You may have heard the phrase before “Culture Eats Strategy”. If you are familiar with this phrase then you most likely understand how a corporate or team culture will be a driving force in the success or failure of any strategic initiative.
What is also important to understand when establishing a culture is that it must be authentic and if it is not it can backfire on you.
When building a team in which culture is important the one thing you should be weary of and try to avoid at all costs is assuming you can import a culture. Cultures are developed, encouraged and nurtured, but you cannot just, borrow, import, or hire one away. Culture does not come “off the rack”.
Create, build, nurture or develop a culture, but don’t try to appropriate someone else’s.
Let me share a true story to illustrate the risks.
Years ago a young Manager was starting up a service team for a company. Let’s call him “Tad”.
Tad had limited experience at that time in recruiting and hiring. Consequently, he had more failures than success and was struggling with identifying the right type of employee. Most of the candidates who worked within Tad’s field didn’t really have the right skills. They knew the industry and the product, but they were lacking in many other important areas and turnover was always a big challenge. Tad decided that he would start looking outside of his industry for potential similarities. Tad had some previous luck on an individual basis doing this and had assembled a pretty good team, but the company was growing fast now and Tad was in a hurry.
If Tad could just profile another industry that he could just pluck from He would have the unique answer to his problems. He needed a magic pill of sorts. Tad needed to find a candidate pool of ready-made customer service ninjas. Having seen the movie “Universal Soldier” he joked about how he needed a team of half-human, half-robot employees who were impervious to any challenging environment. Among his interviews he found a candidate who was retiring from a career in another field and was looking for something new. This particular candidate had the background and qualities that Tad believed would make this candidate a unique success. Tad admired this candidate’s former field of employment, but had no experience in or working with people from this field. Tad was, quite possibly, seduced by the imagery of having a team from a field that he had so much admiration for. So Tad hired this person convincing himself that his problems were over and he just solved the puzzle that others could not. “How smart of me“, he thought. He believed he found the magic pill.
Then as human nature compels us to reinforce what we believe is a good decision Tad doubled down. He was going to bring in a team with all the same built-in qualities and culture. His newcomers field had candidates with an already established bond that Tad believed would fast track team initiatives and further cement earlier successes. Tad was going to build his team of “Universal Soldiers”.
Tad decided to hire more people from the same industry that his new star employee came from. “I’m so smart I am going to hire more of these guys” he thought.
Now here is where things started to go wrong. In Tad’s haste to find the perfect candidate he either ignored or overlooked possible downsides to this type of candidate. He soon discovered that his new employees’ former industry fostered a very negative environment which allowed an abusive culture that often led to legal claims of discrimination and harassment.
Of course Tad’s new employee had been quite successful in that environment and was highly placed before retiring. So as it turned out he had hired what turned out to be the worst person ever to………………… Well let’s just say he hired someone who was the wrong fit for the job. “Uh oh“, he thought, “I think I may have hired an asshole“.
Actually, through doubling down on his genius decision he had quickly appropriated a growing culture of “wrong fits” and as it should be pointed out a type of culture he had no experience with. One could now even argue that Tad was the wrong fit for that particular team. “I’m feeling a little outnumbered now” he worried.
It was not long before Tad was starting to receive complaints from customers and co-workers alike, but now Tad’s ability to resolve the complaints were being undermined by a growing political divide in his team. Meetings were becoming contentious and Tad was finding himself with more problems than he had bargained for. “No sir, We do not condone racists comments of any kind” and “No Miss, we don’t approve of that kind of behavior either”he was now saying on the other end of the phone.
If Tad had just hired one person who was a problem it would have been simpler to address. If Tad had come from the same background and shared the same bonds as this new group Tad might have had more authority, but now he had to be careful of causing a mass exodus or a mutiny as rumor had it.
In the end Tad’s experiment did not work out. He lost a few good employees to competitors and he had to terminate others along the way. He also had to refill all of those positions again, but not without taking a toll on the team’s morale, a negative impact on the customer and Tad’s credibility as a Manager for a while. “I really screwed up on those hires, but I have learned my lesson and I promise it will never happen again” he explained to his boss and the head of Human Resources.
Tad was lucky. It could have been worse. He could have allowed this to get out of control. He could have tried it again in another variation only to fail twice. He could have lost his job. Fortunately for Tad, he learned a valuable lesson and he made better choices in the future. He built a great team and they developed their own culture that fit within the corporation’s and the team’s values.
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This has happened to leaders in almost every company I have been a part of. Some were gobbled up by it and others were set back extended periods delaying important goals and initiatives. Having seen this enough times I feel compelled to share a lesson that I… uh, I mean, Tad had learned.
Create, build, nurture or develop a culture, but don’t try to appropriate one that isn’t yours.
A true culture is an organic thing. Sure it can be influenced and directed, but it will not work if it doesn’t come off as genuine. Especially if the culture is not one that you would fit into if you tried to join from the outside. It will create a lack of faith in your leadership and will make you look vulnerable to your employees. They will sense this and will not follow if they don’t see you as truly modeling the culture yourself.
Try as you might you can’t build a culture that is big on teamwork if you are a solo player and you can’t convince people that you are all about the customer experience if you also enforce cuts in quality & service. You can’t pretend to be something you are not. You need to be authentic about who you are to create the right culture. No one can claim that Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg ever pretended to be someone they were not. They have both been unapologetic about some of their more questionable policies and yet they have been wildly successful as they focused on the values that made their products great. You can’t become the next Zappo’s, Nordstrom or Disney by reading a book and copy-catting a culture someone else built over years of trial and error.
This means be true to your own values and don’t bullshit yourself or anyone else and it wont backfire on you.
Bottom line: There are no shortcuts in building the right team or developing a culture.
Good Luck-
David Dell
As always I appreciate your feedback and comments. If you agree with me share my post. If you disagree with me please comment. I look forward to hearing differing opinions as I learn something new from every interaction.
Culture Eats Strategy, but the Wrong Culture can eat you Alive! was originally posted on LinkedIn.
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