You don't have a culture problem, you have a management problem

Photo by Jan van der Wolf.

We're not quite at the end of the school year, but we're close. Lately, we go get the kids from school and then finish up our last few hours of work from home. The arrangement works pretty well. They get to run around outside. We skip the worst of rush-hour traffic. And figuring out dinner gets a bit easier for everyone.

But we don't really have a home office. So when we're home, our big kid's bedroom becomes the unofficial conference room for business calls. There's a chair. There's a small table. There's good natural light. And while there's no way to have a video call without looking like you're joining from a 13-year-old's bedroom, so long as it's voice-only, it goes ok.

We often save our calls for the end of the work day. Those tend to be the times that work best for our west-coasters. And honestly, the quiet of home provides a good backdrop for meaty discussions. Without the distraction of video, the conversations tend to go deep quite quickly. And doing several of them back-to-back, a pattern emerges.

There's the CEO whose company meeting culture has become the number one topic in every meeting.

Everyone feels like they need to attend every meeting. They're worried that if they don't, they'll miss something. And the result is that our meetings are way too crowded and way too slow. We can't make decisions. And now we're stuck in meta-conversations about our meeting culture. We never even get to the really important stuff.

Followed by the HR leader who senses something isn't quite right with their remote workforce.

It's hard to tell how long things should take. Listen, we're committed to a remote workforce but now we have this culture of finger-pointing when one team hands-off to another. And everyone keeps complaining that they're understaffed and overworked.

And finally the finance leader who'd sorta like to fire the whole team.

You have to understand, we have a lot of B players. People who were hired early in the company's history and just don't have the experience or frankly the attitude of A players. That's the thing, we've got a soft culture. That's what we need to address.

The majority of the time, if you've got an issue that involves your org and how the humans inside it are working, you point to culture. It's literally the word for "how the humans inside the org are (or aren't) working."

All models are flawed, some models are useful

In a sense, of course these things are all culture. Of course the team FOMO-swarming every meeting is a culture problem. Remote workers feeling isolated and overworked is obviously a culture problem, too. When someone uses the phrase "soft culture," it's pretty clear they're having a culture conversation.

It's not that these things aren't cultural, it's that talking about them as cultural problems is an analytical dead end. The language most organizations use around culture is very passive and observational. Like culture is something that happens to your organization. Things like:

• Our culture has suffered with the shift to remote work

• There's a bit of burnout culture here

• We have a soft culture

The framing sounds reasonably specific, but it completely lacks any agency. Like everyone is just stuck playing the hand they've been dealt by The Culture. If you put the agency back in, it sounds more like:

• We haven't adapted our cultural practices to remote work very well

• We burn people out

• We haven't set clear expectations, and don't hold our teams accountable

This second set of sentences feels different, right? Maybe more concrete, maybe more uncomfortable, but certainly not passive.

The only change we made is to add some accountability. But that change is a powerful tool for cultural issues, whether you're a founder CEO or a first-time team lead. Because once you add agency to the situation, the question becomes: whose? Whose job is this stuff supposed to be? Culture is everyone's job, sure. But burning people out is a set of specific workload and prioritization decisions. Switching to remote without adjusting how we work is a set of specific actions, or failures to act. Who owns those?

Who indeed

A lot of people we meet are desperate to avoid the idea of management when they talk about culture. Founders/CEOs as authors of culture, sure. HR maybe, especially when they're labelled the People & Culture team. But mostly people talk about culture as an emergent property. About bringing in The Right Kind of Person. If they talk about process at all, it's in the context of a principles document, a values statement, or a culture handbook.

Culture handbooks don't produce culture, people do. The culture you experience in your organization is a rolling average of the last thousand interactions you've had. Every piece of feedback, every conflict, every trade-off is culture. Every hiring, promotion, and firing, too. Those interactions come from everywhere, but a disproportionate number will come from your close peers, and your own boss. Culture may be everyone's job, but some people have a lot of sway on your local average.

And, if you're a boss, you have a lot of sway on other people's averages, too. HR, culture teams, even the CEO can't match the impact you have on the working experience of your team. Culture flows through you — the number and depth of interactions you have practically guarantees it. That's not an accident. That's the job.

Management needs to be at the core of any conversation about culture problems, because those problems are management's responsibility. Culture problems are outputs — the result of failures upstream. Management problems are the inputs. And the good news is that, while culture problems have a certain passive, shruggy, "whaddyagonnado?" vibe, management problems have clear and direct management solutions.

If your culture has a problem with remote, your managers have a job to do. Management can tear down the processes, meetings, and expectations that aren't working, and build new ones as needed to get shit done. If your culture has a problem with clear expectations and accountability, your managers should be all over it. It's literally what we pay them for. And if your culture has a problem with burning people out? Your managers should stop fucking doing that. Plan better, say no, communicate risk. The buck has to stop somewhere.

Now, a fair counter to all of this is, "yes, but our managers don't know how to do those things." We meet a lot of bosses, and the majority have never had any training on how to do the job. The median path to management expertise, from what we've seen, consists of a congratulations announcement, a linkedin update, and then 10 years of feeling like a complete fuck-up as you try to figure it all out. So yeah. Your managers might not know how to do those things. Not yet anyway.

But they can. Take it from us, because we know. This stuff is all learnable. You can have a team of people with the tools to build culture on purpose instead of watching it happen to them. You just have to start by solving the right problem.

- Melissa and Johnathan