CULTURE ISN’T A CLUB, IT’S A COLLECTION OF EVERYDAY BEHAVIOURS

I was at the Festival of Work recently, listening to a talk on building ‘cultures for performance.’ I found myself nodding along. But at the same time, a small thought kept nagging at me – what if we’ve got it slightly the wrong way round?

In our work at Interaction, we spend a lot of time inside organisations listening, facilitating, coaching and something comes up again and again. We’ll sit in a training room with people from the same organisation hearing different versions of what the culture feels like. One person describes openness, challenge and feedback yet another talks about hesitation, uncertainty and things unspoken. Same organisation and same values but different teams, different managers and different day-to-day realities.

It’s a useful reminder that culture isn’t a single entity, it lives and manifests in smaller pockets, in teams, in relationship, in the way a meeting is run, in how conversations are had and how people are managed. As Amy Edmonson’s work has shown, those micro-cultures are what people actually perform within day to day.

That’s why, listening to the idea of building ‘for performance’ I kept coming back to something simpler. In our experience, performance is rarely the thing you build directly. It’s what happens when people feel able to contribute. In other words when there’s trust, when it’s safe to challenge, when people know they’ll be heard. If we get that right, performance tends to take care of itself.

It’s something that I keep coming back to. The question is not ‘Are we building for performance?’ but ‘What does it actually feel like to be here?’

In my view, people don’t experience culture in the abstract; they experience it in the small, everyday moments. The good news is that those moments are shaped by behaviours we can notice, practise and develop.

So, in these same situations when we are inside organisations listening, facilitating, coaching, a big part of what we do is help people develop the behaviours that matter most. Importantly these are typically the behaviours that change the answer to ‘what does it actually feel like to be here?’.