Cultivating Culture

A gardening approach to culture

Think back to a community that you’ve been a part of with “good culture”.  It could be a rec league, school, work, or a place you’ve lived.  How much of the interactions that contributed to the culture were planned and how much were spontaneous interactions or inside jokes that formed meaningful bonds across the group?  Now think of a place that had a “toxic culture” and how that impacted your relationships, work and health.  Culture has the power to weigh us down or be a force multiplier in our communities so let’s use something a bit more tangible to discuss the actual cultivation of culture.

Culture (originally “colere”) means to tend & cultivate.  Just like gardening, cultural formation requires a light but intentional hand to steer a community toward a positive and shared goal.  Not tending to the weeds coming up in your garden can be just as dangerous as too much water.  Let’s look at a few approaches to cultivate an environment where people can flourish and do their best work.

What’s already growing?

Let’s say you didn’t have access to any seeds, how would you go about putting together a garden?  You might start by surveying the plants that already exist and determine which ones work well in your current environment. You may want to encourage a few of these to grow and relocate or prune the plants that will not interact well.

If you’re tracking the metaphor I should clarify that the plants are ideas or behaviors and not people.  You can build an outstanding culture in an organization with the people you already have without removing individuals that are going against the grain.  One powerful way I’ve seen this done is to survey everyone about what positive parts of the existing culture motivate them.  Pull this together into a word cloud (or ask the latest chatbot to summarize the input) and select shared values across the group.  Even more powerfully bring the group together after you’ve done some of this legwork and come together on some of these shared values. The discussion of why they are important to your community is just as important as printing them onto a poster or t-shirt.

This reinforcement creates buy-in and shared purpose across the group.  Since it came from the practices and behaviors that had already taken root you’re no longer alone in cultivating the garden, you’ve now been joined by a whole team of gardeners who are now aligned in the mission to build an environment everyone has agreed they can thrive in.

Bringing in new seeds

Every new person brings their own individuality and unique perspective.  This is great!  A monogarden becomes boring quickly and even larger scale farmers have learned that crop rotations will keep a healthy mix of nutrients in the soil that will make future crops stronger.  In the same way it’s important to accept up front that new people may shift the early group behaviors but doing so can make the entire group stronger.

“Cultural fit” is a terrible and loaded term, often it’s used as a gatekeeping mechanism to block people from joining a group with no core reasons which can lead to toxic monocultures.  Having a well defined group culture can help when bringing in new folks by using it as a roadmap to identify behaviors and ideas that will help the garden flourish.  It can help when core values are defined to directly ask people interviewing, “These are our core values which one resonates with you the most?” or “What does X core value mean to you?” This serves two purposes, it helps give you an idea of what the new person will bring to your existing culture and plants the seed of them being part of your group early.

Grow your traditions

You never know what norms or traditions will spring up and catch on.  Things that didn’t exist a year ago, might start to feel like that must have been around forever or were intentional.  One powerful and evolving tradition I was a part of was my organization’s daily standup. From early days we all stood in a circle to report on what we were working on and if we were blocked on anything and needed help with.  Everyone participated across sales, marketing, product, and customer experience.  

Needless to say, 20 people reporting doesn’t scale well across a 15 minute meeting.   Instead of ending this cultural sync, it evolved as a way to call out wins and celebrate contributions of individuals across the team.  Leaders across the team selected stories that emphasized the impact the cross team collaboration was having on our clients.

As we grew to 50+ people the tradition of clapping for each win also didn’t scale so the main standup borrowed a tradition of a single clap for each success from our sales standup.  This powerful audio cue of a large synchronized clap across the whole group both reinforce the existing culture of synchronizing everyday with our peers across the company while evolving to meet the time constraints that would have started to make that touchstone ineffective.  

Again when we switched to a remote workforce in 2020 we could have dropped the standup and retreated to our team silos and freed up 15 minutes of everyone’s time everyday.  Instead, keeping connected over video served as a way to remain close while working from home.  Unsynchronized clapping and the challenge of having 100 people off mute proved challenging as well. Instead we picked up the American Sign Language of applause by waving two hands in the air which was brought to us as a diversity lesson from one of our colleagues in Sales Ops.  Now 15 minutes every day our screens lit up a screen full of shared handwaving to celebrate our teammate’s wins and remain in sync even when we were working farther apart.

Know your environment

The goal of all of this is to create a system that can survive without continual top down management and directives.  One where individuals across the group are empowered to bring their own uniqueness and contribute toward a shared vision.  

Just like planting plants that love the sun in the shade will lead to a bunch of dead plants, forcing ideas that work well for other organizations doesn’t ensure they will have the same impact on your community.  It might be something that can be maintained for a short period of time but the roots may never grow deep.

The benefit of sharing the cultural workload across the group is you now have a whole team incubating ideas and sprouting new traditions.  At that point it isn’t your job to push cultural growth, simply to create an environment where the existing cultural growth has room to thrive and catch on.  

At the end of the day, we’re all in this together.  Let’s grow our communities and be good gardeners.