Ep226: If your culture could talk with Tom Krause

David Wheatley interviews Dr. Thomas Kraus about his book "If Your Culture Could Talk." Dr. Kraus, a renowned thought leader in organizational culture and decision-making, discusses how leadership actions directly impact culture. He shares a story about a leader named John who learns to understand and change organizational culture through personalized interactions with a culture entity. Dr. Kraus emphasizes the importance of genuine communication, listening, and appropriate action in leadership. He also highlights the gap between leaders' intentions and the actual impact of their decisions on organizational culture, using examples like a technology company's layoff notice to illustrate his points.

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Transcript

David Wheatley (00:55)
Welcome to this episode. I'm your host, David Wheatley, and I'm joined today by author and consultant Tom Krause, who wrote a book that came across my desk—and it was appealing enough that I said, "Oh, I want to talk more to this guy."
So, welcome Tom.

Tom Krause (01:11)
Thank you. It's nice to be here.

David Wheatley (01:13)
So before we get into your book, just give us the 30-second summary of your bio.

Tom Krause (01:20)
Yeah, so I studied both experimental and clinical psychology in graduate school. I intended to do clinical work, but I got off on a sidetrack that turned out to be a career of doing work with organizations—much of it around safety improvement.
And in the course of doing that, I kind of took on the task of translating research-based relevant information to the value that it had for a particular task for an organizational leader.
And that's basically how I got to the importance of culture and what I've been doing for the last 40-some years.

David Wheatley (02:09)
That sounds like the really complex version of what a client once told me—which is, he stopped subscribing to HBR because if there was ever anything interesting in it, I'd give him a simplified version that made sense for his world.

Tom Krause (02:22)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Wheatley (02:24)
One of the things that attracted me to your new book, If Your Culture Could Talk—and it looks like this, for those watching—
One of the things I’ve been saying to a number of clients over the years is that culture is a direct reflection of leadership action. And when I read this, it felt like we were on the same page.
So give me a little bit—tell me about this book and how it came about and what the key pieces are for you.

Tom Krause (02:57)
The words that you just said are recognizable to organizational leaders. If you said, “Is that true?” they would endorse that statement. They might say it in slightly different terms—they might say, “Yes, we create the culture.”
But oddly enough, if you look carefully at their decision-making processes—which we have done in great detail over the years—the decisions that they make don’t reflect that.
It’s not that they intentionally say, “Let’s see if we can mess up this culture” or “Let’s see if we can create a culture where people don’t trust each other,” or where information doesn’t flow freely up and down and across the organization.
But they make decisions that have that effect—usually unknowingly. It's not like they say, “We don’t care, let’s just do it.”
So it interested me: Why is it that a leader can know something in some kind of abstract way, but not know it when it comes to actual day-to-day decision-making?
And how could you get that across to people in a way that would be more than just academic—not just the words, but actually get across what that means in their day-to-day life?

So that led to: “What if I wrote a story about this?” Rather than laying it all out in academic terms—which I’ve done for years, and I’ve written a bunch of books of that kind. They have an important place.
 But I thought this would be fun—to do it differently altogether. And I kind of got off into the idea of: What is culture?
 I mean, it’s an odd construction if you think about it. Where does it live? That’s what I was thinking. Where is it?

We all know it’s important. Organizational culture is really, really important. If you’ve worked in three different places, you know there are different organizational cultures.
 Even in one big company, if you’ve gone from one site to another, you can almost tell immediately: this is a different kind of place.
 But what is that? How can it be that something exists… where does it live? Where does it exist?

It’s between people, right? So how can something live between people?

When I began thinking about that, I thought—this is kind of interesting. How can you get at it?

And then I thought of—what if we just had a hypothetical leader who had a big problem and set out to change the culture without really knowing what he was doing or how to go about it?

So then the story kind of unfolded from that—he would be confronted by the personification of this culture in such a way that he could have conversations.
 And this culture could talk to him very directly, unlike the real world—where a senior executive may be a little bit difficult to talk to directly.
 I mean, you wouldn’t want to say to him, “No, wait a minute. You’re the problem here. It’s the decisions you’re making.” You can’t say that.

Well, in this situation—where it’s an entity, a personification—they can say whatever they want to.
 That kind of entity can say whatever it wants to. So I had some fun writing those conversations in such a way that the reader could sort of say, “Man, that’s what I wanted to say to that guy—but I couldn’t.”

David Wheatley (06:49)
If only people could be more—what we call—caring, honest, and direct in their conversations about what’s going on with people at higher levels.

If I go back a step there—what’s an example of a decision that somebody makes with good intention, but that actually has the opposite effect on the culture?

Tom Krause (07:09)
Yeah. The most recent one I came across—it actually happened recently—was a technology company that was doing layoffs.
It was a part of their business, not the whole company. It was a reasonable decision—good business, necessary.
But the way they did it was to send out a notice in the middle of the night.
And the notice said, “You’re laid off, and you will no longer have any contact with the company. This email is the last communication you’ll receive.”

If you’re an employee and you wake up in the morning, get your coffee, turn on your computer, and there’s this message…
 That leaves you stranded. And angry. And unhappy.

Whether they needed to lay people off or not is one thing. Whether they needed to lay me off is another thing.
But did they really need to do it that way?

It turns out that culture is sensitive—not so much to what you do as a leader—but how you do it.
And you’d think that would make it easier. If we can just figure out how to do it, at least we can do that. But companies miss that.

The people who made that decision were probably influenced by legal considerations. Someone probably said,
 “The best way to eliminate lawsuits is to not give any indication about anything. Just lay it out, turn it off, and be done.”

But the effect on the culture was very strong—and very negative.

David Wheatley (09:07)
And I imagine that the effect on the culture of the people who were left—because of the way that had been done—they’d find out how it happened very quickly.
Now you’ve got people saying, “Hey, that was a bit crappy.”

Tom Krause (09:23)
Yep. Yep.

And you see it in other places. I could give dozens of examples where a decision is reasonable, but the way it’s carried out is not.
 So I feel like, “That’s not fair. That’s not how I would want to be treated. Or how I’d want my family to be treated.”
And that has an effect. That has an effect on the culture.

David Wheatley (09:56)
So probably hanging on the boardroom wall of that same company is a set of values that includes something like, “Be respectful of our people.”
That’s the delta that you’re identifying. We say that’s what we’re trying to create…
But then we send out layoff notices at midnight. That’s the gap between what we say and what we actually do.

Tom Krause (10:27)
Yes. And that’s so common.
It’s very hard to live up to those idealized statements that companies love to make.
And the effect of that is really a downgrade.
What I learn as an employee is: we say all this stuff, but we don’t really mean it. It’s not real. It’s sort of fake.

David Wheatley (10:50)
Yeah, so what they should replace it with is:
“We say we’re going to be respectful, but don’t be surprised if we lay you off with an email in the middle of the night.”
That would actually match the actions to the statements. But nobody’s ever going to put that on the boardroom wall.

Tom Krause (11:03)
Right. Right.

David Wheatley (11:06)
You had this idea of having a conversation with the dark culture creature that emerges—and has this direct kind of conversation.
Eventually, when the leader in your book starts to match things up, the culture creature disappears. It’s the dark side of it that’s the problem.
What else are leaders doing that creates that darkness?

Tom Krause (11:38)
A whole lot of it is about what the academics call “upward communication.”
Does information flow up through the organization?

Do you remember Deming? Is Deming a name in your…?

David Wheatley (11:52)
Not personally, but yeah.

Tom Krause (11:55)
Deming was one of my heroes. I thought he got it right way back when.
And I think what he had to say is still right.

He illustrated that the frontline employee—the person closest to the work—has a lot of knowledge that’s relevant to the decision-making processes of senior executive leadership.
 Now, that could be at the site level—plant manager and staff—or at the corporate level. But that information close to the work is extremely valuable.

But the problem is: does that information flow?
 Does it go up to the top? Does it get there? Or does it get part of the way and then stop?
 Or along the way, does the frontline employee learn that it really doesn’t matter if they talk about this stuff or not?

Even when they come around and ask questions—they don’t actually listen to what I say.
 It doesn’t really matter. I’ve talked to three different people about the way this work configuration is hard on my back.
 I have to twist. I have to lift and then turn. And turning that way is not good for my back.
 My doctor told me, “Don’t do it that way.”

I’ve told four people that.
 And it wouldn’t be a big thing to change that—to reconfigure it so I could pick it up and move it without having to twist.

A little of that goes a long way. And then I begin to think,
 “Well, they say they’re interested. They even come around and talk to me about how they’re interested. But they’re not really listening. They’re not really interested.”

And then that begins a downgrade.
 My relationship to the activity is now of a different kind.

David Wheatley (13:50)
Right.
Which all comes around to: it doesn’t feel like people actually care about me.

Tom Krause (13:56)
Yes.
Well… they don’t.

David Wheatley (14:00)
Well, they may say they do, but their actions are showing otherwise.

Tom Krause (14:04)
Yeah.
It’s not like they’re bad people.
They do care. They do.
Objectively, they do. But they don’t realize.
And that’s the part that’s most interesting to me.

They don’t realize that the decisions they’re making have those effects.

We developed a simulation to try to get at that.
 In the simulation, we’d give people decision dilemmas.
 They’d make a decision… then another one… and another one.

Then we would show the effect of those decisions—at different levels—in an extrapolation.
 “You made this set of 15 decisions. Here’s what happened.”

We tried to get at that. To build recognition.
 But it’s hard.

We’ve studied 400-some fatal events—actual events where people were killed.
 We studied them from the standpoint of decision-making.
 What decisions were made that led up to and caused this person to be killed?

And we also studied the biases involved in those decisions.
 The cognitive biases—Daniel Kahneman’s work. Another one of my heroes.

The interesting finding—which we didn’t anticipate—was that about half the time, the decision-maker didn’t realize that this decision was going to have those effects.

It’s not that they said, “We don’t care.”
 It just didn’t dawn on them that this was a decision that would affect the culture of the organization.

David Wheatley (15:58)
It’s like they don’t see the real impact.
They might see a result—but not the ripple effects.

Which, these days, feels like a real shortage across a lot of leaders.
 They don’t understand the ripple effects of the decisions they’re making.
 In the short term, it feels like a good one—but they don’t understand the rest of it.

Tom Krause (16:05)
Yep. Yep.
I think that’s right.

And it’s hard.
 Business leaders are under pressure.
 It’s not like it’s a cushy job where you can do whatever you want and life is fine and you get promoted and it’s all terrific.

I’m expected to get results.
 I have a limited amount of time to get results.
 I feel like I’ve got to make this work.

So I do the math and make the best decision I can.
 And I might say, “Don’t bother me too much with all this stuff about how careful I have to be not to offend someone.”

It’s understandable.
 It’s understandable that the leader wouldn’t realize the effect they’re having.

David Wheatley (17:16)
You’ve been very generous to the leader there.
I think yes, it’s understandable—but if they took a minute, they could see the negative impact.

Tom Krause (17:25)
Yes.

When pointed out—in my experience—like NASA is a good example…
 We worked with NASA after the Columbia space shuttle failure.

It wasn’t hard to get NASA leaders to make changes.
 It didn’t take much.

We just taught them to ask, during decision-making,
 “Is there another opinion in the room?”

David Wheatley (18:00)
That’s an interesting start point.
But what’s even more important for the culture is: how well do they listen to that opinion?

Tom Krause (18:10)
Yes, indeed.

David Wheatley (18:12)
Because I’ve seen so many places where they’ll ask the question—but nobody wants to answer it because of everything that’s gone on before.

Tom Krause (18:18)
That’s right. That’s right.
And that’s actually what happened at NASA.

It happens in healthcare—where the surgeon is about to make a mistake, and the nurse doesn’t want to say anything.

It happens in the cockpit—where the junior officer sees the captain going the wrong way but doesn’t say anything.

David Wheatley (18:46)
That’s where I really like the analogy in your book—this dark cloud-like essence that’s growing.

So the moment the doctor’s making a decision and the nurses are looking at each other saying, “Oops, this is not going to be good”…
 You can feel that dark cloud emerging over the operating room.

And that’s what you’re addressing in the book.

So give us a few steps.
 What should leaders be doing—besides making sure that communication is coming up from the bottom?

What else can they do to eliminate this “dark creature”?

Tom Krause (19:22)
Well, being a genuine listener goes a long, long way. So not just going through the motions, but actually listening—actually taking in what is said. And that means being responsive to it.

The person may be saying something, and you recognize immediately, they just don't know the whole story. If they knew the whole story, they wouldn't have that problem. They just don't know what's really happening because that level of information isn’t available to them.

So if I just take the time to explain—"No, wait a minute, the reason we took the action that we took was because of this set of circumstances"—it's two-way. Listening isn't just that I take it in; it's that I also understand where it is that you don't understand, or what additional information you need that I can provide.

That's a piece. So it's a genuine kind of exchange—authentic, real kind of exchange.

David Wheatley (20:23)
We're Jeep Listening.

Tom Krause (20:24)
And you talk to the employee about that—they will remember those events. Employees have a long memory—both ways.

They’ll tell you stories of what happened 17 years ago, when so-and-so hired their son, and the son was no good, and they wouldn’t get rid of him, and he became a real problem, and blah blah blah.

They'll also tell you about the manager or leader that really did listen, and really did take action, and really had a genuine sense of what was the right thing to do—and who did it consistently. And what a pleasure it was to work in an organization with that person.

David Wheatley (21:02)
I worked with a leader a number of years ago who would make his leadership team—the C-suite—work the plant floor for a four-hour shift every... I think it was about every quarter, every six months, alongside the operator. So the operator stood there while the CEO shot screws.

It was amazing how many fans and mats got replaced the following day.

Tom Krause (21:23)
Yup.

David Wheatley (21:25)
Because it became, "I'm talking to the boss about this," and the boss is saying, "Well, who have you told?" And I've told these three people, and now I'm telling the boss. And the boss is going away saying, "Get these people some mats and stop filtering this out."

Basically, because I had to stand there for four hours.

Tom Krause (21:40)
Yep. Yep.

David Wheatley (21:42)
So—deep listening and deeply engaging to make sure that there's mutual understanding.

What’s another thing that leaders can be doing?

Tom Krause (21:52)
Well, taking appropriate action on the basis of what was heard.

So—listening really carefully and being sure you get it. And then having the dialogue to fill in the spaces so that you fully understand. But then being willing to make the call, whatever is the appropriate thing to do, and following up on that in a really significant way.

Coming back and saying, “We talked about this the last time I was out here talking with you—how is it going so far?”

Following up. Letting it be known that not only did you listen and do something, but that you were interested in what the end point result was.

David Wheatley (22:34)
So really it's about creating fluid, bi-directional communication channels all the way up and down an organization.

And that people feel able to have that conversation. It's not a matter of, "Well, you told me, so I have to go away with that." It’s: "You told me, and we had a conversation to understand it from both sides—not just one side."

Tom Krause (22:41)
Yep. Yep, yep.

David Wheatley (22:58)
There are three or four—actually, I think there's another three steps in the book that you get into in the back once you get out of the story, so I don't want you to share too much now.

We'll leave something for the reader there.

The last question I have: It felt like in the book, your character John's revelation was supported by an outside, objective viewpoint. Was that executive coaching at work?

Tom Krause (23:26)
Yes, it was.

When he realized he didn't know anything about culture, that was the big first step for John. He was a technical guy, and he knew a lot about the technical side of things. He was really, really good at it—he could do the math. But he didn't understand the cultural side.

And he had leaned on other people, like Jane in the story, to take care of that for him. So when he realized that was not sufficient—that he had to actually do this himself—then he got directly involved.

He talked to consultants, but he didn’t just say, "You go find me a consultant and I’ll come in and listen for an hour." He got involved himself in figuring out, “What is this culture thing all about? What is it that I need to do differently myself?”

And that was the turning point for him.

David Wheatley (24:22)
And I like that it helped him clarify his thinking from the outside, objective perspective—but it didn’t do the work for him.

Tom Krause (24:28)
Exactly. Yes.

David Wheatley (24:31)
So where can people find out more about your work—or where to get this wonderful book?

Tom Krause (24:37)
Easiest is my email: tom@trkrause.com

David Wheatley (24:45)
Okay—and is that the best place for them to buy it too?

Tom Krause (24:49)
Actually, Amazon has it. That’s probably the easiest way to get it, or they can just send me a note and I can send it to them.

David Wheatley (24:58)
I was going to say—I’m trying my best not to feed Jeff any more money if I can avoid it.

So I’m assuming it’s available at all good bookstores, maybe to order, or they can go to trkrause.com and find out more there.

I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with us this afternoon. I hope some of our listeners and viewers find interest in what’s there—and start to look and see whether they have an accurate picture of their culture.

Tom Krause (25:30)
Terrific. It's nice to talk with you. It's been fun.

David Wheatley (25:34)
Thank you, Tom.