Building the vital emotional commitment of your Culture: The Stan Slap Interview

One of the profound delights of my ongoing interview series is the opportunity to meet some of the most passionate and outspoken advocates for the business impact of culture. Few as colourful or outspoken as Stan Slap, author of two of my all-time favourite books on organizational culture and the CEO of SLAP, the culture consultancy based in San Francisco that works in over 90 countries worldwide. Stan is able, in equal doses, to channel strict management thinking with anthropology and philosophy yet, beneath it all, he fervently believes that an organization’s commitment to empathy and humanity is what separates truly great organizations from the mediocrity factories (love that term) that many companies have become. I caught up with Stan from his home where he’d just returned from visiting the new SLAP offices in South Africa.

HB: Welcome home, mate. Thanks for talking to me so early in San Fran. For those unaware of SLAP or the work that you’ve been championing, can you give us the background on your organization?

SS: I think I’m home. I’ve been traveling so much, I don’t even recognize the money here. To answer your question, the work my company does is focused solely on achieving maximum commitment in the three groups that decide the success of your company.

We identify these as your manager culture, your employee culture and your customer culture. We’re not talking about a bunch of managers, employees and customers.When these groups formed relationships with your company, they became cultures and became far more resistant to standard methods of corporate influence.

Our renowned expertise is in understanding how these cultures really work and how to get them to really work for you. This is our 22nd year in business: we’re not some consulting company’s suddenly bolted-on culture practice that they didn’t even have a few years ago. We don’t do anything but this. We don’t think there is anything but this.

We were the first company to accurately identify culture as a self-protective organism, the first to identify a manager culture as distinct from the general employee culture, and the first to identify brand status as gaining faith in a company’s intention from both employee and customer cultures, in that order. 

Anyone who thinks this is soft stuff is clinically insane. It’s the stuff of hardcore business results.

SLAP’s – that’s the company; I haven’t taken to referring to myself in the third person – unique solutions have caused legendary metrics impact for many of the world’s most successful, demanding companies. The kind of companies that don’t include Patience on their list of corporate values.

HB: Wow, the energy and commitment of the Employees, Managers and Customers of an organization. That’s a fascinating delineation. Can you tell me more about each group and why, in your work, its so important to separate them?

SS: Man, I didn’t separate them. I just noticed that they separate themselves. You’re asking the right question, though: Why does this matter? Because within each of these cultures there is one problem that has the biggest impact on any company. This is a problem that even the biggest companies have typically been unable to solve. That’s what our entire solution set is about: solving these three stubborn, critical problems.

From your manager culture, the biggest issue is how to gain emotional commitment, which translates to managers taking on company success as a personal crusade and so is worth more than financial, intellectual and physical commitment combined. We can do that for you. From your employee culture, the biggest issue is how to ensure protective evangelism for any strategy, performance goal or organizational transformation so that these are implemented even better than they were planned. We can do that for you.

From your customer culture the biggest issue is how to transfer sustainability of your company to your customers so that they advertise and sell for you and protect you if you stumble or get attacked. This is the real meaning of brand status. We can get that for you.

HB: I’m glad you mentioned business performance and culture. How do you align those two elements when you’re working with clients?

SS: Remember that old James Bond movie Goldfinger? There’s a classic scene where Bond is strapped to a table as a laser beam moves to cut him in two. He’s frantically trying to negotiate his way out of the jam without much success. Just when the beam is about to reorganize critical portions of his anatomy he says, “If you kill me, another agent will be sent to take my place.” Goldfinger gives him the villainous eye roll and says, “I don’t think so, Mr. Bond.” Bond says, “Can you afford to take that chance?” The laser is shut off.

What I would say to any CEO and their C-Suite is if the last 5 or 10 strategies in your company worked exactly like they were supposed to – cost what they were supposed to cost, happened when they were supposed to happen, and did what they were supposed to do, then you probably don’t need to know how to truly harness the mighty power of your culture to protect and promote your business. But if they didn’t work as planned, and you are betting your company’s success and your own reputation on the next strategy to be launched into a hyper-competitive unforgiving marketplace, can you afford to take that chance?

After all, who is going to decide the success of any strategy or performance goal in your company? If you’re running the company, start by crossing yourself right off the list. Your cultures have the first vote. It they want something to happen, then it’s going to happen. If they don’t want it to happen, it’s not going to happen.

I’m asked all the time to define a “great culture.” I think people expect me to say that it’s a happy culture. Well, yeah, you do not want your culture to be actively unhappy, but a great culture is a committed culture.

The commitment of your culture can be measured by any metric used to manage business performance.

HB: Why do you say that companies may not understand what a culture is?

SS: Culture is the most overused yet often least understood concept in business. It was Merriam Webster’s Word of the Year in 2014, which means that according to the most popular dictionary in the entire English language, “culture” had the most increased searches for definition.

In my company, we say that if banana had made Word of the Year, by now companies would understand what a banana is and recognize that it’s not going to peel itself just to feed you.

Ask around and you’ll typically hear culture defined as “beliefs about the way things are done around here.” That is not a culture; that’s just the currency of a culture. A culture the self-protective organism that obsessively collects data, validates it as potential beliefs, and shares it privately amongst itself.

A culture comes into existence whenever people share the same basic living conditions and so naturally band together to share beliefs about the rules of survival and emotional prosperity. It’s true whether it happens in the jungles of Samoa or the Microsoft campus in Redmond. How do I survive, working in this industry, in this company, on this team, for you. And then, knowing that I’m basically going to be okay, how do I get rewarded emotionally and avoid punishment. It shares these beliefs amongst itself because the more people looking out for the safe watering hole, the safer it is for everyone.  

Your employee culture is an independent organism, living right inside the enterprise, with its own purpose and all the power to make or break any management plan – and any manager. Its purpose is to protect itself, not the company.

This is understandably frustrating to management who can reasonably claim, “If you are concerned about survival, do your job and you’ll keep it. You want emotional prosperity, do a great job and we’ll tell you that.” But that would only work if your culture perceived a reliable through line between what happens to the company and what happens to the culture. 

Achieving cultural commitment is a matter of aligning your culture’s own perceived path to survival with your company’s perceived path to success. A culture is not anti-business or anti-management. It is anti-unsafe.

HB: That’s heady stuff Stan. Certainly see how it goes a layer deeper than the notion of shared beliefs. The survival instinct is a fantastic way to explain the reticence and even resistance to change we see all around us. 

SS: Once you understand a culture it’s the simplest operating system in the world. A culture is an information gathering organism designed to assure its own survival. The implications of this for you are that its antennae is working constantly, tracking you and seeking information. Its credibility detector is nearly infallible. Its perceptions are alarmingly accurate. Its memory is elephantine. You can’t bluff, bribe or bully a culture into sustainably believing or doing anything. You can’t tell it what to believe and you can’t stop it from existing.

But you can take great comfort from recognizing that a culture is the most rational organism in the world, solely concerned with defining the known rules of survival and emotional prosperity. It deals in the real, it is objective, it is agnostic – doesn’t even mind bad news but minds whether it can trust who’s giving it the news – and it remains an open system, always seeking to update the known rules of its survival and emotional prosperity. 

Your culture will give you whatever you want. You just have to give it what it wants first. Respecting what it wants is the difference between its defiance and its compliance.

HB: In your book, Under the Hood, you talk about the Seven Deadly Sins of Cultural Commitment, how to avoid the mistakes that companies make when trying to gain maximum support from their cultures for business performance How are these concepts playing out when Executives are obsessed by initiatives like Digital Transformation and Lean Workforces?

SS: Hey, thanks for the book call out, Hilton. Yup, plenty more info about what to do in those pages. It’s a hell of a pithy read, if I do say so myself.

Companies spend all their time talking to their culture about what, how and why. When the culture doesn’t seem to get it, the company talks louder as if that was solving the problem. If the culture still resists, the company assumes its culture is of diminished intellectual capacity and can’t grasp the business imperative. 

But what, how and why are never as important with a culture as “why not?” Despite the corporate logic and urgency of your requirements, and any financial reinforcement for the culture that accompanies success, would your culture not offer its commitment?

That’s where my company plays. We’re not as concerned about what, how and why you want it done, but why the culture would hesitate to give it to you.

All those behaviors you want from your culture that are critical to corporate transformation, like innovation, accountability, compliance, flexibility? Those are latent in your culture. The issue isn’t teaching your culture these behaviors; it’s convincing your culture to give them to you.

The most important epiphany is that it is not the responsibility of your culture to understand the business logic. It is the responsibility of your business to understand the culture’s logic. Get this one thing and you’re unbeatable in any market you choose to own. After all, you can’t sell it outside if you can’t sell it inside.

Listen, the most critical imperative of the 4th industrial revolution is to finally learn the lesson of the 1st one.

The original industrial revolution viewed an employee culture as an easily replaceable, casually abused resource with limited potential to impact business success.

And thereby ensured that the tremendous influence a culture can have on company fortunes went untapped.

Is the ultimate story of the 4th industrial revolution going to be a dystopian one -- the rise of the machines that displace human commitment with technology? Or is it one where humanity in business will finally be seen as the driver that it is, not simply an unavoidable business expense that should be diminished however possible to assure speed and success, but a far greater assurance of both? 

It’s an asset certainly because the willingness of a company’s employee culture to protect, course correct and evangelize offerings and intentions is stunning. Not just inside the enterprise but outside of it. Remember, customers are employees too and will decide to protect or reject a company in part on how they perceive it treats people just like them. As long as you need a loyal customer culture to be successful, you need a loyal employee culture to be successful and no machine will change that business fundamental.

What companies must do is to remember that the definition of humanity is compassion. The opposite of compassion is indifference. Be anything but indifferent to the human beings that are the caretakers of your company. To be trusted to care about what matters most: this is the defining grace of your business.

HB: Culture is on the lips of every Executive I talk to. Do you think these moves show the tide is changing? Is Culture finally getting its due?

Some companies certainly get it, and some certainly want to get it and some want to pretend it doesn’t exist. I’m particularly surprised that more P/E firms don’t jump on the importance of cultural commitment, since the will of the culture is one of the primary assets they’re purchasing and any CEO they install needs to be appropriate to the maintaining or moving the state of the culture when they assume the position.  

HB: Stan, for the leaders reading this, what advice – besides calling SLAP and you immediately – what advice would you give?

SS: First, collapse the lines. A number of companies understand that culture is important even if they don’t always understand what it is. So, they devote resources to improving the commitment of their culture – it’s one path they pursue in the business. These same companies definitely understand that business performance is important, and they devote plenty of attention to that path. And yet, these are separate paths in the business.

You need to collapse one into the other and make the business case for cultural commitment. It is the ultimate driver to business performance, not some fluffy thing. When you are working on it, you are working on financial impact for the enterprise. 

Next, recognize that a culture exists to protect itself and so is a closed society to management. It won’t naturally reveal its true motivations and beliefs.

You need to get your culture to talk to you like it really talks to itself, to reveal any current hesitation it has to support company goals, and where that hesitation comes from, and then you need to know exactly how to recalibrate the level of commitment.

There isn’t an engagement survey in the world that can tell you this. SLAP can tell you this, though. It’s a lot of what we do for companies, with bulletproof accuracy.

Another thing: If you ask any manager what they manage, they’ll tell you a P&L or some revenue responsibility. Or maybe a business process or function. In a large company, maybe a geography. Keep staring at them until they realize that’s not the answer you’re looking for and they’ll eventually blurt out, “People!” I manage a team!” You’ll be waiting a lot longer for them to tell you that they manage a culture. How a culture works and how to assure its maximum commitment is the greatest missing competency amongst even the smartest management organizations. It doesn’t matter how smart or urgent the strategy is from the top. If each of your managers can’t drive it through the belief system that is their own subculture, it’s DOA. This critical competency must be in place. And yes, SLAP does this for our clients.

For a CEO, the most important thing to remember is that the ultimate commitment a culture can give won’t be seen unless it needs to give it: If your company ever gets into trouble, only a truly committed culture will step up to save it. You can’t bank that commitment when you need it, you have to put it away ahead of time. This whole culture thing isn’t just about achieving performance for your company; it’s about achieving performance insurance. This is the ultimate legacy for any chief executive. Be the Chief Culture Officer in your company.

And last, but actually more important than any of the above and for every manager: No matter where you are in the arc of your career as a manager, take some time to think about it as if it had already concluded. What do you want to have accomplished when it’s all over? Do you want to have grown a company, made a lot of money? These are very good things. Do you want to have had a lasting positive impact on the lives of the human beings that helped you do that? Now, that’s a great thing.

You don’t have to give up the good things to get the great thing, but you have to want the great thing.

Understanding how to maximize the commitment of your culture can be the difference between your career success and failure, or your company’s success and extreme success. But this isn’t just about your career and your company. As a manager, you have a deep, lingering impact on the lives of the members of your employee culture. If they are made to feel small on the job, that won’t stay on the job. It will jump the fence and follow them home. These same people are partners, parents, neighbors and voters. The toxic impact of an anxious, uncertain population is incalculable.

A culture’s profound search for safety and meaning in an uncertain world is a reminder that we are all searching for this same thing, we all live in this same world. Treating your employee culture with empathy and grace is not simply a job performance tactic. It is a mirror that reflects your own true humanity.

The real bottom line action for any manager? Be human first. A manager second.

HB: Sublime. Thank you for that poignant reminder of what leadership means. And the amazing passion you’ve brought to our chat.

SS: Thanks for what you do, too. Hilton. It was an honor to spend time with you.

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Your organization's ability to ADAPT is the most critical business imperative Executives face today. People, not Pixels, are the only sustainable competitive advantage you have.

I am a Toronto-based Consultant with a love for Marketing and a passion for Culture. In this Digital age, I truly believe that Culture, Leadership and Capacity either impedes or accelerates any organization's efforts to grow. I would love to discuss your organization's adaptability with you and help you create a Culture that inspires and invigorates your people.

Reach me at hilton@hiltonbarbour.com