and approaches, but when you looked at your culture, you find that while you certainly value the concepts behind innovation (creativity, future focus, etc.), the action side of innovation—running experiments, taking risks, developing prototypes—are not really present in your culture. What do you do?
You run some plays. You change existing processes or structures to make it clear that you value those kinds of actions and behaviors.Maybe you’ll change your monthly or quarterly organizational dashboard to include “experiment metrics.” All your employees would be reporting regularly on how many experiments they ran and what percentage of them failed (side note: if all your experiments succeed, you’re not pushing the boundaries enough). If you start doing that, you would quickly see people running experiments (to avoid reporting lots of zeroes). Or maybe you could run a technology play, like adopting idea management software, where everyone in your school has the opportunity to suggest ideas for innovation, and then vote them up or down. By crowdsourcing idea generation and evaluation, you end up with a much broader range of ideas to work from.
Endgame: Culture Management
Once you run those plays, you’d take a couple more out of your playbook and run those. Or maybe one of those first plays didn’t work the way you thought it would, so you pull it out to make some changes and put it back in. The point here is that you shouldn’t focus on culture change as a thing you do at a single point in time. Instead, you should build the ongoing capacity for culture management. You need people, processes, and systems in place to make sure your culture is continuously aligned with what makes you successful. This work can be distributed among several people inside the school, and it doesn’t require attention every moment of every day. But you should always be adding new plays and running them to make sure you’re moving in the right direction, making culture management a priority.Workplace Reads
Learn more about culture and employee engagement with these articles by Jamie Notter at Forbes.com.
“Employee Engagement is a Lagging Indicator of Culture”
“Motivating Millennials (And Everyone Else, For that Matter)”
“No, Culture Does Not Eat Strategy for Breakfast”