Jamie recently examined the importance of finding your North Star when leading with meaning and demonstrated how to do so through stories; in this article, he expands on storytelling and explores how having such a clear North Star helps create culture in your workplace.
Culture emanates from people uniting around a common cause. A great metaphor for understanding how this works is Hofstede’s Cultural Onion Model.
Imagine a group of people appear shipwrecked on an island. They are instantly united by a common desire to survive and get off this island. “Survive and return home” become the values at the very core of this group’s culture.
Around these values, the group develops rituals to help them live by those values. For example, they all find themselves waking at the crack of dawn as the sun starts shining in their face signalling for them to start the day.
Then immediately, they congregate together in a circle and start planning what they need to do today to survive and return home. Soon enough, these morning planning sessions become a ritualised part of the group’s culture, and a way of reminding them every single day what unites them and what they are working towards.
As they go about their daily activities of hunting, foraging and crafting, they experience successes and failures. But every time one person experiences success – maybe they catch a fish, find a new vegetable or craft a superior shelter – the group comes together to celebrate that individual’s successful actions.
Individuals who accumulate more success become idolised by the group, as they clearly have a set of behaviours that if copied by everyone would enhance the group’s survival and ability to return home. This is how group’s develop heroes who literally are an embodiment of the group’s values.
As the group continues its activities over a sustained period, they start to transform their environment into a living reminder of their culture:
- Sticks and stones become spears; a symbol of their power over the environment.
- Logs and leaves become shelter; a symbol of comfort.
- The camp fire around which they congregate; a symbol of belonging.
In this way, the group develops symbols that act as permanent reminders of their group’s values, etched into their surrounding environment.
The kind of society we live in today is far more sophisticated than that of those shipwreck survivors, yet you can still see the cultural onion everywhere you go:
- Countries have their education systems (rituals), historical figures (heroes) and national flags (symbols).
- Sports teams have their chants (rituals), legendary players (heroes) and team colours (symbols).
- Corporations have their onboarding processes (rituals), employees of the month (heroes) and branding (symbols).
As culture starts to form, teams develop implicit sets of expectations that they hold each other accountable to. We see examples of this all around us.
Leadership, culture and expectations
In some cultures there is an expectation to stay silent and work long hours, in other cultures the expectation is to contribute more opinions and to respect people’s work life balance.
These implicit expectations have a huge impact on performance. This is especially clear in sports teams. One striking example for me was when I watched Manchester United (who I am unfortunately a fan of) get beat by their rivals Manchester City.
Manchester City were winning 3-1, yet their coach Pep Guardiola was standing on the sidelines yelling at his players as if they were losing. It wasn’t good enough for them to have scored more goals, he expected far more of them. Given his exceptionally high standards, perhaps it is no wonder Manchester City are the current FIFA Club World Cup Champions.
Standards influence performance in every context.
More and more managers these days are managing hybrid teams. Half of their team is in the same office as them, whilst another half work remotely, sometimes in different cultures and time zones. A typical problem is that when they are having a meeting, it’s natural for managers to pay more attention to the people in the room and ignore the people online. It is literally “Out of sight, out of mind” and it amazes me how often this happens.
A simple solution is for managers to set themselves a higher standard of involving everyone in the meeting, both online and offline. Then, they should communicate that standard to their team members so their team members can hold them accountable to that standard. The next time they have a meeting, if they go too long without involving the people online, then someone will step in and remind them about it.
This isn’t rocket science. It’s one of those surprisingly simple yet profound approaches. The clearer and more rigorously reinforced those standards are, the more consistently the team will perform to them.
And one of the most effective ways of reinforcing these standards is through storytelling.
How can you use storytelling to create culture in your workplace?
Collect and share stories of role models to look up to, or examples of times people hit those standards or completely failed. Stories are sticky, and will lodge themselves firmly into people’s memories, and from there will not only influence individual behaviour, but will also be shared by those individuals therefore helping the standards spread to others as well.
The mechanism through which standards are enforced is through simple, intrinsic social motivators; Acceptance and Rejection.
Hit the standard, and we are treated with respect, embraced and praised. Fall short of the standards and we are treated with contempt, excluded and criticised. These social motivators are hard wired into us from our hunter-gatherer days, where social acceptance and rejection were literally a matter of life or death; be accepted by the group and we can work together to survive, be rejected by the group and you are on your own and will most likely die.
This hardwiring of the need for acceptance and to avoid rejection is why our teenage years are so miserable. Being made fun of, not being part of the “cool” group or even not being included in someone’s game can literally feel like a death sentence to a child who has not yet developed sufficient cognitive capacity to rise above evolution’s intrinsic interpretation of these actions as being banished from the hunter-gatherer tribe and forced to fend for themselves.
Perhaps it’s no wonder that a sense of belonging is so important to employee wellbeing and its impact on business.
According to research conducted by BetterUp, employees with a high sense of belonging had a 56% increase in job performance, a 50% drop in turnover risk and a 75% reduction in sick days. Belonging is no small thing.
A beautiful way of thinking about belonging is the ancient Māori concept of Whakapapa, described in clear and practical terms in Owen Eastwood’s book “Belonging”.
He describes Whakapapa as an unbreakable chain of people going back and forward in time. As the sun rises in the East, it shines its light on the earliest founders of the tribe. As it moves across the sky to the West, its light shines on new generations, with each person getting their time in the sun. But the sun is always moving, and moves on to the next generation, and the next generation until it finally settles in the West.
That chain is held together by the values, rituals, heroes, symbols and stories of the tribe. All those elements come together to immerse each member into a web of meaning, giving them a sense that they belong to something bigger than themselves that transcends time.
As the sun shines on your team, do they know where they came from, where they are now, where they are going, and who is standing next to them? What values, rituals, heroes, symbols and stories give meaning to your tribe?
Leading with meaning: tell more stories
Meaning brings people together, helps them hold out through tough times and drives them forward. In such turbulent times, meaning is essential for leading.
All of the things I described above can be achieved through one simple habit: Tell more stories.
Tell more stories of:
- what matters to you and why
- where you came from and what it means to you to be a part of this team
- where you are going and what it’ll look like when you get there
- how you’ll get there and what that looks like
- role models and what they did
Without these stories, people are left to their uncertainties. Questions plague their minds. Questions about why, where, what, how and who. Voids filled by everyone in their different way through obsessive ruminations, lead to rifts, divisions and tensions.
But with these stories, people share clarity. There are no voids to wedge people apart. Instead, a web of meaning weaves them together.
This is the art of leading with meaning.
