Drew Jones | Creating a Culture that Inspires: The Impact of Authentic Leadership and Core Values

Frank Cottle [00:00:25] Good morning, Drew. Welcome to the future. Work podcast. Say, can you start off today by telling us a little bit about how you as an anthropologist look at and study the. 

Drew Jones [00:00:40] You know, business anthropology or the anthropology of the workplace is a recently somewhat of a hot topic, but really, business anthropologists have been around since the 1940s, really. And what it is, is it looks at the world of business in all of its dimensions, both the workplace internal culture as well as consumer markets, consumer culture, and the strategic opportunities, really, through the lens of culture, and which we are with the science of culture, at least cultural anthropology is. And so we differentiate ourselves from conventional perspectives on business, which generally are grounded in either psychology, a variety of types of psychology, or in economics. And so we frame behavior both internally and in terms of consumer behavior through the frame of culture, where we assume that people are motivated by different things based on their cultural upbringing, their communities they live in, and as it relates to culture internally. This is what my most recent book is about, The Open Culture Handbook, where I’m trying to nail that down in a scientific manner because and we can talk about this over the course of the discussion, but since the early 1980s, businesses have been enthralled with the culture concept. But unfortunately, it’s not really grounded in science of what evolutionary scientists understand culture to be. So right now, I’m kind of on a mission to really make a bold statement about, from an evolutionary science perspective, what culture is and how it can be better managed in companies than it is currently, which we can talk about some of the statistics that indicate that. But that’s really the background. 

Frank Cottle [00:02:43] It’s interesting because when I think of culture in business culture, as, you know, we have offices all over the world and have been operating globally, god, for 30, 40 years almost. And we have to do things very differently in France than we do things in Germany, or we have to do things very differently in the Gulf states, gulf states than we might do in the UK. So when you talk about culture, are you talking about a generic, ubiquitous issue that all people have in common, or do you have to isolate it by, I’ll say, nationality or certain types? European culture versus Southeast Asian culture? Everybody doesn’t work the same. 

Drew Jones [00:03:45] Absolutely. And I think that’s a great way to frame the question, because there are multiple dimensions of culture. What you’re talking about is very real. Behavior, both in business and other parts of life are different in different parts of the world. That kind of goes without saying. What my concern is that business leaders and consultants assume that they understand what culture is in the first place. And then the challenge is how do you understand how things are done differently in South America to Britain or to Canada or to Myanmar or whatever? And so this is really the point that I’m trying to press. And that is culture as a force in human evolution has been terribly underappreciated in that culture is that thing which differentiated us from other higher primates and made us more capable of learning, innovating, sharing knowledge, adapting and moving up the food chain, colonizing the entire world except for Antarctica with human populations. So in an evolutionary science perspective, culture essentially is innovation and adaptation. And it’s a very directed force in human life. And really, it accounts for our success as a species. In fact, Joseph Heinrich’s book, evolutionary Anthropologist at Harvard is called the Secret of Our Success. And it’s culture right and his view, which is mine as well. And if you take that understanding of culture as a force of evolution and apply it to businesses, it’s very different than what we have today, which is often the values and beliefs that people share in an organization. Well, that’s very interesting. And it’s true that there are different norms and procedures and assumptions about behavior that exist differently in different organizations. But if we’re going to talk about culture in any kind of serious way, there’s more to the conversation. Because, again, from an evolutionary perspective, humans culture exists at two levels. One is we’re wired for culture beginning in the cognitive revolution 150 so thousand years ago, we developed the capacity to mimic, observe, learn, store information, pass that information on within the generation and then across generations. Thus the evolutionary advantage that each subsequent generation had. And so, as employees of companies, we bring our cultural nature, our inherent cultural nature to work and the standard approach. Let me back up two ticks. The impetus behind Start writing this book was this puzzle, what I call the culture dilemma, which is Peter Drucker said in the late 80s, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Everybody agreed with it. Research from Gartner suggests that large companies spend around $2,200 per year per employee on trying to get company culture right. For a big company, that’s a lot of money. However, for over 60 years since data has been collected, employee engagement has never really gotten above 30%. Across the country, 70 plus percent of corporate change programs fail and between 80 and 90% of mergers and acquisitions fail, largely because of what’s called poor cultural integration. So I think what us evolutionary anthropologists would say is that we’ve been trying to put a square peg into a round hole for generations and that we’re just mismanaging human’s cultural nature. And so the challenge is what is it that stimulates culture organically between people in a group? And there are certain observable things that you see in companies that do this well, but really it centers around several sort of overcoming several myths that are propagated in society at large. But in business particularly. One is that humans are inherently selfish and individualistic which does not bear out cross culturally at all. We’re a communitarian species that behavior is regulated through culture. One is that humans basically can’t be that were fallen bad and need to be managed right. This is the assumption that we need to observe and micromanage people. That really stems from a Western Christian point of view that people are inherently fallen and need monitoring and micromanaging. And the other is that people are inherently rational. And that’s not the case. We have capacity for rational thinking, but we’re primarily emotional and this is how we survive in the world and react to threats and develop attachments and everything else. And I guess the fourth really myth that really needs to be challenged is this notion that only a few people are bright enough and creative enough to be innovative. And so when I look at all of that and I look for companies that have super high levels of engagement, employee engagement and high levels of innovation, they all tend to do similar things. They have a compelling story which connects with people’s emotion and a sense of purpose. They allow employees a long leash in terms of experimenting, trying new things and innovating which allows people to act on their full cultural nature. Because at heart, culture is about adapting and learning and sharing information. And then the third is a sense of community that a company either has or doesn’t. So for me, the challenge is to identify the tangible aspects of employee experience that fulfill people’s cultural needs as opposed to articulating abstract cultural goals that often don’t really ever translate down to individuals. And so research by Gartner suggests that I think they said 86% of employees don’t believe the cultural aspirations of their leaders and 69% don’t understand them. Even. 

Frank Cottle [00:11:16] Stop there if you can for a second because what’s the reasoning for that? What causes that gap overall? I’ll use remote work as an illustration, something that’s very prevalent today, that wasn’t prevalent five, six years ago, at least on the same scale. And then I’ll use any number of executives choose big name here, doesn’t really matter, that says, well, everybody’s got to come back to the office because that’s the way we work and that’s our culture. Or I’m afraid they’ll lose their culture if they don’t come back to the office. My view would be you don’t have much culture to begin with if you’re afraid of that. But how do you take those gaps and create conduits or bridges so that they don’t really exist? There has to be a simple way of like you said, here’s five myths. Well, there has to be three rules so that you can have that strength in your culture. And what’s the purpose of the culture to begin with? Is it to dominate your competition? Is it to be a leader? What is the purpose of corporate culture to begin with? 

Drew Jones [00:12:41] Well, for my fellow cultural anthropologists, the idea that a company own, possesses, and has a culture separate from culture, you know, writ large, is a bit of a stretch, right? I mean, it’s one reason you find very few cultural anthropologists practicing as culture consultants, because many of them just don’t believe that such a thing even exists. We’re cultural beings. We’re influenced by all the things around us outside of work. We bring that to work to a certain extent. I agree with that. But I’ll get back to your point in a minute about some tangible things, some things that not rules, but things that companies can do to activate it. That’s really the point, which I haven’t gotten to yet. But the challenge is with the standard approach to changing culture, is that they all follow the same sequence. They start with a culture survey, a large survey that when you finish, your culture is placed on some kind of schema, whether it’s blue or red or green. And you’re a blank culture, you’re a performance culture, you’re an innovation culture, you’re a culture of integrity or one of these phrases notions. 

Frank Cottle [00:14:07] But can’t you be all of those? 

Drew Jones [00:14:09] Of course, that’s the point. But the typical culture change process starts with placing you somewhere and benchmarking you against all these other companies as one type or having a certain orientation to your culture, however the language of the survey puts it. But then the CEO or the leadership team says, well, we want to be this kind of culture that’s different than the one we have, so we’re going to close the gap. So these are the behaviors that our employees need to embrace in order for us to become this new culture. So it’s the classic consulting gap closing analysis. But the onus falls on employees to change their behavior, and statistics show that that rarely works. Those processes go on for four or five months. People resist it. Management gets frustrated, they abandon it, and it’s like, well, what culture program? That was last quarter, right? And then on and on and on, and the futility just continues. What companies can do to your question earlier is create material conditions where culture can develop and grow organically, because this is what humans do. You put people together in groups, and they bind themselves through culture. So you can’t engineer it the way businesses seem to want to do, but you can create conditions for it to thrive. And so that’s the subtitle of the book is five Questions to Drive Engagement Innovation. And that’s really what I’m talking about. One is having a very clearly defined strategy that’s communicated ideally in some form of storytelling manner that has a compelling purpose that gives people a sense of connection to the cause. That’s one, two is what people are working on. This is where I say that innovation is as much of an HR issue as it is a business growth issue. Because when an employee comes in to work, if they’re cognitively stimulated and challenged to create some new either a process or a hack or a concept for a business or a service or whatever, that’s a fundamentally different kind of work than coming in to work and simply slashing costs all day or scaling an existing business. So this is why companies WL Gore, Hare Electronics, others, Google, famously provide some amount of the work week to pursuing out of the box innovative possibilities that stimulates people. So what people are working on is critically important, how they work on it. This is the classic case of how much management is enough and this gets to the whole issue of trust and remote and hybrid work. But companies that are consistently innovative and have high levels of engagement also allow teams to largely self organize schedules, internal team agreements, how they hold each other accountable. A company like Automatic, for example, the company behind WordPress employees basically hire and fire new staff. A new candidate comes in and does an audition for a couple of months and then the team votes up or down. At Simcoe, people set each other’s salaries through this radical transparency and team accountability. Morningstar Tomatoes, the largest processor of tomatoes in the world has no job titles. Organization is completely self organizing. So how people work so that’s one. The fourth is leadership, right? Does leadership trust its people and really cascade a growth mindset and tolerate risk? And so right now the turnaround at Microsoft can largely be attributed to Sachin Adela’s enthusiastic embrace of a growth mindset and tolerating risks. And he know the two things that drive us are continuous learning and the willingness to experiment. And the cultural turnaround at Microsoft has led to this ginormous financial turnaround. Now it’s the third largest company in the world by market cap. And the fifth element is where people work. And this is where my model of culture really overlaps with the world of workplace. Because rarely in standard corporate culture models do you have any consideration of the physical environment where people are working. But from a sort of materialist point of view where you work is crucially important. It textures your everyday working, whether you’re at the office, what colleagues you’re with, what the environment is like if you’re at home. So the workplace becomes a lever of shaping culture as well. So really the five things are meant to be these tangible things stories, experimentation, self organization, growth mindset and workplace. But I do think to your point about remote, I do think that the organic bonds of culture do develop more easily face to face so while I am an advocate of remote and hybrid work, I do think that some amount of FaceTime can be very healthy for building trust. Not necessarily culture in the way necessarily the way a lot of CEOs talk about it. Because you’re right, if they cared about culture before, now they’re using the remote as like all of a sudden they found the culture religions, oh, we’re going to lose our culture. That’s a bit disingenuous. But I do think that copresence really is important for the development of community. 

Frank Cottle [00:20:52] Yeah, I think that the pendulum always swings from everybody in the office to nobody in the office to now we all work from home, near home and in the office, all three issue, all three places. And that’s created a new workplace dynamic. But in that new dynamic though, you reference relationships between people and trust and teams and things of that nature. Can those things be as strong within a we’ll call it a hybrid environment of from home, near home, at office, all three of those places. Because we’re all sort of local nomads now we all nomads, we’ll call ourselves. I like that we all fall into that category these days, or most of us do, at least in the white collar environment. I won’t say how I’ll throw my opinion out on it. When you talk about culture, I think the foundation of culture is leadership. And the foundation of the leadership has to be some core value philosophies literally of life, not just of work, but of life. Are they good people? Do they believe in being good people? Are they trusting people? There are several things that form an individual and the individual at the top has an awful lot to do with the way the organization is created. You can be trusting, good and aggressive. You don’t have to be one or the other. You can be all of these things. And if you have some core philosophies about how you make decisions and I think that’s the important element of the philosophy is you make your decisions based on your core philosophies. You can cross borders pretty easily. It’s much easier to cross borders. And today, at least in my view, every company is international. They have an international client, an international supplier, an international technology, something that crosses borders. There are hardly any businesses today that do not have some aspect of that. So your philosophy, your basis in your life philosophies at the top that help you to make decisions across borders I think is elemental to the cultural structure that does survive. Change does survive growth, does survive corporate integrations. When you go through an M a. Environment, I think that’s a critical part of the process. 

Drew Jones [00:24:05] Yeah, I agree. So long as there’s consistency there. From an employee’s perspective, a lot of those values are kind of meaningless unless they translate it into actual decisions that impact people in ways the values say they’re going to well, that’s where I. 

Frank Cottle [00:24:30] Say Drew, there has to be not just life philosophies but decision making philosophy. You make your based on those philosophies. 

Drew Jones [00:24:37] Up and down the whole spectrum and consistently. 

Frank Cottle [00:24:42] It’s not philosophy if it’s not consistent labor of the month. 

Drew Jones [00:24:48] I think the cynicism from employees often is that a lot of their leaders espouse wonderful ideas but when they show up at work, it’s a completely different reality. 

Frank Cottle [00:25:05] Than the executive is full of shit. Sorry to say that on this podcast, but that’s just the way it is. That’s not a trustworthy person whose ideals or philosophies you want to follow. You can’t be five different things for five different reasons, for five different people. You have to be one thing for everything. And if you’re not, you’re just flavor of the month and that never works. 

Drew Jones [00:25:32] Yeah. No, I agree. In terms of how the lomad I love that Word stays. You keep connection and trust and culture and that sort of thing across different nodes of work in different locations. One of the things for me, really, as I’ve worked through the book and I’m starting to do some speaking on it and really thinking about the gist of the whole message, it really comes down to learning and sharing. Knowledge and creating an environment where not training and development kind of knowledge. Where you sign up for a certification and you do it and then you get the credential. I’m talking about everyday stuff. And so there’s a great application that WordPress created called P Two and it’s now publicly available. Enterprises can use it as a software, as a service solution, but it’s a micro blogging. WordPress start out as a blog and now they’re just a CMS. But it’s a microblogging environment that you customize for either a team or a whole organization or whatever and everything that you do is documented there and it’s different than Asana or a typical project management tool in that everybody has access to it and it’s in real time. But then you can also search it and it creates a knowledge repository continuously over time that can be searched. And so it’s like the brain of the organization. And automatic. The parent company of WordPress is 100% remote. They’ve never had an office. They had an office briefly in San Francisco, but they’ve got a couple of thousand employees that are in over 100 countries, almost a billion dollar company and they meet up once a year for they’re called a grand meetup. Otherwise it’s completely remote. 

Frank Cottle [00:27:48] It’s funny because when we ran the Allwork.Space we had offices in 54 countries and it was an organization of independent operators of business and co working centers. And we used to have you’ve heard the term absence makes the heart grow fonder? We’ve always heard that for decades. And we used to meet twice a year and those were the best meetings ever because everybody had so much to share and everybody had so much to catch up on and really wanted to drive deeply. Their relationships were incredible. And the other thing that we used to say is because we were so geographically and culturally diverse, that our diversity, and this is long before dei, but different kind of diversity in our case, but our diversity was our strength. The fact that we could bring knowledge from different cultures altogether, create a single philosophy or a single decision making or business solution for our customer base was incredible strength because we would learn things, gosh, they’re doing things totally different here than we would do it somewhere else. And our only challenge was making sure that when we translated across the border that we got it right. Yeah, that is a challenge overall, so that everybody could use the benefit of what somebody had uniquely come up with. 

Drew Jones [00:29:24] And it was just and, you know, Google now has internally, I think, called g to g, googler to Googler, similar to this p two at automatic, where. 

Frank Cottle [00:29:37] If I say Googler to Googler, I’m going to start drooling. It’s a strange thing to say, but. 

Drew Jones [00:29:42] Anyway, the point is with the maturing of technologies going back to your situation previously, some sort of shared learning environment can really accelerate that. So when you do get together in person, you’re really on the same page and instead of catching up, you can go forward and brainstorm stuff because everybody’s up to date on everything. For me, in terms of people want to measure culture, strength of culture, I don’t necessarily use that language. I mean, for me culture is really a question of in terms of KPIs, right. Engagement rates could be a measure of it retention, but also new products and services launched over the last couple of years, new process, internal processes and things like that that have been rolled out, employee led processes over the last. So really it comes down to learnings. This is why I think even though I don’t advocate necessarily 100% remote work, I think Automatic, the parent of WordPress as well as GitLab are really exemplary in that they both maintain really strong cultural dynamics and enable culture to grow organically in a fully remote environment. So they show that it’s absolutely possible. It’s just, I think harder and it takes a lot of intention and a lot of work and tools and all the rest. So it is doable in the hybrid environment, but especially the hybrid environment because people are still together frequently, if not every day. 

Frank Cottle [00:31:29] We’re kind of running a little long on time here, but look at the future of work. Put your crystal ball on your anthropological crystal ball a little bit. We’ve had massive cultural shifts globally during the last two decades, driven by geopolitics, driven by competitive economies on a national basis, driven by pandemic on a global basis. And now new ways that we’re looking at things make one big forecast for the future of work. Of how these changes are going to impact the way that people work in the future. Don’t go too far. Just the next ten or 20 years, just five years out, because there’s an acceleration factor here. I would have said ten or 15 years out a couple of years ago, but that’ll all happen in five years. Now. AI is going to impact that. What’s the cultural impact of AI? Does AI itself have and create its own unique internal culture that then has to be shared with non AI, with non artificial intelligent beings? Is there going to be a sharing of cultures? 

Drew Jones [00:33:02] There’s so many great and you’ve got. 

Frank Cottle [00:33:04] 30 seconds to do that, Drew. 

Drew Jones [00:33:07] I can’t do that, but if you give me a little well, first of all, in terms of AI, some people like to whinge about the impacts. But really, if you go back to the trajectory of evolution and human evolution, hunting spears, fire, domestication of agriculture, navigation, industrial revolution, information revolution, the Internet, AI is the most human thing in the world. It’s people inventing new things together and applying that to solving problems and adapting. And of course there’s complications and consequences that are unforeseen. But to me, AI is just the most perfectly natural thing we could see. It’s something that hopefully people could have anticipated. So I think that’ll just become an everyday thing and we’ll just have to deal with the consequences in terms of future of work prognostication. I do see companies, a good example is Fujitsu. They’ve really embraced post Pandemic working both in terms of digital. First, people can work at home and they created satellite offices closer to where people live if they want to go to work in a physical place. But also as part of their commitment to employees, they’re allowing people to take on outside work on top of their full time jobs. So I think that what we’re seeing in Pandemic was a real glimpse into this, is we spend a lot of time, the rituals of working that aren’t very productive, whether it’s meetings or small talk here and there. Yes, it’s culture building and all that stuff, but I think people called it the great resignation. My wife refers to it as the great domestication. I think people rediscovered their home lives and things that matter to them. So projecting that out, I think that office footprints will shrink, people will work significantly at home, and that over time. And the missing piece here is portable health insurance. But I think over time, jobs themselves won’t be so singular. Where I work for this company and this company only, I think people will be forced to adapt in terms of having multiple things that they’re doing. And organizations are just going to have to accept that and allow that kind of decentralization of what work is. Because really face it, I don’t know the data on it specifically, but a lot of people are in jobs only for the benefits, right? I mean, they could make some money, else they could make money elsewhere, but not plus the benefits, which can be significant. So I think AI and activity based working and a number of things will significantly impact what we think of as a company. How much overhead, how much real estate, how much sort of core fixed assets they have. And then also what a job is will be, I think, more portfolio oriented than it is today. So, yeah, I don’t know if that answers any questions, but absolutely. I think long term, I think AI, honestly will be a tool for accelerating cultures in organizations. That is, if you can sort of manage the inputs in some kind of structured way, the way open source software does with gatekeepers and an eye for disinformation and some of these things. But yeah, I guess that’s probably the extent of my Future of Work predictions there. 

Frank Cottle [00:37:23] Well, it’s certainly a challenge because we’re going through so many changes, but that gives us the opportunity to really create the future of work that we’re looking for and that we want, if we’re bold enough to do so. And someone or all of us will be, because change is inevitable. It’s constant. So a culture of change, a culture of adaptation a little bit, or as my wife would say, if I didn’t have my yogurt every morning, I wouldn’t have any culture. But we have to look at those things seriously as we go forward. And I’m looking forward to reading your next book. Your last three have been fabulous and they’ve really given a lot of insight. We’re really grateful to have you as one of the voices of the future of work. With All Work now, it lending your intellect, your perspective and your understanding of where the future of work is going. So thank you, Drew, for your time today. 

Drew Jones [00:38:28] Well, thank you so much for the conversation, Frank. I really, really appreciate it. 

Frank Cottle [00:38:32] Take care. 

Drew Jones [00:38:33] Take care.