Culture Isn’t What You Think: Foundations for Thriving Workplaces

Culture isn’t about food days, slogans, or posters on the wall; it’s about how people actually experience your organization every day. 

In the premiere episode of The Culture Advantage Podcast, Dr. Michael Baran unpacks what culture really means, why it determines everything from retention to innovation, and how leaders can intentionally create environments where people thrive and teams excel.

Transcript

Culture Isn’t What You Think: Foundations for Thriving Workplaces

Is your company struggling, navigating through high turnover, toxic leadership, or a culture that's holding your team back from reaching its full potential? Well, you're not alone. So here's your host and guide, Michael Baran.

Michael Baran: Culture is an essential aspect of high functioning teams and organizations, but it isn't what you think it is. Welcome to the very first episode of the Culture Advantage Podcast, where we'll talk about experiments, insights, and breakthroughs for thriving organizations. I'm your host, Michael Baran, and I cannot wait to kick this off with you.

Now it only makes sense that in this first episode we start talking about the very definitions of culture [00:01:00] itself because there's so many misunderstandings, even among experts. Now, I'm a cultural anthropologist, so I've thought a lot about this. What is a cultural anthropologist you might ask? I do not assume that people know what this is.

In fact, I will never forget telling a relative who I shall not name that I was going to get a doctorate in cultural anthropology. And they said, why do you wanna study dinosaur bones? Or another who said. I didn't realize you could even get a PhD in philanthropy. Now, I didn't study any of those things.

No. I studied and researched people and cultures, people in all their different groups, in all their different contexts, people in different societies with different cultures, people and power of different kinds people and how developing minds interact with culture. And yeah, I did some cognitive psychology research as well.[00:02:00] 

One of the fascinating things about people is that we don't come into the world with too many built-in instincts or pre-programmed behaviors like other animals do. You know monarch butterflies that instinctively migrate in the fall, or bees that instinctively dance to signal different locations now?

Instead, humans come with this incredible brain. That learns everything. Human learning is amazing. Many, many years ago I worked with folks at the Harvard Center on the developing child, and they talked about the statistic, which I found just unbelievable, right? They talked about how. Human babies from zero to three years old, how their brains are forming.

700 new synaptic connections per second, right? 700 new connections per second, and that blew me away. It always stuck with me. Some years later, I was working with them [00:03:00] again and I was saying, oh yeah, I always think about that statistic, about 700 new synaptic connections. And they said, oh, Michael, that was when we've got better instruments now.

Now we know it's actually one to 2 million synaptic connections per second. And I don't even know how to think about that, right? So our brains are literally being built, the architecture of our brains being built and learning about the world within a particular cultural environment. Humans and their brains are fully cultural all the way through.

So the kinds of things I specifically researched were the subtle, often under the radar ways that cultures can make people feel valued and included or bad and excluded. And that's something that happens for all human societies and it's also relevant for organizations in different ways. So let's [00:04:00] get into it.

First, what is Culture for People? Well, if you're in corporate America, you might've been to cultural appreciation days, and you might think that culture means foods and festivals, and it's not that those things aren't a part of culture, but it goes much deeper than that. We can think of culture as a kind of common sense about the world, the way that, that we understand what everything is and how everything works.

It's that deep, the way we think about time, about family, about meaning in life, about cleanliness, about gender, about sex, everything. To give you a sense, there was this famous experiment that was done by one of the cultural psychology professors I used to work with at the University of Michigan named Richard nsbe and he and Ko Masuda.

Who's now a professor at the University of Alberta. [00:05:00] They showed people in the US and Japan, the exact same short little video, right? It was a video of some computer generated fish, okay? And not real fish. They were sort of animated, computer generated fish, and there was a group of fish swimming, and then one fish swimming more alone in front of the group.

And they just ask people, what's happening here? For the most part, the Americans said, oh, look at that leader fish. How bold, how daring, how brave. He's different. Not like those other fish. Good for him. And yeah, even though it's a fish, a lot of Americans tended to default to thinking of it as male. Right.

Then watching the same video, what did the Japanese people see? For the most part, they talked about seeing a sad fish. Why was it sad? Because it was being shunned by the group. That poor fish. I wonder what that poor fish did to get shunned like [00:06:00] that. That's the co, the kind of common sense, deep stuff we think about when we think about culture.

But of course cultures are not homogenous, right? It's not like everyone in the US thinks one way. Everyone in Japan thinks another way. There are a lot of differences within what are considered cultures. Obviously right. Look at the US right now, and you can see we don't just have political divides. Like, you know what taxes should go to pay for what?

We have some fundamental differences in the way we understand the world sometimes, and those could be called cultural. So we've got these sort of what we think of as national cultures, but then within that we have so many ways we think about the we, when we think about how we understand things, right? We could be our region of the country, our religion, our generation, our gender, our race, our [00:07:00] ethnicity, and so much more.

We've got dozens if not hundreds of Wes that we're all a part of. And one of the wes that many of us get to be a part of is an organization where we work. So you've got these places of work which are bringing together people of all these different cultural backgrounds to work together. And to be part of an organizational culture, and for some people that might be one of the only places where we actually encounter a lot of cultural difference.

In the US we've got, for the most part, very segregated communities and schools and religious organizations and social events still. In this day. So if you're running an organization, a workplace, you've gotta think about culture in these two important ways. First, how are all these people, with all these different cultures gonna work together seamlessly?

How are they gonna [00:08:00] collaborate the best they can? How are they gonna handle misunderstandings or conflicts? What are we gonna do when we have different biases that come into play? That's one way we've gotta think about culture. And then secondly, how are we gonna create our own organizational culture? We are gonna have shared experiences, shared language, shared ways of seeing things and doing things, shared lore, shared jokes.

That's part of the culture. But also, how are we gonna be intentional about creating a culture? That allows everyone to thrive, everyone to feel valued, welcomed, respected, and heard. That allows teams to collaborate together, to innovate, to perform at their highest levels. This is what the podcast is all about.

If you're a part of a workplace. Now, I want you to think about the culture there. It's often sometimes that we haven't really made explicit, right? Maybe you're thinking about our company [00:09:00] values. Those are usually made explicit, but those explicit statements, they're sort of aspirations, right? That's not necessarily the real culture.

They're important, but they're not necessarily culture. Culture could be more thought of as how are people treated? Especially when no one is looking, and that means everyone. What gets rewarded here? What gets ignored? How do decisions get made? Who knows what about what, when? Who feels safe to be their authentic selves and who doesn't?

What happens when someone tries to be innovative but fails? In my work with organizations to improve their cultures, they often start by asking leaders to evaluate their culture, even rate it on a scale from one to 10. And most leaders give themselves a pretty good score. I might ask them what they're thinking about when they make that assessment, and I usually hear something like, well, we're not perfect, but [00:10:00] most of the people are positively contributing to the culture most of the time.

And that's one definition that someone could use. What's the sort of average culture? What do most people do most of the time? But I then ask them how would they rate their culture if instead of that we define culture as the worst thing that happens, that gets ignored or tolerated. What if that is what sets the culture?

That's what organizational psychologist John Amichi suggests. Well, when you put it that way, the culture doesn't look so good and it's a much bigger problem than they tend to realize. So that's the journey I embark on with them, and I'm really excited to embark on that journey with you right now. These are the kinds of things we're gonna look at as this podcast evolves.

Why culture matters, what's getting in the way of the culture you want? What we can do [00:11:00] about it, how to create and maintain a culture where people thrive, teams excel, and organizations achieve their goals and their missions. So let's talk a little bit about why culture matters. It impacts retention, reduces turnover costs, helps attract and retain top talent.

Impacts trust and performance, impacts innovation, profitability impacts brand awareness and customer experience. In other words, it impacts everything and not just buy a tiny bit. By a lot. I could throw around lots of numbers, lots of studies. Studies that show, you know, how toxic culture is the number one reason people leave.

Companies and companies in the top quartile for an inclusive culture perform 87% higher than companies in the lowest quartile. And you know, there was one big research project done by [00:12:00] Google called Project. Aristotle, for example, and they studied, I think almost 200 teams and found that psychological safety, right?

Psychological safety, being a culture where people can speak up without fear. That was the single biggest driver of high performance. And innovation on teams, not the IQ of employees, not their experience, not the clarity of their roles, whether the work was meaningful to them, not any of that, but psychological safety.

I'll probably have a whole episode about that later on because it's such an essential concept. The safety to be vulnerable, to speak up, to be who you are. And I wanna be really clear that not everyone feels psychological safety to the same degree, right? As one example. Just think about people who identify as LGBTQIA plus.

What percentage of people who [00:13:00] identify as LGBTQIA plus in the US do you think, don't feel safe to be open about that part of their identity at work? Right. They're not open with their colleagues, with their bosses. What percentage do you think doesn't feel safe? Okay. To even be themselves at work. Think about a number.

The actual number is almost 50%. Almost 50% of those people don't feel safe to be who they really are at work. Now, of course, that's an average. Different states are different in that regard, urban versus rural. It depends even on the industry or on the specific organization, but it's an average. Now there's some obvious costs here, right?

People have to spend all this brain energy covering up that part of their identity. They've gotta change their pronouns and carefully monitor what they say. When someone just asks what they did over the weekend, [00:14:00] they need to monitor what's on their social media, who can see their social media, what pictures are up on the wall in their office, all that energy spent on something other than their job.

Right. And how many people on a team do you think, or in a department that are intolerant, does it take to obliterate any feelings of safety? Just one. Just one person is all it takes. And that should make it clear what we were talking about earlier, why we can define culture as the worst thing that happens that we tolerate.

And of course, it's not just L-G-B-T-Q-I-A, people who are are not feeling the safety at work, right? People of color and people who speak English as a second language, people with disabilities, maybe introverts, Muslims. And you could go on and on. Now, I wanna close here with one more story. This [00:15:00] is a positive story about how we can actually change the culture intentionally.

This is a story about Shell oil rigs. Okay? I originally heard it on an Invisibilia podcast years ago. You know, sho big offshore drilling places where typically men would go and work for a long time, maybe 28 days at a time. These were dangerous places, tons of accidents, even deaths. Well, in 1997, shell began building the world's deepest offshore, well, something like 48 stories tall.

And one of the leaders recognized that something had to be done differently if this oil rig was gonna have just a basic level of physical safety for the workers. Right? So we took a chance on this leadership consultant. And she eventually brought in hundreds of workers for this training. An intense [00:16:00] training, often super full days from early morning to late at night.

And in this training, what do you think they talked about safety procedures, best safety practices. No, she had them talking about their families. Their hopes, their fears, their dreams, their traumas. She had them crying together, laughing together, bonding together, opening up. And of course some of the guys are thinking, what a colossal waste of time and money.

We're not talking about safety at all. Who's getting fired for this? But guess what resulted from this? An 84% reduction in accidents? 80, 84% because the culture changed in some key ways. People felt safe to admit when they didn't know something, they felt comfortable asking for [00:17:00] help. They had new communication norms.

They could be both strong and vulnerable. In other words. The psychological safety resulted in the physical safety, and that's just one of the ways we can think about improving a workplace culture. Right. What metrics do you have in mind that could be improved by improving culture like this? It might not always be obvious.

But think about it and we'll talk more on future episodes. Now. If you're intrigued and excited about this, please subscribe so you don't miss a single episode, and I commit to you that I'll continue to bring value, not just thinking about this abstractly, but in practical applications too. Two.

So that's it for today's episode on the Culture Advantage Podcast. Head on over Apple Podcasts, [00:18:00] iTunes, or wherever you listen and subscribe to the show. One Lucky Listener every single week that posts a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes will win a chance in the grand prize drawing to win a $25,000 private VIP day with Michael himself.

Be sure to head on over to culture advantage podcast.com and pick up a free copy of Michael's gift and join us. On the next episode.