The mutiny against corporate cultures 🏴☠️
I have always been a rebel and troublemaker. Always.
Nonsensical rule? Break it. Someone tells you you can’t? Do it. Structure doesn’t work for you? Change it.
My favourite way of fixing something is to break it. My dad always had these elaborate mechanical pens, and I’d always take them apart to see if I could get them to fit back together the same way. This had mixed results, which my dad wasn’t always so pleased about. Lol.
How do my pen-dismantling habit and inability to abide by rules relate to corporate culture?
I’ve worked in several places where I was told, “We have a culture of innovation”, but there was no tolerance for failure. Traditional cultures are delivered top-down, and due to how we set and think about corporate goals, there is only one way to do something: the boss’ way.
I can remember sitting in several conferences pre-pandemic attended by nearly 100% middle-aged men where the topic of discussion was “How do we engage millennials?” like millennials were some sort of obscure new creature they had to figure out. It always made me laugh, and I only asked whether they had bothered to talk to “The Millennials” about how they wanted to be engaged.
In all places and at all levels, at least in my experience, people crave control and self-determination. One of the biggest challenges companies face today is driving profitability and growth without burning out the people who work for them. Ideally, you want an engaged and productive workforce who feel like their work makes a difference, but there isn’t a solid consensus on what this means. All too often, companies rely on excellent first-line managers to engage, motivate and legitimise the work of front-line employees. It’s a risky strategy because it’s got a single point of failure, and if that point of failure moves elsewhere, so does your culture and maybe half your team.
The other important point about top-down cultures is that they only benefit people at the top by their very nature. I’ve just seen a LinkedIn post from a CEO coach saying that Mental Health costs the economy $1 billion annually… which is a weird way of phrasing it. Coming at it from a bottom-up perspective, you might suggest that how the economy is currently structured causes $1bn of damage to the mental health of those employed within it.
The Team Manifesto
I read Be More Pirate by Sam Conniff in 2018 when it came out; it was a beautiful summation of everything I believed about building cultures within teams, and I have always wanted to be a pirate, but without the sea part.
Conniff argues that adopting the pirates' mindset of breaking rules, embracing diversity, and challenging the status quo can empower individuals and organisations to create meaningful change. Makes sense, right?
If you want to “Innovate” and build meaningful, valuable solutions to actual problems rather than just add to the noise of the tech space, you need to break something. Best way to break something? With a diverse group of people who also want to break stuff to put it back together more awesomely.
I often talk to leaders about how you create a culture of innovation. The answer is simple: create a culture of safety. How do you do that? Ensure that everyone in the team feels like they have the space and the security to break stuff, fail and try again. You do this by collaboratively building the terms of engagement so you’re all on the same page about how you do and don’t work together. This has to come from the team directly. It can’t come from the top down.
To implement this in practical terms, every time I have built a manifesto with my team, we’ve gone through several rounds of ideation, reflection and adaptation on what it means to us to reach our goals together. And here’s the rub: the goals are still set at the top line; we’re still a business.
And as we are still a business, there has to be both Yin and Yang. It’s absolutely vital for the team to tell me what they need me to facilitate as their leader for them to innovate. It is equally valid for me as a leader and the business as a whole to lay out what isn’t acceptable and where the lines, boundaries and deadlines are. Whether you’re doing this with leaders or individual contributors, the critical thing here is fostering the trust of the challenge. You’ll never get challenged as a manager, leader or anyone in a position of authority if the person questioning you doesn’t feel safe enough to speak out loud.
Building trust? Well, that’s down to authenticity. Knowing and living by your values is the most impactful way to build trust with other humans. Giving them a solid sense that they know exactly who you are and what you are and aren’t about. I’ve worked with countless people who didn’t like me personally, and hey, I didn’t like them much either. Professional respect is about trusting that the people you work with will turn up and deliver for you whenever the team needs it. Trust is built on a foundation of authenticity. If someone can smell that you’re not who you say you are, they’ll never have your back and won’t feel like you have theirs.
How do you get your team working on their manifesto? My personal favourite method, brainwriting. Like brainstorming, it encourages contribution from everyone. However, it has various benefits;
It invites collaboration early on as you’re building on your ideas and those of others.
It has more structure, which is easy to explain to people so they understand the process.
It ensures equal collaboration from everyone, not just the loud extroverts. You can go through the whole process without having a talking session (although I wouldn’t), and you’d still have some significant work to play back to your teams.
My typical structure involves starting with the objectives, outlining the team structure(s) and explicitly describing the goals, deadlines and metrics we’ll use to determine success for the business. Within this structure, the team is then free to manifest, as it sees fit, the terms of engagement for how we work and the culture we’ll optimise. This process works at all levels of business. However, I would encourage you not to roll from top to bottom in terms of manifesto setting.
Whilst your business goals and KPIs often roll downhill, which is necessary to fulfil the growth requirements of the board, your manifesto is the daily working frameworks and practices your teams will use to meet the goal criteria. Suppose you start at the bottom and establish the individual contributor manifesto. Then you have an additional layer of “this is what our teams need from us to be successful” for your mid-, upper-, and C Level leadership, which you wouldn’t have had before.
It’s easy to think that you need to go top down so you have the structure for your teams to work within. But it’s misguided. If I want my team to do something cool and innovative, I need them to tell me how to create space for them to do this. As a leader, it’s your job to advocate for your team and actively build the environment and conditions for them to thrive. You want all your teams firing this way if you're a CEO. It’s your job to make this happen by fostering and stewarding the culture for your people, not the other way around.
Related tip - when you’re working through this with your teams, have them think of all the boring “terms of engagement” stuff that might seem trivial but make a difference to your daily working experience. Things like;
Asking before dumping meetings in people’s calendars
Always have a meeting agenda
Not booking meetings over lunchtime
Respecting people’s start and finish times
These are things which matter to people on the day-to-day. Yes, I can be engaged in super meaningful work, but if my boss in another timezone keeps summoning me to 6 p.m. meetings on a Friday, I won’t be happy. Your manifesto should be a mix of the important and “wildly important” things (to coin 4DX) and little things that are more of a courtesy, a sort of “no douchebags” policy.
If you want to build a culture of innovation, you have to walk the walk. You’ve hired a bunch of talented people, and you want them to create great things for you, so ask them what they need to do that. If you don’t build a culture of safety around the requirements of your people, they will never be truly free to experiment. The added benefit is that you can build on this, review whenever you like and agree values for your business of the back to the environments you create. This makes bringing new pirates into the fold so much easier. When people ask you what your culture means to you, you can show them your manifesto. Arr 🦜
PS - You can learn more about the Be More Pirate movement here, and they’ve got a great example of a manifesto on their website.
