Community over Culture

What you see here is a music concert, I assume. It emulates a more forward approach to how our society works here in the United States of America; with a me-first approach. We raise our hand, hoping to be selected and not left behind with the others. We are not good with isolation, nor should we be.

Photo by William White on Unsplash

But we raise our hands to join something, to compete against each other, to attempt to win, to be part of something that we may not understand or care about. This beating out the others, is woven throughout our ecological fabric. It’s how we have learned to survive. Competition can be healthy, but not for the sake of crushing the people next to you. Effective progress comes from raising our hand with the other person and joining in a communal way. We tend to ignore this idea in business.

That ignorance is easy to define. The idea of forward progress in business has to do with beating the competition, and generation of revenue. I mean, how else would we measure this success? KPI’s are key performance indicators to reach our strategic and financial goals, and they are not ways to keep people inclusive, or keep people interested. We lose focus of the people (who make up the organization) doing the work. But aren’t these the same people who define our culture?

So, what is culture? We know that it is not as simple as just behaviors and norms but may be inclusive of shared patterns and processes. Organizations provide services or products and have ways that they get things done. We even go as far to hire those who are just like us, making it easier for us to abide by the culture set for by an organization of “we.” But who is the “we” who set the culture? Do they still exist today, or has it been carried forward from a legacy time when the organization people sat at the forefront of that time?

We look for and hire people who match that, the legacy. But if we have people who are just like us, how is it that we can generate the best of ideas, new processes, services, and products? What if organizations could hire great employees and not match “us.” Even the term here of “us” is ambiguous to “a beings” that does not exist. People come and go from organizations, so there is no real “us.” Here, “us” is an entity, that could be run by 100 people one year, and 100 different people the next year. We subscribe to an continuously evolving organizational culture that may have been set by people decades ago.

What if we thought about the organization like a neighborhood or a community of people? Community is wrapped in fellowship and shared goals. In a neighborhood we live together, and most people get along, but we ascribe different ways of life. Some of us are healthy, some practice Buddhism, some water ski, others leave their trash bins out a day later than the rest. But we all selected this neighborhood for similar reasons. It’s location. Our community is in location. We behave differently, have different processes, patterns in our lives, and do not all think alike. That’s okay, and there is some great research that suggests organizations are more prosperous when the “we” is nested in the difference among “us.”

How does community look in an organization? We can select to work for a technology company because we love technology. But loving technology does mean that every single piece of code we write at the company must match. That code must be collaborative in some cases, but organizations such as Google use multiple codes in the organization based upon the purpose of the project, among other inputs. This allows for diversity and generation of ideas to spawn as an organization, and it can be applied to any industry. At the very least, when looking to pick people to join our team, we should look for people who could live in our community, people who don’t always mow their grass on Saturday mornings but may prefer the early evening on Friday to end the work week. Peter Drucker said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I think community is the food, and without it, culture cannot survive. So, don’t always feel that you must pick someone like you. Pick someone who can live in your community. Watch the new ideas flourish, in the garden next to yours, both rooted in similar soil.