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I’m going to take you on a longer-than-necessary journey here, but please stick with me. It will be worthwhile.

The Industrial Revolution

Prior to the industrial revolution, nearly every business had 2 types of workers: Owners and employees. In most organizations, that was it.

Due to most everything having to be done by hand, there was a low limit on how large a business could get. There was only so much people could work on and so much value that could be produced. Part of this restriction was due to errors. Manually performed work is inherently error prone. Think for example of the so called Wicked Bible that omitted the word Not making the commandment, “Thou shalt commit adultery.”

When work had to be performed manually, you were going to run into problems. If your work product has high error rates, people don’t want to pay a lot for fear they might get a lemon. Until the industrial revolution, this hesitation led people to not purchase things or to pay less than they otherwise might have.

Additionally, management systems simply were not developed enough for a person to be able to add value to the work of a large set of people with whom they could not immediately and frequently interact. Think of for example Scrooge and Marley’s money lending business with Scrooge sitting in the corner watching Cratchit do his job. Without the benefits of an adding machine, calculator, electric lights, a time management system, and so on, Scrooge’s ability to add value only stretched so far, which could be one of the reasons he is portrayed as such a terrible manager. He was micro-managing, being a tyrant, etc, and Cratchit’s ability to produce value was limited due to having to do everything by hand. No calculators, computers, or anything else. If this were not the case, Scrooge could have had a whole building of Cratchit’s working away, whose shoulders he did not have to look over in order to ensure that their work product was error free.

With the industrial revolution though came the ability to increase both quality and quantity of work. If I have a machine stamping the soles of shoes, I know that–once I get the machine set up correctly–it will do the job the same way every time. Humans naturally deviate. As this revolution occurred, employers were able to hire more employees to either work the machines or be treated like machines in that they only did a single task in an assembly line or division of labor scenario, which is less error prone than when a single person handles multiple tasks. At some point in this revolution and growth of the size of businesses, people like Scrooge simply did not have enough time or ability to add value to the work of all of those employees.

The widespread adoption of the assembly line greatly accelerated this shift toward more workers and less owners. Because while the assembly line–and variations of it–had been in use as far back as the Venetian Arsenal in the 12th century and even Ancient China, it was not until the industrial revolution when it began to be used to produce more than just a few items.

With the introduction of division of labor and machinery to automate work, you not only had an increase in the number of workers you could hire due to the amount of revenue you could generate, you also had higher quality products you could charge more for and specialized skillsets in your workforce that the owner-manager did not possess.

Enter the managerial class

For the first time in history, large numbers of businesses became stratified into–not a two-tier Owner-Employee organization but rather–a three-tier Owner-Manager-Employee organization. In this new structure, the owner’s responsibility was to the vision for and financial viability of the company with value adding oversight duties being shunted off to the managers. This was new and unusual, because until this time, the only people that could generally be trusted to shepherd the well-being of the company were people with an ownership stake. This new managerial class had no ownership, but still had to exercise responsibility.

While this shift was occurring, a man by the name of Frederick Winslow Taylor revolutionized business with his 1909 book The Principles of Scientific Management, which built on a long evolution of business and efficiency thinking to espouse the viewpoint essentially that humans and their processes should be molded to machines rather than the other way around.

With the advent of scientific management came systems of control and communication that are highly efficient, but somewhat dehumanizing. All in the span of 100-200 years (less in some places), workers went from being craftspeople that knew how to do everything related to a job and who had a direct relationship with their employers and customers to people that worked on only a single piece of a job (for example only installing car fenders rather than building the whole car) and who had no relationship with their employers or customers.

I cannot find the exact quote, but in The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith said something like:

Man will become the minimum his environment requires.

Paraphrasing Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.

And in this case, man’s environment had removed the understanding of the whole product or process and replaced it with an understanding only of installing the watch face, attaching the wiper blades, and so on, which is far more boring and less fulfilling than actually building something yourself and seeing people use it. This robbed the worker of the intellectual understanding of–and attachment to–the achievement that comes from really producing something because you never actually got to see your final product, and when you did, you had only done a small part.

As a result, it became ever more important to motivate workers externally. No longer was it just enough to do a good job because you couldn’t see the good job you had done playing out in the world. Scientific management espoused incentives and methods of control that treated employees like animals or machines. This created an environment in which management had to compel workers to work harder, better, faster even when they felt it was not worthwhile. And when their shifts were done, they were dismissed with something completely unrelated to the accomplishment of a job and instead something that fit the needs of the machine, a whistle or a bell.

Is it any wonder then that–come to today–so many people that work inside of machine-like businesses are dissatisfied with their jobs? For example, 90% of clergy express high satisfaction, while 39% of dry-cleaning workers do. Clergy own most or all of the process from beginning to end of their work and interact with their “customers”, seeing the outcomes of their efforts. Dry-cleaning workers conversely often do not interact with customers, work on a whole process from beginning to end, or see the outcomes of their efforts. The same is true of many industries and specialties.

Schools and industrialization

Many people have made the point that schools are like factories, so for the most part, I will not rehash that here. However, I will point out that–when you design a high throughput system–you cannot deal with edge cases very well. When you have an assembly line building clocks, you cannot accommodate a worker with slightly worse vision or a slower swing of the hammer. The worker fits or they don’t, and if they don’t, they are out.

The same is true of the product as well. You cannot accommodate production of a product that has variation to it. You produce the same thing over and over, and if a product has any variance, you get rid of it.

The same is true of schools. This is where so many children fall through the cracks. Whether you think of them as workers or products, if they don’t fit, they’re out.

If you have children, you’ve likely seen that they are at times well ahead or behind their peers, but generally not in everything. Rather, they might be behind in math for six months while ahead in reading, and then, it switches. If you’re a teacher though with 20, 30, or more students, it is difficult to slow down to help kids that are behind because that takes away from everyone else, and you’re on a schedule, and you have standardized tests coming up, and on and on and on. Too many demands, too many students, too little time.

If a kid is ahead, that might seem great, but instead of capitalizing on their skill or success, the teacher typically has to have them wait on everyone else. And if that student is like I was (and like a lot of kids generally are), they’re not going to sit still and just wait. They’re going to put their energy into something. This is where you might get kids that could be good at something falling out of the educational factory not because they are lazy or stupid or anything else, but because they don’t fit the mold the school requires. They have “too much energy”, “cannot focus”, etc. Much of it likely due to the fact that they are bored as a result of having to wait.

Our school system trains children to be unaccountable workers because schools are filled with children that are being pumped through the system regardless of whether they care about a specific topic, if they are ahead or behind, and more. This introduces from an early age in children resignation that they are not in school to satisfy themselves, but rather to satisfy the desire of others. Ask many children why they go to school, and a sadly, large percentage of them will say because they “have to”, “mom/dad make me”, or some variation rather than because “I get to learn” or “I enjoy it”. They go because something outside of them (people that hold power over them) tells them to do it, and once they are there, other powerholders tell them what to do.

When you’ve gone through 12 years of compulsory education, learning that what you want is less important than what some authority figure wants, you’ve received a lot of reinforcement that it’s only worth doing something when someone, who has power over you, tells you to do it. You learn to just do what others tell you to do because they hold power over you. Passion, skill, understanding, and anything else be damned.

And, no matter where you’re at in your studies, you get told to pass on to the next thing by what? The ringing of a bell or whistle just like in a factory.

What happens at work?

What we see in the work world is a lot of workers that have been habituated to only doing things that someone, who has power over them, tells them to do. Additionally, we see a lack of ownership of the duties they’re given, because honestly, it is harder to take responsibility for something that you might not be enthused about doing, but have been told to do, is it not?

Cruelly, we see some of these workers become managers and learn by example from their teachers, school administrators, and eventually managers that the way to manage people is to treat them like bigger children that should be passed through the factory system with little regard for their unique skillsets, desires, or abilities. Instead, they should be made to fit the mold of every other worker. And, if they don’t fit, they’re out of the company.

This creates an environment in too many companies in which people are there because they have to be. They need to pay the rent, college loans, and more. They’re not there because they want to be. And then while there, they’re treated like what they care about–or are good at–does not matter unless they just happen to be lucky and care about–or are good at–their jobs, or they are in a culture and/or have a boss that does not treat them like they are part of an assembly line.

The outcome of this is that too many organizations are less successful or productive than they could be. You have managers that other-ize their workforces. Believe me, I hear it all the time. “Why won’t these people just do their jobs?” or “I’ve given them everything they need, and they’re still underperforming/won’t do what I say/act like children/whatever.” You have employees that are disengaged, not looking for new or innovative solutions, and worse believe that every job is like this.

Worse still, you also have employees that are at the end of the day wiped out from doing work that does not energize or excite them. And, instead of bringing light and joy to those around them after an invigorating day of doing something they love, they instead bring their frustrations home with them.

Where it works

There are people and organizations that do not fit this mold. Some were lucky to have parents or go to schools that did not treat them like they were passing through a factory. Others did, but they found something they were passionate about and were able to succeed at that thing. Some managers actually add value rather than just bossing people around or wielding power over them. And, some companies actually have cultures that encourage people to bring some of their uniqueness to bear in the service of shared goals.

I wish it were as simple as saying that everyone should just “follow their passion”. The reality of it though, I believe, is that most of us have to work. We have bills to pay. We can avoid community groups (church, neighbors, whatever) that make us uncomfortable. We can not talk to the other folks in the gym or when we’re out walking our dogs. We can skip joining that soccer or bowling team or taking that dance class or getting that drink with some acquaintances after work. But, we generally do have to work, and it’s even part of our development that we most often want to work because work gives us the opportunity to feel productive and have our time and efforts be valued. And, work is the place where we can actually experience that the right way to do things is not to treat each other like non-humans or pieces of a machine, but rather as contributors to a greater good.

If you are a leader, you can work to establish a culture that strips away all of that factory training your staff has taken on and instead help them to realize that true motivation does not come from a powerholder telling them what to do, but rather from connecting what you are good at and care about to a shared goal and understanding that your work matters. When you do this, you’ll see more job satisfaction, more productivity, and more new and innovative solutions in place of what used to just be people taking orders.

After writing recently about cultural misalignment and how that impacts employee stress levels, I was thinking about levels of alignment around culture.

My proposal is that there are 4 levels of alignment around culture in an organization:

1. Level 1 – At this Leadership level, leaders must not just be fully aligned with each other and the company. They must also be aware of things that the remainder of the organization is not, such as basic assumptions described in my other post.
2. Level 2 – At this Integrated level, employees must be fully integrated into the culture such that they align with the values and have had enough experience with the situations that those values should apply to that they feel (even if they do not overtly recognize) the underlying basic assumptions.
3. Level 3 – At this Learning level, employees are getting their repetitions in. They are beginning to experience what others have experienced before and will move eventually to either Level 2 or Level 4.
4. Level 4 – At this Misaligned level, employees either are simply not aligned around espoused beliefs and values or they are, but due to misalignment around basic assumptions, their behavior, performance, and/or satisfaction do not show that they have integrated into the culture.

Level 1 – Leadership

As discussed in my other post, employees can afford to not be explicitly aware of the culture’s underlying basic assumptions because they are only required to act in accordance with the culture. Leadership on the other hand has to guide the organization and help to shape its culture.

When organizations encounter new and novel circumstances for which there is no prior experience or knowledge, leadership needs to advocate for a specific type of response (an artifact) and potentially even a value. For example, “I believe we should do this…” Espoused values and beliefs are always open to debate, but those that are supported by underlying basic assumptions are much less likely to be argued with because those beliefs and values are simply statements about the way the world works.

New beliefs and values though will typically be seen as something coming from another party. When we encounter a new situation and the CEO says that we should handle it a certain way, I as an employee might not see that as the natural solution, but rather as the CEO’s value or belief. I will not internalize it until my experience confirms that his solution is just the way that those situations should be handled. In this way, leadership guides the ongoing evolution of the organization’s culture.

Once new beliefs, values, or basic assumptions are set and felt by the employees though, they begin to limit the ability of leadership to deal with circumstances in any other way because a departure from an existing belief, value, or basic assumption would demonstrate misalignment to the employees and contribute to the stress or underperformance mentioned in my other post.

Level 2 – Integrated

In the most common scenario, you have employees at this level that have been around the bend with you so many times that they have experienced certain solutions that just work or are simply the preferred way of doing things in your situation. These are the people that understand whom to call, how to respond, how to manage projects, etc when specific situations arise. They have been there done that so to speak and learned that the way the organization has responded works.

One of my clients has what they call The Woodard Way. They instill The Woodard Way in their staff through a 3-month training program that everyone goes through and then repeated reminders for how everything they do comes back to a specific approach and why it works.

Culture is a process of social learning. It is not something you do alone. And, culture is also learning from the mistakes of others without having to pay the dues, which is what you want from all of your employees. Ideally, they do not have to make all of the mistakes in order to learn the same lessons, but rather can learn from others what the organization has experienced works or does not.

Level 3 – Learning

Generally, people do not spend a significant amount of time at this level, and the better job you do hiring for cultural fit and onboarding your people, the less time they will spend here. My company for example is small so we do not have a robust onboarding process. We do however work in organizational culture and alignment, so we are much more sensitive to instilling in new coworkers our values and preferred behaviors than other organizations our size might be.

Fundamentally, when you ask yourself how long it will be before a new hire can fly on their own, the answer is for the most part the amount of time they remain at the learning level. After that point, if not before, you should be able to clearly see progress toward level 2 or that they are slipping down to level 4.

Level 4 – Misaligned

This is largely the level I described in my other post. I know I have been there more than once, so I’m guessing you have been there at least once. I hope that you at least liked your colleagues and felt like you’re one of them. Often, misaligned people do feel lonely and isolated though unfortunately.

At this level, performance is likely an issue. The person delivers work that is not what was expected and/or handles situations in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s norms. They and those around them have likely expressed at least some level of dissatisfaction, and as much as you might wish to work on it, you are likely better off parting ways.

As unfortunate as it is, when there is misalignment, it is not often due to an issue with espoused beliefs or values. Most values are idealistic and things that the majority of people would support–truth, love, and the American Way sort of things. The problem comes in the manifestation of those values, and that is generally determined by the underlying basic assumptions.

For example, the company and I both say we value truth. Due to my experience though, truth is best communicated one on one because I have an underlying basic assumption that growth is hampered by embarrassment, and pointing out a problem with truth in front of a group would embarrass the person having the problem. The organization however has come to learn that truth is best arrived at through open debate. What we might see in this scenario is that I appear to shy away from stating the truth and do not seem to be living the value. I know though that I’m just waiting to have the hard conversation one on one. And what I appear to see is that I just work with a bunch of jerks that are more interested in arguing and being mean to each other than they are in actually living the truth value.

Level Management

One of the most interesting things about culture is something that I’ve already stated. Leadership helps to establish culture, but once it is established, culture limits the leadership’s options. As a result, it is incredibly important to be deliberate about hiring and onboarding, to be as consistent and aligned as possible when dealing with new circumstances, and to be as proactive and sensitive as possible about identifying and acting on misalignment.

I once took a job at a company with a lot of great people and customers, but from the start, something wasn’t right. Looking back on it, it was obvious that there was a cultural alignment issue. At the time though, what I could see was a lot of baffling behavior on the part of others, and I experienced a lot of confusion on the part of others about my behavior.

I would work hard on something and actually do a good job, but my effort would not be valued. I would be asked to work on things that simply made no sense to me. And no matter how much talking we did, it seemed like we were never on the same page when it got time to deliver.

After trying to make it work for 2 years, I finally admitted to myself that it was a bad fit and decided to move on. And, don’t get me wrong. It was a hard decision, I did not enjoy the journey, and I had a hard time not just blaming the other party/parties, but the rational part of me knew then–and knows now–that the issue was not that either party was bad or at fault per se. It was a bad cultural fit.

Unfortunately, I worked with people there that experienced the same thing and took it harder. For the sake of privacy, I won’t get into details except to say that I’m about as low anxiety of a person as you can get. On the Big 5 personality trait of Neuroticism, I’m 14th percentile, and I’m 1st percentile in Withdrawal, so I typically experience little anticipatory anxiety and rarely have a long lasting negative emotional state. It wasn’t like that for others though unfortunately.

The Impact of Stress

Think of a seesaw. When one side is down, your stress level is low, and your non-stress level is high. I’m calling it non-stress here because there are a lot of things that are the opposite of stress.

For all people, even people like me, there are times of stress. Like happiness, sadness, etc, stress comes and goes. It’s like weather. The personality traits I mentioned above are more like climate. Despite the fact that my climate might have a naturally low balance of stress response, storms do blow through.

When you get into a stressful situation, many things occur. Your body shuts down nearly everything that you do not need to survive right now, so for example, your kidneys stop processing fluid, and your body actually begins breaking down your immune mechanisms. Who needs an immune response that might keep you from getting a cold when you might not live beyond today?

In ideal circumstances, you get into a stressful situation, you deal with it, and it passes after a reasonable amount of time. Some people hold onto their stress response longer than others, but in the ideal circumstances, this is periodic, and they are able to move on.

Highly stressful situations though create stronger stress responses though, and therefore, the swings between non-stress and stress are larger.

The more often you swing between stress and non-stress, the more wear and tear it puts on your body to adjust. In our visual, it’s a fulcrum. In your body, it’s all of the mechanisms that flood hormones into your blood to stop or restart activity, turn on or off organs, and so on. The more this happens, the more difficult it becomes to switch, and you find yourself simply staying in stress for longer, taking longer to come down when something has stressed you out. It’s like your climate-level balance of stress has gone up.

When you get into stress response, your body shuts down what it does not immediately need and even goes so far as to break down your immune response mechanisms. Imagine a baby on the end of a very high seesaw with mom underneath doing everything she can to protect that baby if it falls off, but not really being able to do anything because she’s too far away. Nonetheless, her attention is still 100% focused on something she cannot do anything about.

When you have frequent stressful situations though and that fulcrum begins to wear out, so that you find yourself staying in stress for longer (with a higher climate balance of stress as I’ve put it), your body does not just recruit mom to watch the baby. Your body recruits everybody in the neighborhood.

Now, everyone that should be doing a job, earning some money, participating in the neighborhood watch, mowing their lawns, and more are instead doing anything they can to get you out of danger instead of doing their jobs.

This is one way that stress contributes to illness. Your body is so focused on dealing with the stress, and its ability to do so has gotten so worn down by repeated bouts of stress that it’s less and less effective despite throwing more and more at it. And while your body is focused on fighting the stress, viruses are getting through the cracks, plaques are building up in your arteries, and more.

Company Cultures and Stress

When you work in a situation like I was in, you will experience stress more often. You will be working hard, in that non-stress position, turn something in, get a reaction you were not expecting, and go into stress response. The more often you are misaligned, the more often this is going to happen. Hopefully, you get along with your coworkers, but more than likely, the misalignment also contributes to there being THEM and YOU, so not only might you be having work problems, you’re also alone.

And, as studies have shown, lonely and isolated people also have lower immune response.

If you read my post about levels of culture, you will see that this is all the more likely to happen when you take a job in a new/different kind of culture, but you believe you’re aligned on values. You will think that–based on X value–you will know what to expect, but due to underlying basic assumptions that no one talks about and few people (certainly not you due to you being new) understand explicitly, you will run into situations in which it appears that your colleagues are not acting in alignment with the values.

This creates that stress response. To you, the values say A + B = C. You experienced A + B = D. And now, you’ve run into a challenge.

The more that you deal with this, the harder it will become to deal with the stress, and the more likely it is that you get to a point where these occurrences contribute to a lower overall level of both health and satisfaction. And, all because you took a job where you are misaligned with the company.

Company Culture, Stress, and Leadership

Ask any leader and they will say that they want a strong culture, everyone aligned around values, etc. Look at how most of them act though. Many people have said some version of:

Don’t pay attention to what people say. Pay attention to what they do. Behavior never lies.

Even if leaders say they want a strong culture, alignment, and more:

1. It’s hard to do and rarely something that pays the bills today.
2. They might have no idea or true intention to actually work on it.

Even if only for financial reasons though, it is in leadership’s best interests to ensure organizational culture is strong. The last time I saw these numbers, the cost of healthcare added $1,500 to the price of every car sold in the United States. That means, if you buy a Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, you’re paying around 10% just for the healthcare expenses of the employees that worked on the car. As a consumer, I certainly would like to pay a bit less for products if I could, and healthcare expenses are a major contributor to prices.

In the United States, these are currently the top 4 chronic healthcare conditions:

1. Heart disease.
2. Cancer.
3. Diabetes.
4. Stroke.

All of those have proven ties to stress.

With the cost of healthcare being a major expense for employers and sickness being a major reason that someone might either not come to work or not be able to do their job well, it is in employers’ best interests to improve their employees’ health as much as possible. And, stress is a major contributor to health that leadership can have influence on through things like ensuring that you hire people aligned with–and cultivate people aligned around–your culture.

To not do so risks significant pain for the individual employee and lower overall success for the organization…although you might not realize why if you don’t bother to focus on these things.

Decades ago, Sloan School of Management professor Edgar Schein developed a model for understanding and analyzing organizational culture. His model divided an organization’s culture into three levels:

1. Artifacts are the things you can see–behavior, office layout, work product, etc. Artifacts are easy to see and hard to understand. The Egyptians built pyramids (artifacts). Those are easy to see. Why they built them though is harder to understand.
2. Espoused beliefs & values are what you say you stand for. Values theoretically prescribe how people act.
3. Basic assumptions are the foundation of culture. They are the beliefs that are so deeply embedded that most people don’t even know they are there. They are just taken for granted because essentially “this is the way the world works” or “this is just the way it is”. As long as values are not simply aspirational, they arise because of basic assumptions. Values come to be because you have encountered a certain situation enough times to eventually recognize that X or Y behavior in that situation is important to the group. Basic assumptions only appear as espoused beliefs or values when they have been recognized, but they always show up in artifacts as behavior. When that occurs, it is not always easy for outsiders to understand the behavior because they cannot see and certainly have never felt the basic assumption that led to the behavior.

Encountering culture

When you first encounter a culture, you are presented with the artifacts and have almost no ability to understand them. For example, if you visit your partner’s family for dinner for the first time and find that they fight constantly throughout the meal despite the fact you were told they are a very loving group, you likely cannot understand how fighting and being loving go together if you come from a family that perhaps did not argue through meals.

At the level of value, the idea of being a loving family sounds the same, but because of your experience, you define loving through the behavior of not arguing. The reason for this might be a basic assumption that your family has that is that you can demonstrate your love for a person by being concerned about their mental well-being in the immediate moment. Does your family ever talk about that though? Probably not. They more than likely avoid arguing because “that is just what you do” or “that is the way it is.”

This group though might have a basic assumption around love that runs more like, “You demonstrate love by focusing on the long-term outcomes.” So for example, if you’re about to make the wrong decision, I need to tell you so, and if you won’t listen, I need to make you listen. That is love in my world.

Understanding culture

In order to understand artifacts, you cannot just understand the values. You have to have enough experience with the culture to feel (if even you do not recognize) the basic assumptions.

Having moved numerous times in my life, I have encountered this many times. I would move to a new place, see someone do something that would not be a typical response where I’m from, and wonder more or less “what is with these people”. The thing is that–when you’re from a city in the west and you move to the south for example–you might find that the average person generally lacks the ability to deal with a disagreement head on and instead will just think or say to themselves “bless their heart”.

To you, it looks like they’re just avoiding conflict. When in reality, it might be that for example people in Seattle or New York or whatever other city have learned that you don’t get anywhere avoiding confrontations. And, people in Atlanta have learned that you don’t get anything out of most confrontations. They might value the same things–such as getting their jobs done or working toward a better future for their communities–but their experiences have taught them that their way of getting to those end goals is better than the alternative.

Hiring and culture

When you hire someone, they might very well align with your organization on values, and the artifacts you and they see might appear to align. For example, your company–like mine–values diversity of behavior and thought, and your candidate says, “That’s so cool. I’ve worked with some really valuable people that weren’t like everyone else in the company, but we never really got anywhere with them because our management treated everyone like a cog in a machine. So, those different people just didn’t fit in.” On the surface, all good, but once the person starts, you find that something is not working. This is where basic assumptions rear their ugly heads.

It turns out that–while your company values diversity of behavior and thought–it has an underlying assumption that it’s okay to go down a lot of unsuccessful paths on projects because those multiple failed attempts will result in arriving at the best possible outcome. Coming from the cog-and-machine environment though, your new hire might very well have learned through experience that you arrive at the best possible outcome when you limit all of the brainstorming or trying new things and instead stick to schedules and best practices. You both value diversity of behavior and thought, but your experience has led you to the conclusion that there are different times and places for those things.

Your best chance of avoiding hiring problems related to culture alignment is to ask questions that get to the candidate’s worldview. Don’t just talk about what you value or believe. Get down to why things are the way they are. Why is it better or worse to do X? Why is it better or worse to communicate in Y way? And so on.

Leadership and culture

Unlike when you are a worker, you must have an explicit understanding of basic assumptions when you are in leadership. One reason is what I’ve already said about hiring. You can align around values and beliefs, but basic assumptions dictate how those values and beliefs are acted out. Additionally, as a leader, you must have a clear understanding of your company’s basic assumptions, or else, you will struggle to understand why your people act the way they do sometimes.

As a worker, you have no need to have explicit awareness of your company’s basic assumptions. To do so would be like the difference between simply knowing that gravity acts in a certain way versus knowing why it acts in a certain way. In my example of the arguing family, most families almost never talk about arguing or not arguing. Arguing, or not, is just what they do. They have learned that that is the best way to act.

From the leader’s position though, you must get down to basic assumptions and have a clear understanding of them. Otherwise, you and someone else can seemingly agree on espoused beliefs and values, but still be in conflict that it seems is not resolvable.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about “The Innovators Prescription”. It’s a good book and worth your time. What has been on my mind though has been the dichotomy between–and process of going from–a primary care physician to a specialist and how we do not follow a similar model in the business world.

In healthcare, we can expect to go to a primary care physician, have some level of diagnosis performed, and then be recommended to a specialist if appropriate. For example, you had a cold back in November, your cough persisted, you saw your primary care physician, they prescribed something and said to come back in X weeks if it did not get better, it did not get better, you went back, and they referred you to a pulmonologist.

In business, we self-diagnose and go straight to the specialist. When you have a revenue problem, you diagnose it as a website or brand issue, go to the website or brand solutions provider, get your prescription, and go on your merry way.

Unsurprisingly then, many organizations never overcome the challenges that they face because they really are not very good at diagnosis–unlike a primary care physician that might not specialize in for example knee or lung issues, but who does specialize in 1) dealing with the most common challenges and 2) knowing how to identify a problem and point you in the right direction. This is one reason that so many businesses jump from problem+solution to problem+solution.

They have a problem. They misdiagnose it. They go to the solutions provider they think they need to solve the problem they believe they face. They get that solution. And 6 months later, 1 of 2 things occur. Either, they move on to the next problem+solution set (which more than likely is just a new manifestation of the previously unsolved underlying challenge) or they blame their solutions provider for not fixing their problem. When more than likely, the work they got was appropriate for the price and circumstances, but it was not what was needed in order to address the actual challenge.

Some businesses try to build their version of the hospital, where you have all specialities under one roof, but you still face a challenge here. In most cases, you go to for example a big marketing agency for a specific job like an ad campaign or a new brand. You do not go to them for diagnosis, and having worked at marketing agencies, my experience is that they generally are not good at diagnosis…even if they have people within the business that could do that job. And, even if you are open to being diagnosed and the one unicorn employee in the agency is able to provide that diagnosis, that hospital (marketing agency) is incentivized to keep you in house rather than to recommend you to a specialist, so you often cannot even trust the diagnosis.

The same thing happens in management consultancies, specialty business service providers (like accounting or HR shops), and more. Those are all either the equivalent of going directly to the ophthalmologist and telling her you need a specific eye surgery (which she provides of course) or going to the hospital and having them try to keep your options limited to only the services they provide under one roof.

What most organizations need is a primary care physician.

Rarely, do the trusted advisors in the business world provide all services. The best ones though specialize in diagnosis so that your business can get the challenge it faces actually resolved rather than doing what I have experienced both as an employee in some businesses and also as a solutions provider for others, which is jumping from problem+solution to problem+solution, getting everyone’s hopes up that this is the thing that will unlock your organization’s potential, and then wearing down your social and leadership capital due to never getting to the other side where people can just buckle down and focus on the challenges in the business’ mission and vision rather than the challenges that just get in the way of actually doing the job.

A little self-promotion

Incidentally, this is something that originally attracted me to my company Bigwidesky, something we specialize in, and something I’d like to think I have gotten better at over the years, so if you are open to exploring if the challenges you face have underlying causes that you might not be seeing, I’d be happy to chat.

Most people treat their company culture like it’s something that is inevitable, like something that will arise or change regardless of what they do. This occurs at both the leadership and the worker levels.

At the leadership level, not seeing that culture is something that you do rather than something that just happens crushes the ability of the group to move toward a preferred future, toward a better culture.

George Washington Carver said:

Where there is no vision, there is no hope.

George Washington Carver

At the worker level, not seeing that culture is something that you do rather than something that just happens contributes to a sense of helplessness, to a sense of victimhood.

Paraphrasing the Bible, Ralph Waldo Emerson said:

Where there is no vision, a people perish.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

And both of these contribute to finger pointing. Leadership points to the workers, saying they just won’t do or be the way they are supposed to do or be. And, workers point to leadership, saying they lack vision, are tyrants, don’t want things to be better or different, don’t care about the staff, etc.

Most of the time, both are wrong. Most people want to be part of a strong culture, but because they lack the understanding that culture is not inevitable–it is something you do–they fail to realize that they contribute to the undesirable situations they wish would change.

The culture problem is multifold.

One

If you believe that something is inevitable, you lose the understanding of and motivation for doing the work that actually brings that thing about. Why work on your company culture when it’s just going to be (or become) what it is (or will be) regardless of what you do?

The reality is that a culture becoming something good was often the result of people in the past struggling to make it so. Rarely, do good things like a healthy culture just happen.

Two

If you believe that culture (or anything) is inevitable, you lose your sense of the past and the future. As far as the past goes, none of the struggle that occurred to make your culture what it is today matters because essentially “it would have happened like this anyway”. Sadly, a consequence of this is that you lose the opportunity to learn from the lessons of the past, because again, the struggle didn’t matter, so why worry about doing anything better or different moving forward?

As far as the future goes, you see only one possible future. Your culture is going to be what it’s going to be regardless of what you do. So, you’ve lost the ability to see, discuss, or work with others toward multiple possible futures, which invariably would require work from you in order to realize one over another. No work is required for you to realize the inevitable future, so you do not need to engage with others in any culture-related struggle.

Three

This all leads to an inability to process facts. If you see something as being inevitable, you will move or interpret facts to suit the narrative that supports your view of the past, present, and future. And when the facts cannot be moved or interpreted, you will simply disregard them.

We can see this in our broader culture in our inability to focus on anything, but narratives. When a fact challenges a narrative and we refuse to even admit that fact into consideration, this degrades our trust in “truth”, authority figures, and facts on the whole. It’s as if you can have your facts, and I can have mine. Mine are right. Yours are wrong, so yours aren’t facts. When in truth, mine are potentially Facts In Name Only.

Often, we’re not actually talking about facts, we’re talking about narratives. And narratives cannot generally disprove one another. Facts disprove narratives.

The most obvious early examples of this played out in authoritarian and communist countries decades ago, but you see it increasingly in the west now. So many things are about what I believe and not about what is demonstrably true.

Four

If you lose the sense that culture is something that you do and instead see it as just happening, you lose the ability to understand why others would act in some greater interest. You cannot understand why they struggled the way that they did in the past.

In fact, you have to embody the spirit of the culture you wish to be a part of, and part of that embodiment is participating in the work it takes to make the culture a reality. The culture you see as inevitable actually won’t come about if you do not live both the spirit of the struggle to realize it and also the spirit of that future in which it has come about.

Not living the spirit actually is a large contributor to people espousing a desire for a different culture, but unintentionally working against its realization. This is because their actions support the current paradigm or the alternative futures that they themselves refuse to see. This leads to people thinking that they supported something the whole time (for example, a movement toward a different culture), it didn’t happen, and that the reason it did not happen was that someone else did something to stop it…when in reality, the individual’s non-participation here was part of what stopped it.

What to Do About Company Culture

From leadership’s seat, you have to develop a vision and communicate that it takes everyone to make a culture.

Whether you’re in leadership or anything else though, the key thing to realize is that you are a part of culture and a part of change. Your company’s culture does not just happen to you, and it certainly does not just happen on its own. It is a combination of the people, how they work together and interact, how they make each other and clients feel, and more.

Culture is an active process of cultivation and practice. You live it everyday. If you are not happy with your company culture, you play a role in making it what it will be tomorrow.

To do anything less is to lose sight of the struggles of the past, the lessons you can learn from others, and the understanding that tomorrow can be better than today.

Are you struggling to find the employees you need? Like me, do you constantly hear from executives that “no one wants to work anymore”? You’re not alone. In nearly every meeting I attend with executives around the U.S., these issues come up.

But, what if the real reason is something that no one is talking about?

The real reason ‘no one wants to work anymore’

The problem is poor alignment between what a job is advertised to be and what the employee actually experiences. On the outside, companies present an inspiring mission or vision.

Look at almost any organization’s website, and you will see an inspiring mission or vision:

1. Nike – To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world.
2. Harvard – To advance new ideas and promote enduring knowledge.
3. Salesforce – To empower companies to connect with their customers in a whole new way.

What most companies present on the outside is a Call to Adventure. It’s the inspiring message that tells you there is a dragon out there that needs to be slain, you’re the one that can do it, and when you come back from that adventure, you and your community will be better for it.

But, what most employees experience is far from that.

One solution – Make the work mean something

The solution is to make the work mean something. Companies need to help employees see the part they play in realizing the company’s mission. This can be done in a number of ways, but the most important thing is that businesses need to show their employees that their work matters.

You don’t have to make everyone’s job exciting per se. You don’t have to give your call center manager the most innovative work in the business.

But, you do need to help your employees see the part they play in realizing your mission.

The most obvious contributor to employees not seeing this–and some potential employees not wanting to work for you–is that most businesses don’t bother to show their employees that their work matters. Employees all too often feel either like their job is meaningless or that it should mean something and no one realizes that.

When you feel like you are a cog in a machine, you feel unseen. You feel like you are just one of many. And, you likely cannot see what your purpose really is. So while you’re spinning and doing your job, you do not sense any greater connection to a larger purpose or that anyone recognizes your value.

You can change this for your employees by better communicating what your company makes real in the world and how each person plays an important part in that. And if you can do that, you stand a better chance of actually being able to get people to want to work at your company rather than just seeing you as another paycheck that maybe they’re no longer so motivated to seek out.

Are you looking to create the ideal job that aligns with your strengths, interests, and abilities? Writing your own job description can be a powerful way to take control of your career and create a position that benefits both you and your employer. I’ll walk you through the steps of how to write your own job description, including identifying a need for a new position, creating a job title, describing the role’s alignment with the company’s mission, and listing the job duties and qualifications. I’ll also provide a template and example to help guide you through the process. Follow these tips and take the first step towards finding your dream job.

The steps to writing your own job description

1. Identify the need for a new position.
   • Explain how your job solves a problem or meets a need that is currently not being addressed.
   • Use research and your own experience to back up your argument for why this position is necessary.
2. Create a job title and description.
   • Choose a descriptive and professional title for your job.
   • Write a brief summary that outlines the purpose and main responsibilities of the position.
   • List the specific duties and tasks that you will be responsible for.
3. Explain how the job aligns with the company’s mission and values.
   • Include a statement that shows how your job will support the company’s goals and values.
   • Explain how this position contributes to the company’s success.
4. Describe the required qualifications and skills.
   • List the education, experience, and skills that are necessary for someone to be successful in this role.
   • Explain why these qualifications are important for the position.
5. Provide a plan for pitching the job to your employer.
   • Identify who the appropriate person or group is to pitch the job to.
   • Outline the steps you will take to present your proposal, including any materials you will use (such as a written proposal or visual aids).
   • Consider possible objections or concerns that your employer may have, and prepare responses to address them.
6. Follow up after the pitch.
   • If your proposal is accepted, thank your employer and follow through on any next steps that are necessary to implement the new position.
   • If your proposal is not accepted, consider whether there are any changes you can make to increase the chances of it being approved in the future.

Step 1: Identify the need for a new position.

For you to really take control of your career and have the best opportunities, you need to demonstrate vision, passion for that vision, and an understanding of what your organization needs to achieve its goals. In 20 years of my career to this point, I have been lucky to have the freedom to both explicitly write my own job description at times and also to develop my own job without writing the job description other times. What responsible owners and managers generally need to see though is how what you do–or will be doing–solves a problem for the organization.

For example, my manager left the company I worked at years ago, and I was left as the most senior member of the team, but not by much. After discussing with my management, I crafted a job description that helped them to see how their overt need for a manager of that team aligned with both my current skill set and the skills and experience I could acquire if given the right support over the coming months.

To do this, I research what managers of that type of role did at other organizations, what responsibilities they typically had before taking on a managerial role, and what I would need to do to develop from where I was to where the company needed me to be. I did this using job board searches and by reaching out to connections of connections on LinkedIn to ask if I could do an informational interview with them.

Step 2: Create a job title and description.

Picking a job title

After clearly identifying, documenting, and being able to make the argument for your position, it is time to choose a descriptive and professional title. To do this, I recommend surveying titles at your existing company and performing searches on job boards.

While Wizard of [pick a topic] or Head of Excellence and whatnot might all be applicable and interesting, they also might present some difficulties for colleagues, clients, and the market to understand. For example, let’s say that you are a high-powered project manager with the Head of Excellence title. Will you colleagues know to come to you for high-level project management guidance versus going to someone with a title like Head (or Director, VP, etc) of Project Management? And while I hope you stay at your current employer forever, the reality is that you might very well move on, but will potential future employers be able to quickly get a sense of what you do if you have a wacky title?

Writing the job description

At this point, keep your job description as brief as possible. You’ve hopefully searched job boards for similar roles, and you likely have pages of examples of roles, responsibilities, descriptions of what the day to day looks like, and so on. Those are all valuable, but the shorter you can make this the better at this point.

You have the need and how it aligns with the company. You have a professional and descriptive job title. Now, write 1-2 paragraphs that outline the purpose for the job and the main responsibilities of the position. For example:

The Chief Futurist role exists to leads the practice of Futurism and establish a consistent company viewpoint on this practice. The main responsibilities for this role are establishing the vision for what Futurism is and how we deliver it, leading high priority client projects in this area, and mentoring and managing our team of Futurists.

Someone reading your high level description should be able to walk away with a strong understanding of what they can rely upon you to accomplish. This is not the How of your job. It is more like the central themes and goals.

Next, you get into the How by describing the specific duties and tasks you will be responsible for. This is where your job board research comes into play again.

Most job listings have innumerable bullet points listing everything people in those roles might have to do, skills they should possess, and so on. Pick the most relevant ones for your new roles and then adjust and add to them based on your vision for the role and how you see it aligning with what the company needs. The length of this list depends on what is appropriate for your company and role. As with many things though, I recommend you keep it as short as reasonably possible.

Step 3: Explain how the job aligns with the company’s mission and values.

By this point, you’ve explained the need for the role, established a descriptive and professional title, written the brief role summary, and documented duties and tasks. The next step is for you to explain how your job supports the company’s goals and values.

Goal Alignment

Thankfully, while many companies lack actual strategies to achieve their goals, few lack goals themselves. Many are unrealistic, more like dreams, but they still exist. So whether your company’s goals are to grow 10% in revenue this year, become the premier provider of paper products in the Northeast, or something else, your responsibility is to explain how your job will help the company achieve those goals.

If for example your company’s goal this year is for revenue to grow 10%, but your job is largely an internally facing role, you can still impact revenue by ensuring that your work is delivered with such high quality, on time, and more that clients want to spend more money with you. Additionally, you might be able to ensure that your company has higher efficiency and/or saves money somehow around your work, so while you might not deliver more revenue, you can deliver more profit.

Value Alignment

Next, you have to align your new job with the company’s values. This can be difficult because most companies lack real values. They more than likely have unrealistic dreams or generic platitudes, that can be read any number of ways, such as “Respect” or “People First”. Still though, if you want success in this endeavor, you have to align your role with the company claims to value.

My company for example has a value about consulting your network. The basic idea is that we want people that are always learning and who will build networks around them that make them and us better. As a result, if I were making an argument for a new leadership position, I could align it with this value by saying that a key aspect of me being in this job will be finding new ways of doing our work and new partners so that we are always improving and constantly bringing new things to the market.

How you contribute to success

You have likely done this throughout your job description, but you need to ensure that you have a clear statement about how your job will contribute to the company’s success. Will you being in your new role generate sales? Will it improve work product quality? Will it open new markets? Is there a need in the business not currently being met?

State clearly how your role will contribute to the company’s success, and you will help executives imagine how what you are asking for aligns with greater company needs.

Step 4: Describe the required qualifications and skills.

Next up, it’s time to list the education, experience, and skills that are necessary for someone to be successful in this role and why they are important for this role. Thanks to you job board searches, you should have a large list of options. This is the space where you list “Bachelors degree in Marketing, Business, or a related field required” and so on.

You cannot reasonably pitch to have a job if you do not have the qualifications, so ensure that the education, experience, and skills are both appropriate to you and also actually necessary for the role. There is no value is listing for example that a BA is required when it’s not. Similarly, if you have 20 years of experience, but someone could do the proposed job with 5 years, you need to list 5 not 20.

Step 5: Provide a plan for pitching the job to your employer.

At this point, your job description itself is likely complete or nearly complete, so beyond editing and refining, your next steps are to:

1. Identify who the appropriate person or group is to pitch the job to.
2. Outline the steps you will take to present your proposal, including any materials you will use (such as a written proposal or visual aids).
3. Consider possible objections or concerns that your employer may have, and prepare responses to address them.

If you have a boss already, but maybe you are pitching a role that would not report to them anymore, you might need to take political or power dynamics into account. There is no use for example pitching a role to your CEO if they’re going to go talk to your current boss and hear that that person knows nothing about your pitch. That might not look too good for you.

As you prepare, ensure that you understand the need, how the company will benefit, and so on so that you can make a cogent and compelling argument. Also, prepare for any objections so that you are not stopped in your tracks at the first question.

Assuming that the person you are pitching to has little knowledge of what you will talk to them about, begin the conversation with a statement of why you want to speak with them such as, “I have identified a need and an opportunity in [this area] and have a proposal for how to address that I would like to speak with you about.” Once you have described the need and opportunity, explain your understanding of how this aligns with the company’s goals and values, and be sure to ask if the person you are speaking to sees the issue in the same way.

If they do not see the issue in the same way, take the time to understand how they see it because you might not still be able to move forward with your pitch. You need information about their perspective though before deciding.

If they do see the issue in the same way you do, explain your pitch for a new role at a high level and then ask if they have any questions and/or would like you to get into details. This is not the time for you to give them a monologue. It would be better to let them talk as much as they are willing to so that they feel heard.

Step 6: Follow up after the pitch.

If your proposal is accepted, thank your employer and follow through on any next steps that are necessary to implement the new position. Typically, this involves an action plan with specific deadlines, and it might very well include a plan for how to replace you in your current role or otherwise cover the work you are currently doing.

If your proposal is not accepted, consider whether there are any changes you can make to increase the chances of it being approved in the future. If at all possible, ask why your proposal was not accepted so that you understand if there is anything to be done and/or where you might not have been in alignment with the needs of the company.

Conclusion

1. Identify the need for a new position.
2. Create a job title and description.
3. Explain how the job aligns with the company’s mission and values.
4. Describe the required qualifications and skills.
5. Provide a plan for pitching the job to your employer.
6. Follow up after the pitch.

To conclude, writing your own job description is a great way to take control of your career development and find job satisfaction. By identifying a need, creating a job title and description, and presenting your proposal to your employer, you can create a position that aligns with your strengths, interests, and abilities. This can lead to more motivation and engagement in your work, as well as the opportunity to develop new skills and add value to the company. Take the time to create a job description that works for you and your employer, and you may find yourself in a fulfilling and enjoyable job tailored just for you. Encourage readers to share their experiences with creating their own job descriptions in the comments below, or to contact you for more information on how to do so.

If you are writing your own job description and have questions, please shoot me a line at eric@inboundandagile.com. I would be happy to help if I can point you to any resources.