Rule No. 3: Adapt

Editor’s Note: The following is a lightly edited excerpt from Mark Miller’s book “Culture Rules.” To learn more, visit leadeveryday.com.

What can you do to monitor the health and vitality of your culture? The answer is not a mystery nor a surprise: listen.

Why is listening hard? We all have two ears and one mouth; it should be natural to listen twice as much as we talk. But if it were this simple, Adapting our cultures would be much easier. Here are a few of the challenges to listening well.

Noise in the system. There is a lot going on in the modern corporation. Have you ever considered how many emails you receive in a given year? The data indicates the typical office worker receives over one hundred emails a day! And for many, the number of text messages per day outpaces emails. You can see in these two channels alone the blizzard of information bombarding our people. Add to this meetings, distractions, social media, and a multitude of other issues, and you can visualize the challenge opposing our good intentions to listen well. If we are not careful, important signals regarding the health of our culture can be lost in this raging storm.

Personal and organizational bias. What we see is never a function of actual data or pure reality.

The inputs we receive are always filtered by our role, prejudice, experience, personality, and our biases, both known and unknown. This is one of the most significant problems we face, and it makes listening well a huge challenge. Our own research indicated leaders see the world differently than the typical frontline employee does. When asked if they would recommend their organization as a great place to work, leaders said yes about 67 percent of the time; individual contributors said yes about 27 percent of the time. This gap is a product of bias and differing perceptions of reality.

Insufficient frequency. Even with the best intentions, most corporate listening efforts fail the frequency test. Imagine if you only looked at your bank records or listened to your spouse once a year. Many organizations do an annual survey to check on their culture. Some do these listening “events” every two years, and some never use a formal mechanism to hear from their people. These seasons of silence present real challenges for leaders: they are literally flying blind. Listening, both through formal and informal channels, needs a much more frequent cadence to guide leadership decisions and interventions.

Limited listening mechanisms. One size does not fit all when it comes to listening mechanisms. Some people will respond in a survey, while others prefer a focus group to provide their perspective. Many organizations have fallen into the trap of choosing one format or another. The best of organizations do both quantitative and qualitative research, often in tandem. They serve different purposes and can be used to strengthen each other.

Information overload. A final reason why listening is challenging is the overwhelming mountain of information from multiple sources an organization can amass. How do you make sense of all the input? This is no trivial question. To have data is step one, but it’s not the goal. The data must be turned into insight and then into action. Many leaders are not capable of doing this work themselves, and you could even make the case they shouldn’t be doing this work, anyway. This is why you see a growing trend in the field of people analytics. Someone has to make sense of the data before leaders can make the appropriate Adaptations to the culture.