Culture is Not What You Say, It’s What You Celebrate

Before I go any further, credit where credit is due. The title of this post is basically directly pulled from a presentation I heard from Scott Hollingshead, lead pastor at Harvest Bible Chapel in Sacramento, California. Discussing culture, Scott told his personal experience of moving from a destructive culture to a healthy one, and this quote stuck out strongly enough to me that I’ve mentioned it probably a hundred times in conversations since.

A modified version of the quote that may apply more broadly: Culture isn’t what you claim to be — it’s what you explicitly encourage.

Let’s unpack the implications this can have on our leadership.

Accidental Hatred

Recently, the tech world was taken aback by an open letter detailing an experience with apparent sexism and unhealthy HR practices in a huge company. If the claims are true, they are devastating, sad, and alarming.

Depending on when you read this, you could fill in the blank with a new company, and new problems. This isn’t new — companies have had issues in culture since people started making companies.

Here’s the crazy part — if you ask the leaders at these same companies being criticized, of course they will say that their culture isn’t sexist.

And in fact, it may be that the company isn’t actively attempting to be sexist. The company probably isn’t trying to burn out their employees with long work weeks. It’s likely that the leaders aren’t actively trying to further inequality. Certainly some people are simply bad, selfish people and their actions are inexcusable, but for the most part, people are not acting on sinister intentions for others. (By no means does this excuse the behavior, as we’ll see in the next section.)

A Sin of Omission

Most likely, the culture problems you are facing is instead a “sin of omission.” I heard this growing up as a kid — the idea was that there are two kinds of transgressions: those where you are actively doing something against your morality, and the other where you are omitting something you should be doing that aligns with your morality.

Culture is what you celebrate, not what you say.

If you on the one hand say that you are striving for balance and flexibility, but on the other hand praise an employee for staying late every night last week to finish a project, you are celebrating something that breaks from your stated cultural principles.

Your underlying intention may be that you are trying to express gratitude for this person who has sacrificed “above and beyond” for the sake of the company. That you want them to know it didn’t go unnoticed.

You may truly want your culture to promote flexibility and balance. And yet, you are only celebratory in the moment where someone was forced to break from those goals.

And what do your employees hear? “If I stay late, I will be more liked and more appreciated. Staying late shows commitment. Staying late shows dedication. Staying late will get me a raise and more favor.” And these thoughts and assumptions are where the DNA of your culture resides.

Culture is not created by what we cut away. Culture is not what’s left after carving the bad out. It follows that our celebration shouldn’t simply be in the exceptions where our values are tested. Culture is built by celebrating the times that the values align with our experienced reality. And the celebration must be explicit.

Happy Gaps

We take for granted the “happy gaps” — when the mood is undetermined, we expect the space to be filled with non-volatile emotion. In this way, we omit what may be considered unnecessary energy-sucking effort. We don’t celebrate someone walking out of the office at 5 on the dot because… well, that’s normal. Our striving and straining to accomplish some cultural normal is rewarded with silence. With a “happy gap.”

A great example of this in action is a happy marriage. Happy marriages, statistically, occur when both the husband and wife actively speak more positive language to their spouse than negative. In other words, it can’t be taken for granted that one spouse loves the other. It must be constantly reinforced. (Individuals tend to assume other people are in the same state they last saw them in, as this reduces the cognitive load needed to understand what may have changed. The truth is far from our assumptions.)

The problem is, there’s no such thing as a happy gap. And when we expect the quiet normality to speak loudly, we fail, dramatically.

Say what you mean.

The cognitive dissonance of saying one thing and celebrating another breaks trust, and causes a sense of frustration amongst the workforce. The idea that we have a moving target, and that our ideals are lip service — these are destructive to morale. Your intentions are not enough — as a leader, you must learn to celebrate in alignment with your values.