Has culture debt put your team in a downward spiral?

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Cultural debt is a term to describe the deep hole teams and organizations fall into when problematic cultural and interpersonal dynamics constantly derail “real work.” The term stems from the concept of technical debt used by software companies to quantify the hidden cost of reworking code caused by always choosing shortcuts instead of better fixes that take longer.

Teams and organizations experience culture debt when they have repeatedly avoided dealing with the human dimensions of their work life, and then find that conflicts, poor communication, and low morale are increasingly inhibiting their effectiveness and derailing their mission.  

What is culture? Culture in teams and organization is the construct of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that shape how people behave when they work together. As a system, it can either empower awesome work and stoke healthy morale, or make everything people do together take longer and feel frustrating and stressful. Culture debt speaks to the cumulative impacts of toxic interactions that become habitual patterns spiraling into collective paralysis. Definitely Not Fun!

These patterns can literally be the difference between success or failure for teams or larger organizations. When solving simple problems repeatedly turn into protracted battles and common sense decisions devolve into public trials testing everyone’s patience, there are serious consequences. These patterns can add costly hours / days / months to critical project development cycles and determine whether good people stick around for the next go around.

The shorthand statement I use to describe this dynamic to clients is that simply put: How We Work Together Determines What We Get Done. If we are communicating and collaborating well, then we can do amazing work. When nobody is hearing or cooperating with anybody else, then nothing works and little of value can be accomplished.  

As obvious as this is, what is amazing is how often groups avoid taking time to do the basic work required to make sure everyone can be maximally productive in a group setting. Generally, teams and entire organizations are so focused on tasks and so uncomfortable with the interpersonal dimensions of their work life that they’ll put actions needed to grow interpersonal health and expertise last. More often than not they only deal with it when everything else fails.

Typically the attitude around doing the human aspects of our work is, “We don’t have time for this right now.” There is a perceived tension between taking time to grow these skills and the time needed to tackle more urgent tasks.

Often the more sinister truth behind these statements is that someone wins and someone loses when teams avoid these issues because healthier cultures demand that we construct more equitable ways of interacting so that everyone can participate fully in the team or organization's shared work.

The more accurate statement is that when culture is correctly recognized as an inherently valuable part of the team’s collective work, the effectiveness of the team is enhanced and time gained by increased efficiency more than compensates for the relatively small amount of time required to build healthy culture.

The reality is that it’s more about how culture work is framed within the team, the importance placed on it by the group’s leaders, and then how effectively the business of building a powerful culture is performed. The best way to work around the perceived tension of making time for this work is to blend it into the fabric of day to day work life by building a solid case for improving the culture into achieving critical outcomes.

It’s fine to drive relentlessly for the team’s outcomes but also task the group to monitor and address their supporting culture. Make regular fine tuned adjustments to group practices around problem-solving, communications, conflict management, decision making, listening and feedback based on the shared knowledge of group culture. Team and organizational culture will always be a result of what we do, not the result of attempts to improve the current culture in an artificial setting.

The recipe for success is simple:

  • Be clear about the objectives of the team or organization.
  • Communicate those objectives by different mediums and different techniques that speak to the diversity of the team’s ways of hearing and learning.

  • With urgency ask the team to identify and concentrate on those things which are getting in the way of reaching their objectives. If the objective is important and cultural norms get in the way, why would we not attack them?

  • Concentrate on developing new stories, eliminating toxic behaviors and routines, and changing power structures and control systems to reach the objective, not vice-versa.

  • Celebrate the successful development of new positive culture. Nothing reinforces appropriate behavior like acknowledgment.

With this formula, the results will speak for themselves. People will be eager to address cultural dynamics and the results will be better collaboration, deeper innovation, faster problem solving, less stress, better morale and more time spent on real work by everyone involved.

When we integrate cultural and interpersonal skill building into the work we can build and reinforce health and satisfaction in the workplace, instead of depleting it. We live at a time when we can not afford culture debt because we need people and organizations to be sources of inspiration and enlightened courageous activity.