Episode 120: What's Your Culture? with Melissa Daimler

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This is The WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright. Way more money, way less taxes.

Tom Wheelwright:

Welcome to The Wealth Ability Show where we're always discovering how to make way more money and pay way less tax. This is Tom Wheelwright your host, founder, and CEO of Wealth Ability.

            So one of the big topics for years has been culture. And as we have struggles hiring people, interviewing people, one of the questions they always ask is, what's your culture? And what I've found over the years is it's very hard to define that and say, well, what is it?

            So today we have an expert with us to help us define culture and talk about how we can evolve that culture and actually make it something that we are going to enjoy because we have to enjoy it first and something then that employees will enjoy as well. And with us we have Melissa Daimler. She is an expert in this area. And Melissa, welcome to The WealthAbility show.

Melissa Daimler:

Thanks, Tom. It's great to be here.

Tom Wheelwright:

And if you would, Melissa, just give people a little of your background and how you got into this whole topic of culture and reculture.

Melissa Daimler:

Sure. So I have been in organizational development and learning for over 20 years in the tech space. And I have always appreciated looking at organizations as a total system. And one of the key pieces of that system beyond purpose or our mission and our strategy is culture.

            I have asked for many years, what is culture? How do you define culture? And it has been such a nebulous fuzzy term. I've gotten, as you can imagine, so many answers to this. It's the organization's soul. It's the personality. It's what happens when the boss isn't around. It's even, worse, it's the donuts. It's the perks. It's the ping pong tables.

            And I just, I got frustrated that not only were those unsatisfying answers, but a lot of people assumed this was something that HR just does on the side. It's a just HR initiative. We now have culture officers in a lot of companies.

            So, beyond that frustration, I also had the opportunity to work at some pretty iconic high growth companies like Adobe and Twitter that had not only great strategic focus areas, but also took time and spent time in building a healthy culture. I had the opportunity and I can say that now to also work at a company called WeWork, which a lot of people have heard about, which had what we'll just say is an unhealthy culture.

            And so I think now as the chief learning officer at Udemy, which has an amazing culture, I had a really perspective on kind of what works and what doesn't work in good cultures. And so I wrote this book on reculturing because I researched so many books and papers and I attended webinars and everybody had this nebulous fuzzy definition and culture has been around for 70 years. I had no idea.

            So I have a very practical definition. I do believe that you can design and operationalize culture. Every employee I think is responsible. And it's just three things. It goes beyond values, but it's also your behaviors. So if you were to describe-

Tom Wheelwright:

Okay. So let me-

Melissa Daimler:

Yeah.

Tom Wheelwright:

I'm going to interrupt you just for a second here. So you're saying that the very first thing is values? So that?

Melissa Daimler:

Yeah.

Tom Wheelwright:

Of those three things, the first one is values?

Melissa Daimler:

I think you don't have to start there, but I think it's a lot of places where companies do start as an anchor. And so, yeah-

Tom Wheelwright:

Makes sense to me.

Melissa Daimler:

… if you… Yeah.

Tom Wheelwright:

It makes sense to me. I mean, if you don't know your values, then I don't think you know anything about who you are. So I think the values is a great place to start. Okay. So if values is number one, that'd be a whole different show. What would be number two?

Melissa Daimler:

Behaviors. So I think a lot of companies stop with values. So you and I have seen the lists. We've seen them on… When we were in offices more than we are now, they're on the walls, they're on the websites. But so often a value in one company could mean something completely different in another company.

            So I was working with two different companies, both of whom had innovation as a value. One was really focused on prototyping more quickly. They wanted to get stuff out faster. They wanted to give people the opportunity to feel like they were in a safe environment to experiment.

            The other company felt like they were moving way too fast. They weren't getting quality ideas out. And they wanted to slow it down. So they actually created a behavior. That was a question. We ask each other why?

            The other one created a behavior on we give space to prototype quickly. It had something to do with moving faster. And so behaviors allow you to codify your values that are relevant to your organization. And it gives a much clearer picture of the playbook that you're trying to operate from within a company.

Tom Wheelwright:

So one of the things we do, I'm actually pulling this book out. This is a friend of mine. Blair Singer wrote this book Little Voice Mastery. And he wrote another book called Code of Honor and he talks about code of honor. And code of honor is really those behaviors.

            And so one of the things we've kind of implemented as a result of that is for every value we list a behavior that actually tells you, what does that value mean? And that's the behavior. For example, if one of our values is, this is a previous value in a different company, we had a value of responsiveness. The behavior was we respond. We get back to anybody within one business day. And so that was the behavior that defined the value. Is that the type of thing you're talking about?

Melissa Daimler:

That is exactly it. That is exactly it, yeah. And I think the point of this is, if you think about strategy as kind of what you're doing, culture is more of how you're doing it.

            And I think over the last couple of years, since we've all been… We've learned now that we can work from anywhere and culture is agnostic of any location or an office.

            Culture is really more about how we work together. And it is helping people understand what the expectations are of each other. So when you have new employees coming in, they have a much better idea of how they're going to be evaluated, what they're going to get feedback on, how they're going to get promoted. And that is just as important as what they're working on with their objectives

Tom Wheelwright:

And that all comes under behaviors?

Melissa Daimler:

Yeah, so that is behaviors. And I do think that and I know I love that you're so practical, which is another reason I wrote the book is because I felt like a lot of people who wrote books on culture had never stepped inside of an organization.

Tom Wheelwright:

Right. Of course.

Melissa Daimler:

So it's very theoretical. And having lived it and was so many other people living this every day, I wanted it to be practical.

            So the other piece that I looked at with behaviors is that it's observable. So you can observe somebody doing something. It's non idiomatic. So often you hear companies say “Don't sweat the small stuff,” or “Hustle harder,” or there's so many different kind of idioms out there. And employees in Tokyo have no idea what that means.

            And so it needs to be globally relevant and understandable. It also needs to be neutral enough. We decided at Udemy that instead of having a separate value and behavior on inclusivity or diversity that that would be threaded through the behaviors. And so that was a lens that we really used in defining our behaviors.

            So observable is a key piece and why that is because if you go to the second part, which is processes. So these are all the things. It's a scary word to lot of people, but we do so many processes in our company.

            So hiring process. So do you embed those behaviors into interview questions? Onboarding. Are we not just doing a workshop on our values, but are we actually talking about stories and giving examples of employees who are exemplifying those behaviors?

            Things like feedback. So often I talk to, and I'm, I'm sure you do too, to leaders who say feedback is so hard and this whole performance management thing is so challenging. And then when I ask them, “Well, what are you giving feedback on? Are you clear about how people are supposed to work?” And they just look at me with a blank stare. Well, you've never really defined those behaviors that you're expecting with people. So how on earth would you be able to give feedback?

            Promotion processes seem to be harder because all of a sudden we're in a room and it's like, well, Tom did great. He achieved his results, but wasn't really a team player. Well, how do you know that? Are there examples? What behaviors did he exemplify or not? So I think again, that the behaviors are meant to be embedded into all of those processes that we have to work through as an employee and a leader.

            And then the third element is practices. So these are similar to processes, but they're more informal kind of day to day things that we do. So practices like how we run meetings, how we communicate with each other, how we connect with each other, how we make decisions.

            So, it's not like every behavior has to show up in every meeting. But as an example, one of our values at Udemy is always learning. One of our behaviors is that we ensure that we have productive and constructive debates to make decisions. So in meetings we want to make sure in that practice we're having those constructive debates with each other.

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Melissa Daimler:

So I'll pause there. That was a lot.

Tom Wheelwright:

Yeah, there's a lot unpack there. No. And I'm good with, we got three, values, behaviors, and practices. That's a good start.

            You said something a few minutes ago that I want to kind of explore a little bit, because I think this is a big, big, big issue for companies right now. And you said that culture doesn't matter whether you're in the office or out of the office, the culture's the same, which I've had other guests that would dispute that. Okay?

            So what do you mean that by that? And how do you really do that? Because I think one of the big questions is one we're struggling with in… I have two, well, I have multiple companies, but two of them we're really struggling with this. Do you bring people back? When do you bring people back? How often do you bring people back?

            And because of course, I'm a baby boomer, so I grew up in the office right now. I haven't actually had an office at the office for about 15 years. And the reason is because I kind of disrupt things when I'm in the office. So they actually don't want me there. So it's actually good for me to be out. And we actually make more money when I'm out talking to people and doing things like podcasts, so forth.

            However, I found that the culture has changed with being out of the office. And I think it's because it seems to me like you have to be so much more intentional with culture when you're not together. When you're together, it's pretty easy. You're seeing people, you've got this human interaction, you know, you've got this natural communication. The culture's a little easier.

            When you're off on your own, yeah, you might be getting independent work done, and that might be great, but you're not constantly with other people. So how do you bridge that? And how when you say it doesn't matter, what do you mean by that?

Melissa Daimler:

Yeah, it's a really good question. And the question that I'm getting a lot lately is, how do we bring our culture back? And I think a lot of people are concerned that post pandemic-

Tom Wheelwright:

Well, that's my point. If you have to bring it back, it's because it left.

Melissa Daimler:

Yeah, exactly. And what's funny to me about that is that there were so many elements of work that people didn't love before. So why are we bringing it back? Why don't we have an… We have an opportunity actually to design something differently.

            I am a big fan of going to the office. I love connecting with people live. I do think there is an element of being in person that you can't obviously get when we're all working remotely.

            I have a nephew who just started a new job and he goes in every day because he learns so much more. Think about us earlier in our career. I learned a lot just by watching-

Tom Wheelwright:

Yep.

Melissa Daimler:

… and those in between conversations. So I'm not saying that isn't still valuable, but I think what I'm saying is people tend to over rotate and rely too much on going back to the office. So can't have culture if, if we can't go to the office.

            And I think your word is really important, which is intentional, because I have also pre pandemic have gone into the office and not talked to very many people at all. So I think it's really important as we think about this hybrid approach to be intentional about leveraging the office differently.

            So when we do go into the office, are we clear about what kind of meetings we're going to have? Are we being intentional about having our team all be there together that day? Maybe we can get together to brainstorm in a way that you can't do on Zoom as easily. Are there decisions we have to make that would be easier to do?

            And frankly, I make fun of the ping pong tables and the donuts and all of that, but we all know it's not that that people get attracted to. It's the connections you make with people while doing that. So I understand that. So I think I'm a fan of the office. I didn't mean to say that I don't think we need the office at all. I just think that culture is a much bigger… It can be defined in a much bigger way than just office.

Tom Wheelwright:

Got it. It's not just the offset, so it's not just the physical environment.

Melissa Daimler:

Yeah.

Tom Wheelwright:

There's a lot more to it. Okay. Thank you. That that's very helpful.

            Okay. So in the few minutes we have left, because this has been a terrific discussion, if you were going into a small business, okay?

Melissa Daimler:

Mm-hmm.

Tom Wheelwright:

And you're saying, and it's like you suggested at the beginning, is like, how would you explain your culture? How would you define your culture, et cetera? What would you tell somebody? What would you tell a business owner? Okay, do these three things, or do these five things. This is how to define your culture. This is how to.

            We get there's values, behaviors, and practices. I kind of get that in general. But if you were to say, “All right, business owner, this is how you figure out what you want your culture to be and what that even means to you. And this is how you would explain it to…” Really what I'm getting at is how do you explain that? How do you define it so well that you can explain it to in a 20 minute interview?

Melissa Daimler:

That's great. I would say just, well, first of all, if it's just, it'd be an exercise for you to do, but I'm a big believer in if there are other people that are working for you to co-create this. So to have a conversation together as a team and answer some of these questions.

            So how do we want to work together? When you've been on teams before what worked? What didn't work? On a good day what would we be doing? What would we not be doing? What do we value as an individual? And does that value show up in this company? Can that show up?

            So I think being clear first just around maybe three to four values that you would want to make sure represent how you're operating as a company is really important. And then once you've defined those being really clear about behaviorally how that would show up.

            So I always say two to three behaviors per value. I think some companies have gone a little crazy with this. I know Netflix when they first started defining behaviors 10 years ago in their culture deck I think they had 30 different behaviors. Now it's up to like 47. That's too many.

Tom Wheelwright:

Yeah.

Melissa Daimler:

And so, you want to just have no more than 10 that really kind of codify and define how you're going to work together. And then importantly, how you're going to work with your customers too. This definitely flows into customer interactions. And then define as you're working with customers, as you're bringing in new employees, making sure that you've set up specific interview questions that can bring those behaviors to life.

Tom Wheelwright:

I like it. I like it.

Melissa Daimler:

Yeah.

Tom Wheelwright:

So, give us the name of your book and where we can find you and where we can learn more.

Melissa Daimler:

So the book is Reculturing. It's a very bright orange cover. So you can find it on Amazon. You can find it on… Where else can you find it? On my website. Go to my website MelissaDaimler.com. There's all the places you can go. It's also in a number of different independent bookstores, and there's a link to that as well, if you want to support them.

Tom Wheelwright:

Awesome. Thank you so much. So thank you, Melissa.

            Culture is one of those things. I do think it's pretty much a core of everything you do every single day. And I love that we start with values because I do think that that's critical because my experience is when partners break up, when spouses break up, it's always around values. So we really do have to start there.

            And we do want employees who share our values. We want customers even who share our values. I don't want customers who don't share my values. I've actually fired customers because they didn't share our values. And we're very specific. So the behaviors, I think go to both, what behaviors do we expect of our employees? But what also behaviors do we expect of our customers?

Melissa Daimler:

Exactly.

Tom Wheelwright:

Because I do think that's part of our culture, if I'm understanding what you're saying here.

Melissa Daimler:

Yep.

Tom Wheelwright:

And so I do think that when we get clear on that culture and I love values, behaviors, and practices, and when we do that, I think we will always make way more money and pay way less tax. Thanks everyone.

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