Let’s Think Differently About Firm Culture

How often have you heard “culture eats strategy for breakfast?” Often attributed to Peter Drucker, it’s become a common saying because it’s true. When people feel unheard, unseen, and unvalued, it shows up in the way they treat each other, their managers, and clients. The antidote isn’t free pizza in the lunchroom or (my favorite) bagels on Friday morning. Providing opportunities for informal socializing is fine, but what people really crave is a sense of inclusion and belonging.

As this Forbes article points out, leaders care about improving firm culture, but they often don’t know how. And there is an incentive to try –  getting culture right has a huge upside:

 I came to see, in my time at IBM, that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game, it is the game. In the end, an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value.

– Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., Former CEO of IBM

How Your Firm Can Crack the Code on Culture

Many firms are trying to get culture right because they know a good culture not only boosts the bottom line, it reduces turnover, improves client service, and increases innovation – a key differentiator in today’s rapidly-evolving market.

If it were easy to improve culture, everyone could do it. It isn’t easy.:

• Culture initiatives often get pushed aside in the face of short-term business goals.
• Leaders may not be aligned on what culture means, why it matters, and whether it deserves attention.
• Different teams have different dynamics, making it hard to find a common approach to increasing employee engagement.

In other words, firm culture has all the hallmarks of a wicked problem. Fortunately, there is an approach that works for these complex, multi-layered and inherently human challenges.

DESIGN THINKING

In case you’re new around here, design thinking is a creative problem-solving method that puts people at the center. It’s an approach used by industry leaders like Apple, Starbucks, AirBnB, and Pepsi to design the products and services we all know and love. Design thinking begins with a simple sounding goal: to develop solutions based on a deep understanding of the needs, desires, motivations, and behaviors of the people we are designing for.

Here’s an example from a friend of mine who worked for a major healthcare provider. The design team was tasked with improving patients’ waiting room experience. One solution was to make the exterior areas more appealing and almost park-like (this is in California.) Did it work? Nope. It turns out, patients did not want to go outside because they were more concerned about missing their turn than with enjoying the nice weather.  So the team went back to work and came up with a solution that’s 1 part Cheesecake Factory and 1 part Southwest Airlines. The moral of the story: don’t assume you know what other people want. The second moral of the story: you won’t get it right the first time and that’s okay.

We can do the same thing with firm culture.

Like a health clinic, firms are made up of people with different needs, desires, and behaviors. Leaders and decision makers need to have a deep understanding of their lived experiences if they are to design a culture that attracts top talent and makes them want to stay.

Understanding that we are not designing products or services, I’ve incorporated the principles of design thinking into my own framework, the High-Impact Leadership Framework which has five stages:

1. Empathy & Discovery
2. Align & Define
3. Ideate & Innovate
4. Evaluate & Experiment
5. Reflect & Refine

Each of these stages may be revisited more than once, always building on what we’ve learned. It is understood that some ideas won’t work out, others will need some tweaks, and others may work in part. When we don’t expect to have the perfect solution immediately, we remain open to new possibilities.

The Power of Design Thinking for Firm Culture

Design thinking has been around for awhile now, and while it has moved beyond is origins in product design and into software and services, few are harnessing its power to solve tricky workplace challenges. The top 3 reasons design thinking works for culture just like it works for products and services are empathy, collaboration, and the bias to action.

Empathy

As discussed above, designers begin by listening to the people they’re designing for. Through empathy, assumptions are replaced with a deep understanding of their real, lived experiences. We aim to elicit the nuances in how culture manifests at your firm, uncovering hidden challenges and systemic imbalances that are not immediately apparent.

Collaboration

Design is a team sport, and for good reason. Bringing the people impacted by culture in the same room as those with the power to enact change not only leads to more innovative ideas, it ensures you are solving the right problem. That is, the problem that is most relevant to the people affected. It’s an opportunity to validate ideas before committing too much time or resources.

We all want to avoid working on the wrong problem. We also want to avoid solutions that are unrealistic for other reasons. Collaboration mitigates this risk by inviting different perspectives into the conversation. Not only is it much easier to address financial or logistical concerns at the design phase, it ensures that solutions will align with your firm’s business goals and priorities.

Bias to Action

Some say that designers like to “move fast and break things.” That might make those of us who value well-thought out plans cringe, but it does reveal one of the key designer’s mindsets – the bias to action. Designers take what they think is a good idea and get it out in the real world as quickly as possible. Maybe not the whole idea at once, but enough of it that we can learn something. Rapid testing beats perfect planning every time.

Ready to learn how design thinking can help you develop a high-performance culture at your firm? Book a call with Katherine and let’s get started.