Speaker #0Welcome to Conscious Culture, not everyone has authority, but we all have influence and choice. This podcast is about the moment you decide to use yours. I'm Kris Corbus, let's begin. Every organization has a list of things that are completely normal inside it and would be strange anywhere else. Nobody wrote that list. It's not part of your onboarding documentation, but in few weeks you know exactly what is on it. You want to belong, to fit in, so you start playing by the unwritten rules without questioning them. That list what I am talking about is collection of appropriate behavior or simpler called culture. The price of belonging is ignoring wrongdoing... until you cannot. Your values kick in and the perfect picture starts to crack. You start to notice things around, in a meeting where a comment lands strangely and nobody reacts, or that moment when someone walks in and all conversations go silent. You see promoting the office bully and ignoring the one who did the job, and you start thinking, somebody should do something about this. Why is no one doing it? I tried to avoid that thought, to run away from it, to ignore it. I simply didn't know what to do with it. It felt too big, too complex, and not for me. I'm just an ordinary person. But somebody should do something about this. That moment is what this podcast is about. I hope you will decide to be that somebody and I will help you to make your first move. I don't want to give you the wrong idea that I always knew about culture, human dynamics and the whole thing around it. No, I come from tech. I'm trained in system analysis and pattern recognition. And for almost 20 years, I worked with software. Requirements engineering, software testing, agile, non-agile. I hired people, I defined processes, I created departments. Like many tech people, the reason I choose tech: I didn't know how to get along with humans. Yes, I know, they are everywhere, but... I like algorithms. I find them beautiful and easy. And humans... I found unpredictable. As a child, I had a lot of problems, and pretty early I discovered that one of the reasons was because I couldn't read faces. So I trained myself with help of the comic books to recognize face expressions. And things went much better from that moment. But anyway, I'm nerd, I'm techie. I'm trained to find the real problem underneath the visible one, to look past the symptoms and find the cause. I was pretty good at it. But then the strangest thing happened. I started to see things behind the visible, not only in context of software, but in the way how people work together and how organizations work. Biggest issue with pattern recognition is when you, once you see it, you cannot unsee it. And I didn't know what to do with it. I tried to talk to my colleagues about it, but I failed. Not because they were unwilling to listen, but because I was very, very bad at explaining what I was seeing and why I thought it is a problem. So I changed jobs. but I think you guessed already. Different company, different industry, different people. Same patterns. Teams redesigned processes when the real problem was trust. Developers ignored good practice because nobody had given them official permission to apply it. Managers pleasing customers and not addressing the real issues. That bothered me a lot. I had this digital transformation project. And one day our... Project manager comes to me and says, Chris, do you have any certifications? Yes, of course, but why do you need them? We are in the middle of project. I want just send them to the customer. Why? It makes no sense. The typical thing about digital transformation projects is that leadership team is clear about the goals and what they want to achieve, but they haven't explained it to the employees in detail. And typically employees are worried about their job security, so instead of working on project, they sabotage it from inside. She didn't want to tell me that at the beginning, but that's what was happening here as well. And her way of solving it was showing them certifications. And that was the moment when I thought, we are a bunch of highly intelligent people. We know how to fix big stuff, complex stuff. But again and again, we failed very basic human things, like having a difficult conversation. No technology can solve that. And again, that annoying thought appeared in my mind. Somebody should do something about this. I really, really hate that thought. I was waiting desperately for someone to come and fix this whole mess. Okay, let's put a little bit more cheerful picture and talk about culture. If I asked you now to describe your company's culture, I guess you would struggle. Most likely because you don't know really where to start and what to include. It's something like asking a fish to describe water. It's not hidden, it's just everywhere. So something similar is with culture. It's everywhere around you. It's in your office, a different one in your home, a different one with your friends. Different groups have different cultures, and you are part of all of it. What is appropriate in one setting, in one context, is most likely not appropriate in another. Seth Godin, the branding guy, offers the simplest definition of culture, which I really, really like. It goes like this. People like us do things like this. That's it. Beautifully simple, right? Nothing about values on the wall or what is written in the website. Picture of different colors and shape people. Just what the actual people actually do. Let me give you examples. The names of companies are invented, but the patterns you most likely know. A few years ago, there was this trend in tech companies addressing employees as family members. A lot of mentioning of family in job ads, company pages, meetings, everywhere. We are the family. We are the family. But the company is not a family, right? So why do they call employees family? Here is my take. White cloud engineering leadership manipulates employees by giving false security and belonging. People like us, leadership, do things like this. Give false security. We are the family. gets your guard down. But then, when it fits to the leadership, they get out the contract, and you are not part of family anymore. All your security and belonging is out of the window, and you start to feel used. Okay, I will give you another example. In Yellow Submarine, colleagues look the other way when something unethical happens to one of them. People like us do things like this. They may comfort themselves. It's not my problem. It's another department. Maybe there's something, I don't know what's happening. If it really would be wrong. Someone would do something about it. Someone should do something about it. You can tell a lot about culture by watching what happens in those small moments. Who interrupts whom? Who gets thanked? Who gets forgotten? What happens when somebody makes mistake? Who is the one who makes mistakes? Only junior people or senior as well? What happens when someone disagrees with the leadership? Those moments are the culture. Everything else is just a decoration. So, what do we have so far? You know that no one will come to save you. There is no department for this, no external expert who will magically fix all the things. Only you and people around you. And also you know what culture is. People like us do things like this. All those hundreds of small decisions you make every single day, you are shaping the culture. You have influence and you have choice. Through things you say or don't, through what you tolerate or challenge, through every small permission you give or withhold. You have influence. The question is how you are using it. Last winter, I started to work with organizations again. And because of that, I created a bunch of brand new trainings. Agile, human dynamics, conflicts, all the good digital transformation. Very different topics, different organizations, different audiences. But what surprised me was that sooner or later, the conversation always found its way to talk about unwritten rules, the things everybody noticed but nobody talked about, what got rewarded, what got punished, what was never addressed. Basically, we were talking about culture. That was not part of curriculum, but I saw clearly that there is a need to talk about culture. Long story short, I decided about this podcast. So here you are. You are probably listening to all this and thinking, okay, somebody should do something. And maybe that's somebody I could be. And yeah, I could have influence and I definitely have choice, but How? How? How do I change the culture? How do I do that? A culture is too big, too complex, and you are just an ordinary person. It is way easier to complain, to point fingers, to wait. I have done that, all of that. But that's how we influence culture as well, just not in a positive way. So again, how exactly? The whole podcast will be your answer. I will have guests and conversations around the moment of change. This podcast is the space to explore it, to fit in and ignore or to do something about it. Before we finish, I want to give you two things. A permission and a question. Permission to go for it. It doesn't matter how small the first step is. It is the first step. And the question, what is your next move? This was Conscious Culture. If this episode gave you something valuable, the most generous thing you can do is to share with someone else. You can find more about how I work with leaders and teams at kriscorbus.eu. See you next time.
