Colin D. Ellis's Blog, page 5

Culture By Design

Organisations spend hours discussing culture. They launch initiatives, run surveys, hold workshops. Yet somehow the culture challenges and frustrations keep shifting or else nothing ever changes.

Some then try to fix it with operating model changes, some with restructures, some with transformation programmes. None of which generally address the root causes.

So then the narrative shifts; ‘culture change is hard’; ‘culture change takes years’ or ‘you can't measure culture change effectively, anyway.’ However, these statements are false.

The reason these challenges keep shifting isn't because the elements of culture are unknown or unpredictable. It's that most organisations approach change backwards. 

Culture change isn't ‘hard’ when you design it intentionally from the start. It's only hard when you're trying to retrofit meaning onto systems that were built without it. It's like trying to tune an instrument while the orchestra is already playing.

The truly great organisation cultures recognise this truth - you get the culture that you choose to build. The best places to work every single year have access to the same information, talent, and advice that you do, yet every year they are regarded as the best places to work. What is it that they do?

The answer lies in something I have discovered during a decade of research and work.

Download my new white paper by clicking the image above.

It’s a discovery that applies to every organisation, in every sector, in every country around the world. I should know I’ve been helping organisations to successfully implement it for the last 10 years! To date, I’ve worked in 20+ countries with 120+ teams.

The organisations that succeed in not only creating a great place to work, but also ensuring it stays that way, all have three principles in common.

They are as follows:

Leaders commit - Great leadership teams don't just talk about culture, they commit to it. Together. They recognise that culture is the mechanism through which results are achieved and they set the example for others to follow.

Managers build - Senior leaders are role models for the culture, but it’s middle managers who actively build it. When managers are provided with the skills to build, uphold and evolve culture it changes everything.

Employees own - Leaders commit and managers build but without employee agency, it will always feel like culture is being ‘done to them’. After all, you can’t preach culture and hope for ownership. 

When you have all three of these principles in play, you have the recipe for continual success. It’s then important to ensure that this isn’t a one-off ‘tick-box’ culture. For performance to be sustained then not only do existing employees need to remain aligned to the approach, but the people you hire need to support it too.

Never forget that you get the culture that you choose to build. If you’re not intentionally designing the way that work gets done, then achieving high-performance will only ever be fleeting.

You already have a culture, why not make a great one?

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To help you fully understand how to apply these three principles, I have written a new white paper which you can download for free (with no marketing obligations) from here .

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Fresh Thinking

Stagnant and pleasant cultures are the enemy of fresh thinking. 

They suffocate creativity seeking instead to rely on outdated approaches in maintaining the status quo. They perpetuate mediocrity and miss opportunities to solve persistent cultural challenges. This leads to a loss of pride, performance and productive outputs. 

New ideas are vital. They inject energy, spark curiosity, and demonstrate that leadership values diverse perspectives and a willingness to continually improve. 

They ensure that permission exists to try new things and are open to different ways of thinking themselves. This openness cultivates psychological safety, trust and encourages calculated risk-taking.

It’s a demonstration that they are intentional about culture and dedicated to seeing it improve. Not through some legislative programme, but through a determination to do better.

Fresh ideas don't just solve problems, they transform how people feel about their work.

Looking for some fresh ideas about culture? Download my new whitepaper today.

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Your book titles are negative aren’t they?

I never thought I would write one book, let alone seven. In order to do so I didn’t need motivation as I had ideas and case studies, I needed structure, advice and to educate myself as much as I could on my subject matter.

Even when I was a senior manager, I always lived by the mantra of ‘opinions are good, but facts are better’. That’s not to say that I didn’t (and don’t) have my own opinions. I share these regularly in my blogs and podcasts, but I always felt that if I couldn't justify them with tangible evidence, then no-one would ever read them.

When I was writing my first book, I was told that ‘people reading it' should be a secondary concern. Its primary function was as a business card to get meetings and hopefully get work. It was some of the worst advice I’ve ever received. It suggests that I should abandon my integrity and rather than writing what people are talking about and presenting solutions that they may need, the process was enough.

I have never taken this approach. I have always written books that I think will be of value to those who may read them. It would have been much easier to fill a book with my opinions, take one good idea and repeat it for 250 pages or else come up with a catchy title that bears no relation to the content, but I always ask myself ‘how does this book serve the reader?’

That’s not to say that everyone will like what I write. I’m aware of that, however, I like to think that I write about the issues that people are concerned about or living right now and provide actionable advice they can immediately take to improve their situation.

This includes using the language that people use, rather than trying to confuse you with big or abstract words that don’t accurately describe what people may be feeling. Many people have suggested that I do this, including recently, when someone said to me ‘Your book titles are negative aren’t they?’ They were referring to Culture Fix and Detox Your Culture.

I’m not one to be upset by opinions, but I suppose I had never thought about this before. Again, I’ve always used titles that speak to the people that might read them.

When I wrote Culture Fix, people had been telling me for years that their culture was ‘ok’ and that one or two things ‘needed to be fixed’. Similarly with Detox Your Culture. Toxic cultures have ruined lives, reputations and results. Whenever I spoke to leaders, they were interested in the steps required to mitigate the risk of this happening and thus, detoxifying their cultures.

I spoke to a People and Culture leader at a conference that I was speaking at recently, who patiently queued for me to sign her copy of Detox. When she got to the front I said that it was great to see it full of post-it notes and the front cover looking battered! She said that she takes it everywhere and that it ‘is full of simple actions to change the way we work’.

Of course - as an author - you’re always chuffed to hear this and it was a good reminder to me, that even though one person might see the title as negative, another had taken the time to read the book and found that it’s what’s inside that counts.

Here’s a list of my favourite books whose title might not immediately bowl you over:

Uncommon sense, common nonsense - Jules Goddard

An everyone culture - Robert Keegan

Flow: The psychology of optimal experience - Mihály Csíkszentmihályi

Team of teams - Stanley McChrystal

The antidote: Happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking - Oliver Burkeman

‘Detox Your Culture’ is in the running for a UK national business book award next week alongside lots of other great books, which is a good reminder that you should never judge a book by its cover…or its title!

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Acronyms

Business has become insufferably coded and complicated. Every meeting is now drowning in acronyms such as KPIs, OKRs, ROI, EBITDA and so on. Acronyms create insider clubs that exclude newcomers and stifle genuine communication. 

This linguistic laziness masks poor thinking and creates the conditions for stagnant cultures where people nod along, pretending to understand. And yet, leaders seem to love it.

Everything they do from values to projects to processes isn’t complete unless it can be turned into a pithy acronym that few people will understand.

However, the truth is this. Real leaders speak plainly in language that everyone understands. 

Clarity builds trust. Jargon and acronyms destroy it.

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Is your vision believable?

A vision statement is the basis for day-to-day decision-making. Great cultures and leadership teams assess any new work against their vision and question its alignment. If the initiative or project doesn’t contribute to the achievement of the vision, then they don’t do it.

Netflix has achieved unprecedented success over the past 10-15 years and their vision has changed multiple times to reflect this. Their vision today is ‘We aspire to entertain the world’. It’s short, memorable and their employees believe it. It sparks inspiration, motivation and everything that they do is aligned with the achievement of this.

(Except maybe the show Buying London, which was rubbish.)

What Netflix and other great organisations recognise is that in order for staff to have belief in the vision, it has to be believable in order to be achievable. Only then does it become easy to bring to life, every single day, through the decisions that managers make.

Without believability it is just a statement, seemingly conjured up in a boardroom to satisfy the need to tick a culture box. It becomes performative in a way that values do when they aren’t actively demonstrated from the top.

When done well a vision is a catalyst for motivation, momentum and success.

Does your vision spark inspiration towards achievement or drain the belief from those that read it?

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A learning culture that works

Most organisations fundamentally misunderstand what a learning culture actually is. They think it's about training courses and development budgets, ticking boxes on annual performance reviews, and investing in the latest learning management systems. Yet in reality it is more than that. It’s an embedded behaviour - driven from the top of the organisation - to continually improve the way work gets done.

35 years ago author Peter Senge wrote about the five disciplines of a learning organisation model: personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, team learning through dialogue, and systems thinking. However, recent research suggests we need to add two more elements to make this work in today's reality: knowledge generation/sharing, and organisational behaviour.

Why? Because learning isn't just about the individual, it's about the collective. Also, it's not just about knowledge acquisition, it's about creating it, sharing it, and embedding it into how you actually work on a day-to-day basis.

Generationally, the expectation is that information on how to work more effectively isn’t retained for the benefit of one or two individuals. It should be used to enhance the conditions for all.

Google has embedded this into their four-pillar approach. Learning is a process (not an event), learning happens in real life (not just classrooms), learning is personal (tailored to individual needs), and learning is social (collaborative by design).

What’s brilliant about this approach is that it recognises that learning happens everywhere in an organisation; from everyday conversations to project debriefs to customer interactions, and yes, sometimes in formal training too.

However, the key ingredient that most organisations miss is psychological safety. People won't admit what they don't know, won't ask questions, and certainly won't share their mistakes if they fear ridicule or retribution.

Psychological safety isn't just nice-to-have, it's the bedrock upon which everything else is built. Without it, expensive learning platforms become digital dust collectors (I’ve seen many of these in my time!), and development programmes become box-ticking exercises (and these!).

So how do you actually create this culture? Start with these three foundations:

Normalise not knowing. Leaders need to model curiosity and admit when they're learning something new. Make "I don't know, let's find out together" an acceptable (even celebrated) response

Create systems for knowledge sharing. This isn't about databases, it's about building sharing into your regular operational and rituals, where teams share what didn't work and what they learned

Measure learning, not just performance. Track how quickly teams adapt to change, how effectively knowledge spreads across departments, how many creative solutions emerge from the ground up

An effective learning culture isn't created solely by training budgets or fancy platforms, it's created by leaders who understand that in a rapidly changing world, the ability to learn faster than your competitors might be your only sustainable competitive advantage.

Does your organisation have a learning culture?

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Culture Speak - Part Three (video)

In the third episode of my 7-part series on the importance of developing a common language around culture I discuss the characteristics of a pleasant culture, where emotional intelligence is high, but everything is just, well, a bit ‘nice’.

It is available as a video series on YouTube (below) or as a podcast at the following links:

Spotify Podcasts: Click here

Apple Podcasts: Click here

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Solving the culture puzzle

‘Culture change is hard’ has become a phrase used by leaders who don’t want to invest in the very thing proven to transform business performance.

Most of the time, it’s used because they simply don’t understand what culture is or the steps required to actually change it. I was talking to a senior HR leader about this last week, who expressed her frustration at the intransigence at a senior level to support activity to improve the way things get done.

I empathise. Culture can feel like a magic eye puzzle. You know the answer is in there somewhere, if only you can see it. Yet, like a magic eye puzzle, once you learn how to do it, you can see the answer every single time.

Can you see the two birds in this picture? Stare at the yellow elements in the image for a few seconds and let your eyes blur out everything around…until you see the image.* It won’t happen immediately, it may take a few seconds, but it will appear.

Culture is like this. Once you know, you know and it not only becomes easier to ‘sell’ to senior leaders, it becomes easier to understand and do too.

Having studied this thing that we now call culture for almost a decade and having worked with organisations around the world to successfully transform, I can tell you that there are three principles that are applicable to every organisation, in every sector, in every country around the world. In next Tuesday’s newsletter I’ll reveal what they are. 

Every single organisation can have a consistently vibrant culture, but it is only attainable through understanding what culture is and how it’s built, such that it can be  intentionally designed by those who have the responsibility for delivering results.

Never forget that you get the culture that you choose to build. Your people are waiting - not for perfection, but for you to help them unscramble the puzzle.

*Of course, don’t strain or damage your eyes! And if you have any sight impairment issues this definitely won’t work.

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The best CEO

The best CEO doesn't command and control. They create conditions where others flourish. They master the human skills, know the right questions to ask, are approachable and visible, build trust through transparency whilst setting clear expectations around behaviour and performance.

They listen more than they speak, make decisions through people rather than despite them, and understand that culture isn't what happens in meetings, it's what happens between them.

The best CEO is one that you’ll never forget, for all of the right reasons.

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Do you have ‘Teams Torment’

At a conference I was speaking at in Sydney, Australia last week, I spent some time talking to different people, from different organisations in different sectors. One of the prevailing conversations centred on the overwhelm they felt through Microsoft Teams messaging.

We joked about it at first, but it became obvious that it was no laughing matter and that people were feeling overwhelmed by communication, not just through Teams, but email and WhatsApp groups too.

Many organisations find themselves in the same trap. They have embraced the technology without setting some rules around what’s the appropriate medium to use for each type of message to ensure that tasks and interactions are given the correct priority at the right time.

I have developed a simple communication plan template to help people to overcome this overwhelm. You can download it from here for free.

It requires that you work with your team to agree which channels get used for which type of communication and whether notifications for these should be on or off.

Notification overwhelm is real, but by agreeing how you’ll handle your interactions you can stem your Teams torment.

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