The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation

A “yes man” culture that is adverse to dissent can not only be stifling for employees, but in some cases, can be downright dangerous. So how do you create a culture where everyone feels empowered to bring their ideas to the table?

On today’s episode of The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer, Haas School of Business professors and organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava answer a question from Shuchi Mathur, the Vice President of Customer Experience at Reelgood. Jenny and Sameer share examples of companies they’ve worked with like Pixar and Netflix that have built cultures around celebrating failure and farming for dissent.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”

Find the full transcript and learn more about the podcast at https://haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Jenny & Sameer’s 3 Main Takeaways:
-Be intentional – recognize that you need to go out of your way to prioritize dissent; otherwise you might inadvertently stifle it.
-Build systems – some organizations even establish processes to encourage people to take deliberate action to surface dissent. This is mission-critical in an organization where life and safety are on the line.
-Model what you want to see – leaders need to actively model a willingness to admit when they’re wrong and own up to mistakes. At the same time, they can seek out and defer to expertise, rather than acting like they always have the answers.

Show Links:
Boeing Hit by Damning FAA Report Faulting Safety Culture [Bloomberg]
Fixing Boeing’s Broken Culture Starts With a New Plane [Bloomberg]
Boeing: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [YouTube]
The Lasting Leadership Lessons From The Challenger Disaster [Forbes]
The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA [University of Chicago Press]
Sales Misconduct at Wells Fargo Community Bank [Harvard Business Publishing]
Zappos has quietly backed away from holacracy [Quartz]
Structure That’s Not Stifling [Harvard Business Review]
'Farming for dissent': The strategy that helped Reed Hastings turn Netflix into a $240 bn company [Business Today]
Reed Hastings: This 3-word tactic helped make Netflix a $240 billion company [CNBC]
Netflix: A Creative Approach to Culture and Agility [Harvard Business Publishing]
No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention [Penguin Press]
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success [Random House Publishing Group]
Lessons from Pixar 2: Failure Is an Ingredient for Creativity [Medium]
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Apologizes For Comments On Women's Pay [Forbes]
Microsoft's CEO Sent an Extraordinary Email to Employees After They Committed an Epic Fail [Inc]
Satya Nadella at Microsoft: Instilling a Growth Mindset [Harvard Business Publishing]
Managing High Reliability Organizations [California Management Review]
Must accidents happen? Lessons from high-reliability organizations [Academy of Management Perspectives]
The Opposite of Complacent: How Risky Businesses Avoid Disaster [Berkeley Haas Newsroom]

In this time of quiet quitting and burnout, how do organizational leaders create a culture that encourages workers to go above and beyond their job description?

Organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava are back to answer this question from Meili Hau, the director of the Student Health Center at San Francisco State University. Tune in to hear Jenny and Sameer share real-world insights and research as well as strategies you can put to work to improve your workplace culture.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”

Find the full transcript and learn more about the podcast at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
Jenny & Sameer’s 3 Main Takeaways:
Codification – Codify your values and norms and systematically bake them into the fabric of your organization.
Opportunity – Set up systems and opportunities for people to not only document their work and share knowledge across boundaries, but also to form relationships and meaningful connections that span those boundaries.
Leadership – Leaders should reinforce the big picture, laying out a strong vision that inspires people to go above and beyond their job descriptions to achieve big goals together.
Show Links:
Who is Quiet Quitting For? [The New York Times]
The Berkeley-Haas School of Business: Codifying, Embedding, and Sustaining Culture Case Study A and B
Berkeley Haas Defining Leadership Principles
Where Culture Really Matters: Berkeley’s Haas School [Poets&Quants]
How Stripe Built a Writing Culture
Dean's Speaker Series | Patrick Collison, Co-Founder & CEO, Stripe; Co-Founder, Arc Institute
The Hidden Power of Social Networks
Enculturation Trajectories: Language, Cultural Adaptation, and Individual Outcomes in Organizations [Management Science]
Organizational Commitment and Psychological Attachment: The Effects of Compliance, Identification, and Internalization on Prosocial Behavior [Journal of Applied Psychology]

Is it better for an organization to have one unified culture or a collection of mini ones? What are the benefits and drawbacks of each approach?

Organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava are back with more research insights, real-world examples, and tips for company leaders, this time about the complex world of subcultures.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”

Find the full transcript and learn more about the podcast at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*
Jenny & Sameer’s 3 Main Takeaways:
Awareness – know what subcultures exist within the organization and anticipate the possibility that they conflict in dysfunctional ways.
Agility – be willing to try out different cultural priorities. Before deciding that the counterculture is necessarily problematic you should look at what it is solving for.
Alignment – prioritize one cultural norm that applies to all units and unifies the organization rather than trying to be perfectly aligned on everything.


Show Links:
The Role of Subcultures in Agile Organizations [Leading and Managing People in the Dynamic Organization]
Maersk: Driving Culture Change at a Century-Old Company to Achieve Measurable Results [Berkeley Haas Case Series]
Identifying Organizational Subcultures: An Empirical Approach [Journal of Management Studies]
A Language-Based Method for Assessing Symbolic Boundaries [Sociological Methods & Research]
The Lasting Leadership Lessons From The Challenger Disaster [Forbes]
5 Ways to Create a Culture of Innovation in Your Organisation [Salesforce Blog]

In this world of hybrid work, how to build and maintain long-lasting and impactful relationships at your company can be a head-scratcher of a question.

The Culture Kit hosts, Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava, are here to help. On today’s episode, they’re answering a question from HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan about how to keep employees connected whether they’re at home or in the office.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!” at https://forms.gle/mxt7gBpRFqy4e52z5.

Find the full transcript and learn more about the podcast at: https://www.haas.org/culture-kit

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Welcome to The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer, a podcast created by the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.

In this inaugural episode, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava—two Berkeley Haas professors who have dedicated their careers to studying and advancing workplace culture—answer a question from WD-40 CEO Steve Brass about how to create and maintain a strong workplace culture.

What does it mean to have a strong culture? According to Jenny:

“A strong organizational culture is one where people both agree about what's important and care. And so if you think about in your head a two-by-two box here, which is what academics love to think in terms of, you have one with agreement, low-high, one with intensity, low-high. If you're high on both, you have a strong culture. If you're low on both, you have a weak culture. But if you're high on agreement but low on intensity, you have what we call a vacuous culture. Everybody agrees, but nobody cares. And you could be high on intensity but low on agreement, and there you'll probably have a lot of conflict, or what we call warring factions. So those are the possibilities for how strong culture can array.”

Jenny and Sameer also discuss the dark side of strong culture. According to Sameer:

“I think it's also important to keep in mind that strong cultures can also have a dark side, and an organization with a culture that is too strong can quickly become stifling and fail to recognize the value and importance of non-conformists who are often really central to efforts to innovate and change the culture over time. In fact, if an organization's culture becomes too strong, it can actually take on the qualities of a cult. And so there's a risk of having a culture that may be just too strong.”
The two also discuss Jenny's take on Netflix and Genentech's cultures and how leaders even know how strong their culture is.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!” at https://forms.gle/mxt7gBpRFqy4e52z5.

Find the full transcript and learn more about the podcast at: https://www.haas.org/culture-kit

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

The world of work is truly a work in progress. There are so many unanswered questions.

What's the best approach to bringing workers back to the office? How can you keep remote and on-site workers from forming silos? How can you restore trust after layoffs? Is it possible, or even desirable, to get back to the culture you had before the pandemic? There’s lots to think about, and we’ll be thinking out loud in our new podcast: The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer.

I’m Jenny Chatman. And I’m Sameer Srivastava. We’re professors at UC Berkeley’s Haas School who have dedicated our careers to studying and advancing workplace culture.

We'll think through the questions you're struggling with today and share insights based on evidence from the latest research. You'll come away with concrete steps you can take to start fixing your company's culture right away.

Tune in to The Culture Kit with Jenny and Sameer. Starting April 2 on your favorite podcast platform.

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!” https://forms.gle/mxt7gBpRFqy4e52z5

Find the full transcript and learn more about the podcast at: https://www.haas.org/culture-kit