Pepper Moth

28/02/2024

“F**k. F**kity, sh*t, sh*t, f**k and w***y. W***y, sh*t and f**k and... t**s.”

If you’ve never seen ‘The Kings Speech’, starring Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, I recommend you do so.

The 2010 film tells the true story of King George VI's struggle to overcome his speech impediment with the help of his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, in the lead-up to World War II.

It’s an emotional and unflinching look at the king's personal journey as he deals with a debilitating stammer. Not your average Marvel mash-up my kids seem to love, but strangely it held their attention, not least for the amount of times the f-bomb gets dropped.

But the story isn’t about the King swearing. Or even about his stammer.

It’s about his courage, resilience and fortitude. It’s about him facing his deep insecurities and flaws and having the strength to fight through them.

Which is why George VI was such an important symbol to the British people during World War II.

Yes - his story was inspirational, but much more importantly, his story was real.

For me – that’s the power of the story.

You see, anyone can hire the right script writer and give a rousing speech.

But impact only comes when the audience connects with it emotionally. When they feel emboldened and strengthened in their collective resolve because of the example set. Because the authenticity, honesty and transparency of the story’s main protagonist fosters a sense of unity and admiration.

Which is why so much communication about organisational culture fails. The corporate virtue-signalling, the PR stunts, the top-down directives about ‘journeys’ and ‘synergies’ and ‘strategies’ all feel trite, empty, cliched, fake.

So if you want inspire and unite your organisation through culture, ditch the sanitised, sterile, corporate broadcast.

Be honest, be open, be human, be real.

23/11/2023

“Employees have got strong bu****it detectors. They know when they’re being spun a line. They don’t judge us (the LT) by our words, they judge us by our actions.”

I was chatting to a CFO colleague a few weeks ago and his comment really stuck with me, particularly given the usual conversations I have about communicating culture.

And it got me thinking... Are we communicating culture all wrong? In fact, are our current approaches doing more harm than good?

We all already know the workforce today is completely different compared to just a decade ago. Their expectations are different. Their standards are different. Their motivations are different. Their behaviour is different.

But, in a throwback to the century old principles of scientific management, we still seem to think that they are machines that can be programmed how to think and feel.

… if we just keep repeating the same top-down corporate messaging, somehow individual human belief systems forged over decades will magically align to the CEO’s personal view…

… or if we stick some generic one-word values up on the digital wall, everyone will immediately replace their own values and understand, adopt and apply the new ones every day…

… or if we run some glossy internal PR campaigns showcasing our corporate virtues, employees will see the light, and ‘fix themselves to fit in’ …

Well…. no.

It seems that when we try to communicate culture, we’ve focussed on the message at the expense of the audience.

And that’s an issue. As employees don’t trust organisations. Increasingly, they don’t trust their organisation.

The last few years have reinforced the workforce perception that companies and their boards will do anything to improve their bottom line, and do not care about the people doing the work.

Whether its downsizing due to inflation, increased automation afforded by technical progress, forcing employees back into the office, or replacing a populist CEO, the last decade has compounded a sense of ‘them’ and ‘us’.

That despite all the communication about purpose, values, sustainability/ESG, DE&I or employee wellbeing, at the end of the day, employees feel iall their company cares about are shareholder returns.

In this light, traditional internal communications or PR campaigns come across as superficial. As style over substance. As cosmetic over authentic.

As bu****it basically.

So if you want employees to genuinely change their behaviours, first stop thinking about what you want to say, and start thinking about what they need to feel. That means conversations, not communications. That means vulnerability, not sovereignty. That means transparency, not opacity.

People are smart and sensitive. Our cultural communications need to be too.

16/11/2023

“I want you to start a fight.”

Granted – it’s not the advice I usually give people.

But it was what I suggested to a Chief People Officer a few weeks ago when she was struggling with her Leadership Team (LT).

Her issue, like many other CPOs and HR Directors I speak to, was not persuading the LT that culture was important. They already knew that.

The issue was their definition of culture, and more specifically what they wanted to do with it.

You see, many leaders of today will have formed their views of culture on their experiences of yesterday. In a process not dissimilar to Object Relations Theory, the way they relate to culture has been shaped by formative experiences earlier in their career. They repeat the same experience over the years until eventually, their perceptions turn into objects in their unconscious that are then used to predict how things ‘always’ work.

Removing the psychobabble, what that means is their developmental experiences of culture often creates a decisive, fixed view of what it is, and how it should be managed.

But our understanding of culture has changed massively over the last few years. It’s a practice, not a project. It’s emotional not rational. Its about authenticity, not cosmetics. Fixed views formed just five years ago are already out of kilter with today’s reality.

So the first crucial step in virtually any culture improvement initiative is not a culture audit, the business case, or a purpose review. Rather counter-intuitively, the first step is conflict. It is to call out unconscious pre-conceptions and bias at the top of the organisation. It is to challenge leaders to re-consider past certainties. It is about facilitating awareness and acceptance that old answers don’t address the new questions they are being asked.

Taking a step backwards might just be the most important step forwards.

03/08/2023

Why do we only talk about organisational culture when the s**t hits the fan?

When it becomes so toxic that even the broadsheets deploy journalists to unpick the weird and dirty habits of the worst offenders. When employees seem almost thrilled to call their employers ‘dystopian’, ‘soul-crushing’, ‘back-stabbing’, ‘abusive’, ‘bruising’ and (my personal favourite) ‘a dumpster fire’.

Revolut, Twitter/X.com, Yorkshire Cricket, The Met Police, The CBI and The Equality and Human Rights Commission have been outed in 2023 alone, to be added to the pantheon of poisonous reputations that includes firms like Uber, Amazon, WeWork and Theranos.

Why do we only pay attention when it’s too bloody late?

Think of this way. If you’ve smoked 40 a day, and consumed 10 pints of lager and a kebab every night for the last 10 years, no amount of money, cardiologists or personal trainers will help when you’re in the emergency room being fitted with a catheter the size of a garden hose. The damage is done. It’s going to hurt. A lot.

And it’s the same for organisations.

There’s little point starting to invest in culture when it’s already cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands in reputational damage. When it’s already knocked millions off your valuation. Why spend six to seven figure sums on external consultancies to impose culture transformation, when any new habits disappear with the consultants?

Back to the health analogy.

There are no instant health fixes. There are no miracle cures. Doctors may be lucky and save your life today, but if you’re still smoking, drinking, and kababing (yes – I just made that up), then it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when.

So if you’re in average health but want to be around in five years’ time, it’s simple – you need to change your lifestyle. You need figure out which habits you need to stop and which you need to start. You need to figure out how you can make them a simple, realistic, achievable part of your daily routine. And you need to commit to doing them.

If every organisation wants to be around in five years’ time, they need to ask themselves the exact same questions. Before the medics start sizing you up for that hose…..

01/08/2023

Organisational culture is a complex discipline. It falls at the intersection between anthropology, psychology, sociology and behavioural economics.

It deals with shifting emotional subtleties driven by external socio-economic forces and internal politics, while built on the quicksand of unstated values and unconscious bias.

It exists in the hearts and minds of diverse individuals with unique backgrounds, experiences and perspectives, each with divergent and dynamic expectations of what constitutes appropriate behaviour.

And it constantly evolves, as business, society and the world in we live adapts to the macro forces that are continuously reshaping our lives.

Sounds terrifying right!

You'd better spend tens, if not hundreds of thousands with a well-known consultancy to implement their ‘tried and tested’ culture programme. Or buy some expensive ‘culture-as-a-service’ software that will magically enable your culture to thrive. Or set up employee engagement departments to deliver top-down internal communications and PR campaigns….!

Well…. no.

Too many organisations panic-buy expensive culture solutions when they just don’t need to.

Culture is a practice, not a project. It is intrinsic, not extrinsic. It is emotional, not rational.

Organisations should focus on enabling the people ALREADY in their business to develop the knowledge, skills and ability to constantly shape and nurture their own culture. To understand their own organisational psychology and sociology. To explore , test and create the solutions they want to own and succeed.

Anything else is just a stop-gap.

14/03/2023

Is culture a superpower?

It’s a pretty bold question, especially since many people see culture as a cross between ‘The Force’ in Star Wars and some corporate bu****it dreamt up by a few Silicon Valley wonks overdosing on kombucha during a keto fast.

But there’s actually 50,000 years’ worth of evidence to suggest it might be the key to our species' success.

According Yuval Noah Harari, author of ‘Sapiens’, when our ancestors were competing with Neanderthals, Homo Erectus, Denisovans and several other humanoid species for survival, they developed three unique attributes that led to their/our eventual domination.

They learnt to cooperate in large numbers better than any other animal. Working together in big groups (including with strangers) helped them hunt larger prey, defeat stronger enemies, displace rival groups.

They learnt to constantly change how they cooperated. This helped them invent new things, solve new problems, or adapt to new challenges thrown at them by a changing environment.

And they invented stories to help them work together. They created imaginary narratives that connected individuals to a common cause, regardless of whether they’d even met.

Cooperation in large numbers, adaptive teamwork, underpinned by stories to unite in a collective goal.

To us, that sounds a lot like modern organisational culture.

We intentionally shape organisational habits to unify large numbers of seemingly disconnected strangers. We learn to cooperate in different ways so we can innovate, adapt, react, or serve our customers better. And we create stories around our purpose and values to bond with customers, employees, suppliers, candidates and the communities in which we operate.

And yet, despite 50,000 years of it being the very essence of our success, the most thorough and compelling UAT ever conceived, many businesses are still sceptical.

Instead of cooperation, they chose command and control. Instead of adaptability, they chose rigidity and compliance. Instead of stories, they chose directives and orders.

Given the scale and gravity of the challenges facing the world today, isn’t it time we tapped into what made humans so successful in the past? To leverage our only proven superpower?

09/03/2023

“What’s really important to us is culture fit. We need to make sure we’re attracting and assessing candidates based upon their ability to quickly blend into our organisation.”

We often hear this as a key requirement of any culture change.

So it often goes down like a cup of cold sick when we explain that hiring for culture fit might actually be a rather bad idea.

Don’t get me wrong - it’s completely understandable that leaders would think this way. Hiring for culture fit suggests improved efficiency and harmony, reduced friction, fewer management headaches. More time for the day job and everyone’s happier. Win win right……?

But what we often see is that hiring for culture fit increases commercial vulnerability.

We see two core issues.

First, hiring for culture fit pre-supposes that organisational culture is fixed. That the culture you have today is the one you’ll need tomorrow. But culture isn’t fixed, just as the world isn’t fixed. Some of today’s treasured habits might be tomorrow’s riskiest behaviours. We worked with a sales business who’d hired for ‘closers’ for years, only to find that their customers only wanted to work with trustworthy partners.

Second, ‘culture fit’ is often used to give subjective bias and personal prejudice a veneer of corporate respectability. It becomes an evaluation of personal similarity, rather than a measure of organisational compatibility. Over time, teams become uniform, conformist, standardised, which isn’t a great recipe to deal with the commercial essentials of agility, innovation, customer experience, reputation, speed.....

Instead, we advise hiring for culture add. No one can accurately predict the future, but by enhancing your culture with a broader range of attributes, you can be better prepared for it when it comes.

28/02/2023

I’m lucky enough to work with an amazing variety of organisations as they go through culture change. But when we get to the discussion of how to communicate culture within their business, we always seem to bump into the same three issues.

They focus on the task, rather than the result. For many, it’s all about the message, rather than the audience. They focus on the launch, rather than on continuous connection. They focus on information, rather than engagement.

Next, they tell, rather than listen. They broadcast the CEOs view of culture, rather than the collective perspective. They concentrate on repeating the message, rather than aiding understanding. They look ‘in and out’, rather than ‘out and in’, focussing on the narrow view of a few #, rather than on the views of customers, partners, investors and employees.

Last, they default to ‘push’, not ‘pull’ approaches. They invest in top-down instructions, internal PR stunts and corporate virtue signalling, rather than in authentic peer to peer interactions. They ‘control’ what can (and can’t) be said, who can say it, and when and how it is said.

But these approaches fundamentally misunderstand what culture is, and how it works.

People may think rationally, but they act emotionally, so cultural communication is all about relationships. It’s about reinforcing the deeper, stronger emotional bonds between people. It’s about nurturing the safe spaces for people to connect, share and cooperate.

It’s about creating a sense of kinship. People are not machines that can be programmed with ‘a culture code’. Communication has to focus on constantly encouraging and facilitating the collective desire to work better together, rather than hectoring employees into compliance.

It’s about authentic, messy, chaotic communications between peers, not cheesy soundbites word-smithed to within an inch of their lives. It’s about internal communications teams getting out of the way, trusting and enabling people to share what they want to share, when and how they want to share it, with who they want to share it

We need to rethink how we communicate culture.

21/02/2023

Have we got employee engagement completely wrong?

Despite $720m being spent every year on employee engagement (according to Harvard Business Review), 85% of people are not actively engaged at work. That is the same number as in 2002.

Twenty years and $x billions later, the needle has not moved. By even one per cent.

Why?

Well, despite the best intentions, it seems our efforts have had precious little to do with engagement.

Professor Bill Khan of Boston University (credited as the father of employee engagement) believes most of our actions have been geared towards shaping how hard people work FOR the organisation, not how personally engaged they are working WITH the organisation.

We’ve focussed on exertion, not engagement. We’ve measured the outputs, and guessed the inputs. We’ve assumed effort equals satisfaction, when the data clearly suggests otherwise.

A more plausible explanation is that hard works comes when employees are fearful of losing their jobs, or a toxic culture of presenteeism, or a terrible boss that drives impossible deadlines. Or a myriad other reasons connected to fear.

And fear isn’t a great driver of innovation, customer experience, collaboration, or agility – key drivers of value in our digital economy.

True engagement at work comes when an employee is allowed to authentically express themselves. When their work enables them to strive to achieve personal meaning. When they are liberated from fear to try.

So, if engagement is a feeling, why are we still focussed on exertion?

16/02/2023

“Culture is pointless when a company asks for loyalty, and then makes everyone redundant two years later.”

“We can’t wait six months for culture transformation programme to finish. And what happens in six months anyway? Will we have transformed?”

“We’ve already transformed internal communications to drive culture, but it’s not made the slightest bit of difference.”

We often hear about what goes wrong with organisational culture. And many of our initial conversations are met with equal doses of scepticism and cynicism.

And that’s not surprising.

While most people generally ‘get’ that organisational culture is a good thing, most people have had a poor experience of it at one time or another.

Leaders have not walked the talk, investors have prioritised short term revenue over sustainable growth, culture suppliers have focussed on the rational at the expense of the emotional, HR departments have been distracted by the next crisis.

We believe these issues stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what culture is, and how it works.

It’s treated as a transactional task, an agenda item, a project. It’s a tick-box in the Board Report, an unquantified ambition in performance reviews, an overused buzzword to signal enlightened intent, despite a lack of substance.

But these do more harm than good.

Culture is a practice, not a project. It’s a habit, not a communications cascade. It’s an intrinsic behaviour, not an extrinsic instruction.

If we’re going to benefit from real value of culture, we first need to realise what it isn’t.

PepperMoth specialises in transforming talent plans, teams, and infrastructures, Gavin is also an advisor, strategist, disruptor, and coach. Focusing on Business Change, Business Transformation, and consultancy. www.peppermoth.live

13/02/2023

Emerging digital infrastructures are reshaping the forces of production and consumption, disrupting business models, organisational structures and limiting windows of commercial opportunity.

The half-life of skills is plummeting as new technologies emerge, forcing a shift away from ‘content’ skills that measure the ability to repeat the past, to ‘cognitive’ skills that gauge the ability to lead into the future.

The evolving supply and demand of human capital is changing where, when, how and why people work.

Yet despite all this inevitable, unstoppable, irrefutable change, we push back against it.

We’re tired of the constant shifts forced upon us. We’re sick of reacting, managing, juggling, coordinating and coping. We’re drinking from the fire-hydrant of change and we’re drowning.

Because we’ve lost control. Control of our agenda, control of the day to day, even control of our careers. Change has become a distraction that stops us from following our plans.

But what if it’s our plans that are the problem?

Can we really have a long-term plan when there’s so much disruption? Is it realistic to make assumptions on what will happen in three years when we’re not sure what will happen in three months? Does having a plan lock us into unrealistic expectations of the future, rather than the freedom to adapt to how they really are?

Just as Carol Dweck highlighted the difference between fixed and growth mindset, are we suffering from the difference between fixed and growth expectations? That we end up seeing unexpected change as the issue, rather than the opportunity? That change is felt as a personal restriction, rather than a chance to learn and pivot?

What if change was the goal? What if all our roles were actually about adaptive evolution, rather than constantly fighting to get back to ‘the plan’, which is probably already out of date?

Would we be more successful? More fulfilled? Happier?

If we accept that change is the new normal, fixed expectations and plans about the future seem like a deliberate, yet unnecessary, act of self-harm. Isn’t it time we let go?

08/02/2023

Why do so many businesses leave culture to chance?

Overwhelming evidence has demonstrated that it is the key to productivity (doing more with less), customer experience (more loyal customers who spend more for longer), agility (reacting quicker and more effectively to threats and opportunities), profitability (creating more desirable products that customers pay more for)……. The list goes on.

But get it wrong, and the repercussions can be disastrous.

In the last two weeks, the following headlines have hit UK media outlets:

"Police chiefs promise cultural change"

"Allegations of a toxic culture haunt the WRU"

"Revolut assembles behaviour team after culture issues"

"Firms accused of creating 'toxic culture' will be hauled before Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal"

We all know the value. We all know the risks. And yet most still leave it to chance.

Why?

Well – bluntly – many leaders still think culture is a load of bo****ks.

Despite all the facts and figures, the white papers, research reports and public endorsements by famous entrepreneurs, many privately still believe that culture is just another fluffy HR initiative with no commercial value.

And that stems from their defining experience of culture. Which, most likely, was a load of bo****ks.

You see, all decisions are emotional. People may think rationally, but they act emotionally. If their defining experience of culture was personally negative, then they’ll build a mental defence system around that experience that dictates all future responses. New evidence, be that facts or figures, the changing status quo or shifting market forces, is rejected as it doesn’t reflect their 'emotional reality'.

So choosing to leverage the power of culture does not start with a logical understanding. It has to start with building the emotional awareness and acceptance that reality has changed.