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The Newsletter | Edition 025
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In our Off-White Papers, we provide practical guidance on how to respond to our rapidly-changing world. This weekly newsletter explores those topics in real-time, with information and action steps on how to make progress now.
IN TODAY'S NEWSLETTER...COMPANY CULTURE.
Promoting a positive company culture is one of, if not, the most important thing leaders can do in order to help their companies succeed. How can we take a more active role in culture building?
- Why you should question everything from Cristina Pansolini
- Talk it out loud, literally from Fabian Castro
- Pulling from the margins from Merideth Bogard
And this time, our illustrations from Ash Casper.
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START WITH A QUESTIONFrom Cristina Pansolini
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TL;DRTwo articles read in succession got us thinking about how to encourage a productively inquisitive culture. The first, Slack is the Right Tool for the Wrong Way to Work, details how constant interruptions lead to lower productivity from a tool originally built to increase it. The second, Why The Best Managers Encourage Employees to Question Everything, outlines how leaders can invite others to dig deeper, to work more collaboratively and build a habit of higher quality thinking among teams.
WHY IT MATTERSMany of us are still working from home and interacting through screens. According to a recent Gartner study, this could become the norm: 90% of HR leaders intend to let employees work remotely if possible even after COVID-19 vaccines are widely available. This new way of working can make it all too easy to let the leaders lead while staying on mute. It can allow the status quo to fester, as the non-stop, anti-productive Slack communication trap has proven. In a time where shaping company culture requires even more intentionality and creativity, leadership should encourage employees to question not only themselves and the status quo but their leaders—with a shared goal of betterment.
By making it safe for anyone to ask, ‘What if we thought of it this way?’, both company culture and final client deliverables are shaped by insight from every level and perspective.
ONE THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW
Start meetings with questions to encourage a culture of curiosity and inquisitive thinking.
TIPS
- Build in collaborative discussion time to status updates and leadership presentations.
- Create a pre-read system where meeting participants can prepare questions or pushes.
- Verbally reward those who speak up with productive inquiries.
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LEADING OUT LOUDFrom Fabian Castro
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TL;DRCreating a culture that welcomes thinking out loud catalyzes problem-solving. It enhances creativity and learning, yet many of our environments don’t encourage, much less allow us to activate these intuitive cognitive muscles.
WHY IT MATTERSDespite the fact that “inner speech” has been shown to be limited in nature, appearing in condensed sentences and single worlds, we are often socially encouraged to fully flesh out our thoughts before we share them. Additionally, movement enhances thinking and learning, but we glamorize being heads down, at the desk, working away silently.
Spoken word, just like writing, enables new mental cascades through linguistic connections, creating new thoughts, and encouraging the development of complex ideas. Employees often fear judgement when not sharing fully-fleshed out thoughts, and leaders don’t want to risk authority by letting others in on their thought process.
ONE THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW
Create open platforms for both leaders and employees to think out loud free from expectation.
TIPS FOR THINKING OUT LOUD
- Structure daily space for individuals to step away from the screen and think out-loud.
- Develop open-forums for leaders and employees to process thoughts together.
- Dedicate time in each project check-in to thinking through ideas out-loud with zero share-outs/visuals.
- Schedule audio-only, walking meetings outside between teams for the purpose of dream-scenario ideating with no guardrails.
- Or, simply, give yourself permission to start talking to yourself out loud in private. That might just work too, even if it feels silly at first.
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CULTURE FROM THE OUTSIDE INFrom Merideth Bogard
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TL;DRFor centuries, Swiss watchmakers have rooted their cultures in inward-looking traditions and fearlessly-protected values. But, over the past year, Swiss watch companies have started breaking out of the confines of their self-oriented cultures in order to unlock the value of outside inspiration and collaboration.
WHY IT MATTERSBy nature, it could seem that the strong cultures are built by looking in, honing a company’s unique sense of ‘self’ and protecting what it distinctly holds dear. But, there is equal value in looking out, rooting a culture in open-mindedness and actively gaining inspiration from those outside your walls and even your industries. In fact, psychology shows that your own in-house knowledge can be a curse and that ‘functional fixedness’ is an actual cognitive bias that holds people and cultures back from being innovative and progressing.
ONE THING YOU CAN DO RIGHT NOW
Carve out moments for outside inspiration with your teams.
THOUGHTS ON WHERE TO STARTThe moments can be big or small, digital, or live. And, at their best, they’re a mix of seeking new sources of inspiration while finding new ways to share it.
- Make it a monthly gathering moment.
- Invite a variety of people to host – from internal team members to outside experts.
- Encourage hosts to look far and wide for inspiration – What could you learn from history, nature, the arts? What adjacent or analogous industries could you learn from? How might you turn competitors into collaborators?
- Explore other mediums for exchange – Could you make it a shared team chat? Could you make it an all-team newsletter? Could you make it an internal book/podcast club?
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