A Corporate Culture Story
I’m Andy Temte and welcome to the Saturday Morning Muse! Start to your weekend with me by exploring topics that span leadership, business management, education, and other musings designed to support your journey of personal and professional continuous improvement.
My wife Linda and I live on a little slice of paradise in western Wisconsin overlooking the Mississippi River. We have the privilege to wake each morning to an idyllic scene of the bluffs and coulees that line this majestic body of water. Most of our 40 acre plot is taken up by steep descents filled with deciduous trees and a few conifers. The rest is rolling meadow brimming with myriad wildflowers we’ve nurtured to provide a natural habitat for the birds and butterflies.
It turns out that large areas of wildflowers are difficult to maintain over time. If left unattended, grasses and non-native species take over and choke out the yellows, blues, whites, and purples the wildflowers have to offer. We’ve been planting new perennials in small patches using hand tools to ensure the wildflowers kept the upper hand, but it just wasn’t enough. The tall grass was winning the battle.
I had been looking for an implement that I could use in conjunction with my John Deere 1025R subcompact tractor to recondition larger swaths of soil and reintroduce more wildflowers. Surely a large-format technical solution would do the trick! So after the ground thawed last spring, I connected my brand new 13-tine chisel plow to the back of my small but mighty tractor and started ripping at the grassy patches. After exposing the soil, I spread wildflower seed in every direction with the hope that a new generation of wildflowers would soon take hold.
Fast forward to early July 2023. The disturbed locations were now a sea of green hues—surely we’d have an explosion of new color soon! We went out to inspect nature’s progress with great excitement to find that amidst the shoots of new wildflowers lurked many, many, ragweed seedlings! If you’ve read my first book, Balancing Act, you know that I’m terribly allergic to this nasty, prolific plant’s pollen. The last thing I need is to be living amongst a sea of ragweed. Ugh.
For the curious, ragweed rhizomes lie in wait in many soil types in the midwestern United States for the chance to dominate the landscape, pollinate, and ensure its survival. It’s the quintessential opportunist. My failure last spring was to deploy a broad sweeping technical solution to solve a problem without thinking through the ramifications of its use. I should have known that disturbing such a large area of land without a plan to nurture the seeds I wanted to take hold would open the door to the subversion of my efforts by my arch-nemesis—Ragweed.
Entropy and Corporate Culture
So what’s the lesson for business? The vast majority of businesses begin their lives as small enterprises. When things are small, it’s relatively straightforward to be intentional about the culture you want to foster. Hiring your first few employees is also done with intention and a keen eye toward organizational fit. However, as the company grows, the crush of demands from consumers, regulators, vendors, and partners creates a whirlwind of activity.
For the fortunate few, the heady days of rapid growth and scale create an environment where everyone is working at full throttle. In this hectic habitat, keeping that same keen eye on culture becomes more and more difficult. Growth and profitability mask operational inefficiencies and burgeoning cultural challenges. During these intoxicating days of growth, it’s easy to overlook a process that’s suboptimal or give the genius jerk on your team a pass. Yes, that genius jerk may be a pain in the a$$ on an interpersonal level, but we tell ourselves all manner of stories to justify why we can’t or shouldn’t part ways.
As time passes, the business matures, growth slows, and entropy sets in. Leaders and team members pull their heads up and take a look around at the state of their business. The common refrain goes something like this: “Wow, how did our culture deviate so far from our original intention? We need to get back to growth mode, but we also need a culture that will facilitate further growth, not impede it!”
In 2024, technical solutions designed with the intent to influence corporate culture and organizational health are everywhere. AI-enabled coaching, talent intelligence, employee engagement, and recognition/appreciation platforms are abundant and the average “HR tech stack” is filled with offerings that purport to be the secret sauce you need to get your culture back on track. Their websites are alluring and filled with persuasive messages that the solution to your culture challenges are just a click away.
Just as I convinced myself that a large-format technical tool would solve the challenge of entropy in our acres of wildflowers, it’s easy for leaders to fall into the trap of believing that a technical solution will solve all manner of challenges with their organizational culture.
What’s the Point?
In our wildflower project, I thought I’d be able to rip up the soil with my fancy new tool, spread some new seed, and leave the rest to the forces of nature. I hopped off my tractor, disconnected the chisel plow and thought to myself: “Done and dusted!” Wrong. To get the kind of results I was looking for, there was still a lot of maintenance I should have done to ensure the soil was healthy enough to allow the new seeds to flourish, leaving those nasty little ragweed rhizomes that lurk beneath the surface with little room and resources to take over.
In a business setting, sexy talent intelligence and employee engagement software tools must be deployed with caution. Like my chisel plow, they are only part of the solution. Even though it’s 2024, there’s no replacement for the hard, but rewarding work of defining organizational purpose and vision, codifying cultural norms, setting/cascading effective master goals, and ensuring that managers up, down, and through the organization are all doing their jobs.
It’s this last piece that’s critical. The clarity you create is only as good as the managers who are charged with nurturing their plot of land in your business. If your managers are firefighters, glorified individual contributors, or are not versed in the art and science of continuous improvement and organizational health, then all the fancy talent intelligence tools in the world will not move the needle. Here, noxious weeds will continue to choke out efforts to build the culture of trust and accountability that’s necessary to get your company back on the path to growth and sustainability.
In our wildflower patch, the culprit is ragweed. In your business, the noxious weeds are fixed mindsets, rumors, genius jerks, and the actively disengaged. Even with cool new technologies, the human element—great managerial talent—is an essential ingredient to support the lifelong learning, mental agility, active listening, curiosity, and psychological safety that’s necessary for the long-term health of your business.
