Just Do Your Part

It snowed yesterday.  About 9 inches of white powder fell from the sky and on to the heavily trafficked sidewalks that line the streets in my neighborhood.  And the unwritten contract (or, is it written somewhere?  I actually don’t know) is that each resident clears the sidewalk in front of their home.  It’s simple and clear.  We need everyone to do their part, and if we do, the sidewalks are free from ice and snow all around town.  But this morning, on my walk to Starbucks (judge me not!), I had to walk in the street at times, hurdle over piles of sloppily thrown, and navigate areas of the sidewalk that were not cleared.  An irrational level of anger took over, as I kept thinking, “we are just asking you to do your part.”  Why is that so hard? 

And that made me think of the workplace, and the number of times we try to collaborate, brainstorm, enact change, or just simply get shit done.  And how often we ask everyone to just do their part, but how we see one or two people get away with doing nothing.  And, again, I wonder why someone doesn’t knock on their office door to demand more.  And then it hit me:

Our culture is made up, in part, by the worst behavior we tolerate.

We all tolerate that neighbor’s behavior.  We walk in the street, avoid that corner, and work around it.  And the culture of this Boston suburb is “mostly really kind people, with a few selfish a-holes.”  And the culture of the workplace where two out of 10 people on a team get away with doing significantly less than others is “mostly hard working people with a few selfish freeloaders.”  Not the best endorsement, eh?  And I know this isn’t foreign to you.  We all have a colleague who begs the question, “what does she do all day?”  I know it; you know it.  And that’s part of our culture.  It’s part of our culture, because no one knocks on that person’s door to demand better.  No one says “we don’t do that here.”  No one is holding Mr. or Mrs. Freeloader accountable.  So we just walk on the other side of the proverbial (or literal) street.

But imagine if all the neighbors came together and visited house #328, to ask that they begin clearing that part of the sidewalk.  What would that say about the culture of the neighborhood?  And this is not the third-born tattle-tale in me.  No, sir!  This is the culture advocate, and the community builder in me.  Holding people accountable for the behaviors we value IS how we build the culture we want.  It’s as simple as that.

So what does it take to hold people accountable to the culture?

Well, first we have to make sure that our culture is defined.  It’s not good enough to feel it.  We have to be able to see it, identify it, and articulate it.

Then, we have to make sure the expectations of behavior are clearly understood.  We can’t assume people know; we have to make it explicit by building culture into everything we do: hiring, one-on-one meetings, career conversations, performance conversations, decision making meetings, etc.  

Lastly, we need to empower and reward those who stand up for culture.  We can’t rely on good faith; we need to be deliberate and intentional.  When looking at performance, we can’t focus solely on results while remaining blind to cultural impact.  Both have to matter.

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