183. Let's talk culture
"Culture leaks in your language."
This is one of many great quotable-quotes in this fascinating episode where I chat with author and culture expert Shane Hatton about -
- Why culture is so important post-covid.
- Why culture matters even if you are a one-person company.
- What language can tell us about culture, and how you can learn to work it in your favour.
- The danger of not elevating your language.
- How you, as a speaker, can get across team culture quickly.
Transcript
This is one of so many great "Write that down" kind of quotes from this episode with Shane Hatton. It's called Let's Talk Culture. So as you'll hear, Shane is an absolute expert in communication and culture. And if you're listening to this thinking, Oh, culture is something for big companies or HR teams, I don't really have to worry about that. Listen in. Culture touches everybody. And even if you run your own show, it's in your interest to foster a great culture and understand how your language impacts that. Grab your pen and paper. There is so much helpful advice in this episode. And while you're doing that, write down: Join Soul Speakers. So this is my signature group program where you get everything you need to speak from the heart and become a visible force in your field. We have a monthly coaching call along with a bunch of other features.
Our January coaching call is How to get complimented on your voice. And I'll teach you how to produce a great voice that people not only want to listen to, they love. So if you're looking to grow an audience, or get your ideas heard at work, or even start a podcast, having a voice people want to listen to is critical. It's the first step, right? Okay. Are you ready to meet the very talented Shane Hatton? Let's talk culture.
Sally:
Shane Hatton, welcome to That Voice Podcast. It is so great to chat to you after meeting you in person in London a couple of weeks ago.
Shane:
I know! We got to meet in real life. We went from being clubhouse friends to Instagram friends, to being real life friends. And it's my favorite.
Sally:
Oh, I feel like I've really graduated in the Shane Hatton friendship. It is so great to have you here. So, Let's Talk Culture. That's the name of your book.
Shane:
Big topic to cover especially post covid. Most people I was talking to at the time were, I guess coming out of that well coming outta their caves really. And we'd kind of been relegated to our homes. We were navigating return to work in brackets what that looked like, how we were gonna build strong teams. And I think we all know that culture's important. We've known that for a long time. What Covid did was put this giant floodlight on culture for people and they said, okay, we've gotta do something about our culture. So I knew that it was gonna be a really important topic. So during the pandemic, I took some time to evaluate my experiences, my expertise, which really was in that balance between culture and communication. And I went, okay, what's gonna be the most helpful resource and tool in the hands of people? We called the book, Let's Talk Culture. But in, when I read it, I see Let's Talk Culture and talk is the emphasis for me because I see communication as a really foundational component of what helps build great culture.
Sally:
Oh, love it. Say somebody's coming completely new to this and they're thinking, Wow, yeah, I wanna have a good culture within my team, or I wanna play my part to create a good culture. Because we know that if we don't feel excited about coming to work and the people we work with, then what's the point of anything else really? So what are the foundational things that we have to know?
Shane:
Yes, I like that question, which is, what are the foundational things we need to know? Because most people wanna jump straight to, Okay, how do I build a great culture? How do I sustain a great culture? You gotta remember, culture is not just something that exists in huge organizations. It could be that you are operating within a small business team. You might just have you a business manager, a graphic designer, or even some organizations in some businesses. You've got consultants that are working for you, but you've pulled them together as a bit of a Avengers-type group that you've pulled together. So as a business owner, you are still thinking about, well, how do I create the kind of environment that I want to operate within that gets me excited to be out, get outta bed every single day. Most people think about culture through the lens of a team member showing up to work and enjoying being part of the team.
Shane:
What about a business owner who wants to show up every day and enjoy working in their business? So it's everybody. So if we're gonna ask the question about how do we create that kind of environment, we've gotta kind of rewind a little bit and ask the question. So what on earth is culture? And we ran this research project in 2021 with who's a research organization based out of Balcom Hills in New South Wales. And essentially we asked them to, or I asked them to go and find a thousand middle managers, not executive leaders, not c-suite leaders, just everyday leaders. And I said, I want you to ask 'em a series of questions about culture. And one of the first questions we asked was, Do you think culture's important? 99% said, Yep, absolutely.
Sally:
But do you know what it is?
Shane:
Yeah. Well, the second question we asked was, well, do you know what it is? 97% said Yes. 0.1% said, No, we have no clue. And so the third question we asked was, what is it? How do you define it? One in 10 could give us a consistent answer to that question. And when we dug below the surface of that, we realized that the answer that those that one in 10 group people gave us was actually the Google definition of culture. So most of those people just googled the answer to that.
Sally:
It's so funny, Shane, I am literally Googling it right now.
Shane:
It's probably something along along the lines of, it's the values and behaviors and the guide and form the actions of all team members. It's something to do with values and behaviors attitudes, the things that are the guiding principles of our teams. And so it's a consistent definition. But I think one of the reasons why it's so challenging is 'cause right now there is no universal definition of culture. So in academia there was about 54 different academic definitions of culture in the research that I found. And so it's no wonder people feel really confused about it. And so when we talk about shaping culture, changing culture, it's great to have that conversation. We need to, but we kind of have to rewind and go, can we get on the same page about what we actually mean by culture when we talk about culture?
Shane:
'Cause If we know what those kind of common elements are, then we know what other levers that we can pull on. And I'll give you the four quickly. We don't need to go into too much detail, but it's just good for helpful understanding. So when we talk about culture, there's four things culture has in common. Every definition of culture. Number one, every definition of culture refers to something which is collective. And the reason why that's so important to know is that whether you're a business owner of three people, whether you're a senior executive leader of 300 people, wherever a group of people are gathered, you've got a culture. So especially being a new business, you go, Oh, I've only just got a group of contractors. I've got my motley crew around me. We don't have culture yet. I've really gotta build culture.
Shane:
Like, no, no, you already have culture. So it already exists. So the question is, is your culture by choice or is the culture by chance? And most of the time it's just by chance. So one, it's always collective. The second is that culture is made up of a set of kind of unseen elements. Meaning there are things that we do and we experience that we can't necessarily touch or feel. For example, Sal, your values, your beliefs, your mindsets, all of those things are influencing your culture, but they're not things that you can necessarily touch or point to. Like if I asked you to point to your beliefs, how would you do that if I asked you to point to your values? How do you do that? It's, it's quite challenging.
Sally:
Yeah. Well, I did my business company values a couple of years ago because someone asked me that very question and I was like, Well, I actually wanna be able to articulate, I would say to anyone out there who's a business on their own and thinks, oh, you know, company values only just for big companies, I would be like, Nah, <laugh>, you know, do it for your business. Do it for yourself. Because I know that it really helped give direction to not just myself in business, but when I was looking for those contractors or that, those team members, I had a bit of a measure upon which to, to hire people.
Shane:
I'm glad you said that because most early organizations and business owners will go, Oh I kind of know my values. They're not really that important to me 'cause I'm not a big business yet. And I think you would see it with your clients you work with all the time. When you help a person define their, even their individual values and their business values, they become a north star and a guide for you to be able to make the best possible decisions. And I think in lead the room, I even said this, this phrase for me, when it comes to great communication, we wanna find passion in the way people communicate. And the word, the phrase that I used was passion isn't about volume, it's about value.
Sally:
Oh, you've got so many great one-liners. Passion isn't about volume, it's about value. Oh, write that down.
Shane:
Think about the people you've seen communicate and you go, Gee, they were passionate. It wasn't because they were passionate, because they were yelling, they were passionate because you could see the alignment with the value that they held for the idea that they were sharing. And the last two is that culture is also observable, meaning that it shows up in a set of behavioral norms. So the way that we do things as a team, and the last thing is that they're learned from one another on our team. So if we look at those four elements, it's that if you have a team, you have a culture, and it's being guided by, shifted by, adapted by the unseen values and mindsets and meanings that you create. It's showing up in a set of behaviors that people are learning from one another. So once we know this, we can go, okay, well what are the levers that we pull on now? And how does our communication influence that? And I would say it influences it in a profound way.
Sally:
Yeah, absolutely. So fascinating. So now that we've got the, the four key elements of what culture is, what are some tangible tips you can give us in terms of the kind of language to use?
Shane:
The things that pops into my mind is I had a conversation with a professor. He runs the kind of cultural computation lab at Berkeley in California. His name is Samir. And he essentially ran a research project that studied, I can't remember exactly what the number was. It was about 10 million I think, pieces of internal communication in a business. So things like Slack channels, emails, all kinds of kind of written communication. 'cause One of the things he found is that your culture leaks in your language.
Sally:
Oh, so many one-liners! Culture leaks in your language. Yes.
Shane:
Yes. We could learn about your culture through a number of different ways. We can go and observe your behaviors. We can observe certain things, we could do interviews and they would all be filled with certain biases. But if we could put all of your language into some kind of system that could analyze your language, we can learn a lot about your culture. And what he found was that employees who came into an organization that were able to adapt to and learn the language of an organization were much more likely to be promoted within the next two to three years within the business, or voluntarily or otherwise exit the business based on their ability to either adapt to or not adapt to the language that exists within a business. So for example, you show up to a team and a team shows up on Monday morning and, and they go, Hey, what did you get up to on the weekend?
Shane:
And they go, Oh, you know, I went out with my friends, or I spent time with our kids, or we did this. And they're having conversations about outside work. And you participate in that conversation. Maybe it's over email, maybe it's over Slack, and you kind of get welcomed in and you belong. Let's imagine the other way is you go and you go, Oh, sorry, that's, that's private. We don't talk about my private life at, at work. We hold those stories to ourselves, we put our walls up. Can you see the difference? Well, one person's like, Well, we obviously won't include you in our conversations about that. So immediately you start to isolate yourself from what is a cultural norm. And if you continue to do that and show up in that particular way, you're more likely to say, well actually this is not the team for me.
Shane:
People who use, you know, swear words in their kind of Slack channels or their emails. If other people come in and go, Oh, it's okay to swear here, they'll drop a few swear words. They kind of fit within the collective norms of behaviors. And so I think the reason why this is so important, Sal, is that if you think about language, you have to consider the way language is being outworked within your business because the way that you communicate to your stakeholders. So they could be your contractors, they could be your customers, they could be just the people you're working with every single day. The way that you speak to those people and the way that you adapt your language, the people around you can either build those kind of strengthened relationships where you create a set of norms of what's acceptable, what's not acceptable, or they could be the things that isolate you from people as well. But if you've never considered it, what ends up happening is it's just all by chance, it's all by default, rather than it actually being by design.
Sally:
Yeah. I experienced this firsthand actually. So I came, came from being a journalist in a newsroom where the language is very direct. Like there is no fluff at all. There is so much to do in so little time that it is just to the point and sometimes possibly a bit abrasive, but you've got no time to think about whether it was abrasive or not. You just kind of like bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. And then at the end, you know, you get the show to air, you have a toast and like you get on with it. And then coming from that into a corporate environment, when I went into PR with my immediate team, they were former journos. And so I fitted straight in. And that's probably one of the reasons it was, you know, I got the, the role and I was speaking that language.
Sally:
However, I did have some issues with the wider team in my early days. Actually in one case I had somebody in my team like crying and upset the whole day. And it wasn't until the end of the day that I got called into the office, Sally, what did you say? And by that time I'm thinking, I have no idea what I said. You know what I said? And I was backtracking in the day. And over time I was able to see, right, that type of direct communication is not what's gonna fly in this team if I want to get along with everybody. And it was really, really helpful because I was able to acknowledge that and then shift, I guess the advantage of being in a comms team. You're a little bit more adept at it than perhaps in some other roles. And then being in PR around a big business, I knew that the way that I communicated to the, to the engineers was different to the operational frontline staff, different to the comms team, different to the call center because everybody had their own little culture within like the micro, I dunno, do you call it like a microculture within the larger culture of the organization. So interesting.
Shane:
It's a perfect example exactly what we're, what we're talking about here, which is if you were unaware, essentially your culture is leaking in your language, then you would continue to try and push a certain style of communication with different groups of people and you would see vastly different results. For example, you could show up to your IT team and go, Okay, I wanna be very direct, I wanna be very, you know this particular style of communication and it could be hitting up against a brick wall because there's a clash of cultures that exists within that. Or you could be speaking on stage and you go, I, in my entire career, this is the culture that I have been operating within, therefore this is the style of communication that I deliver. And you could be on a stage and completely missed the mark because you've, you haven't kind of adapted that to the cultural norms of the room.
Shane:
So again, you might go direct is the most important part here when what, what people really need is empathy. And we saw that during COVID, right? When you see political leaders or world leaders get on stage and people are hurting. And what they needed was empathy. But what a lot of people that felt like the the culture needed was expertise or skill or proficiency. And people go, well, no, we get that you're proficient, we get that you are skilled care. Well, we just need a little bit of care.
Sally:
Yeah.
Shane:
And so again, being able to adapt to that is really important.
Sally:
Yeah. So if you are a speaker or presenter, you know, if you're showing up to a new place, even a new city, how can you I guess, get some insight into what the culture is before you do step on stage and potentially make a communication faux pas?
Shane:
Oh, good question. We, in, in lead the room, I talk about understanding people's problems and through kind of two sets and I call it the boardroom and the bedroom. But really it's, it's nothing new. It's just my kind of spin on what is essentially presenting versus real challenge. So in counseling or therapy, we talk about the presenting problem versus the real challenge. The presenting problem is typically the thing that the person shows up with. The real challenge is the underlying issue that was the real problem. And I call it "boardroom and bedroom", which is that if you were to take your audience, and let's say that there's a hundred people in your audience, the boardroom problem is if we put, let's say a hundred people in a boardroom, what's the top 10 problems or challenges that they might talk about really openly?
Shane:
So maybe they don't feel uncomfortable talking about it. They're pretty common problems. The bedroom problems, as funny as they sound, are the problems that keep people up at night. And they're the things that if it keeps you up at night, it's probably not the thing you're talking about in the boardroom. It's probably the real underlying problem. So if I always talk about communicating with empathy and understanding your audience, well, it's about getting into their mind and going, What are the boardroom problems they're experiencing? And what are the bedroom problems? For example, you're about to stand up in an organization and make a whole bunch of organizational structural changes. Okay? So the boardroom problems are what do people think about, oh, so what does that mean for our job? What does that mean for our work? What does that mean for our projects we've been working on?
Shane:
Does that mean, you know, what's it mean for organizational strategy? What are my OKRs? All those kinds of big things. Everyone will talk about that publicly. Do you know what they're not saying in that room? They're not saying, Oh my gosh, I have private school fees, or I've got school fees, I've got books coming up. I can't afford to pay my kids' school fees. They're not saying I'm already working overtime and my spouse already hates me because I'm coming home and this is gonna add so much more work to this. That's what they're not saying. So if you can understand both of those, it allows us to show up a whole lot more empathy in the way that we communicate.
Sally:
Oh, I love that. Bedroom versus boardroom. I often describe a similar thing in terms of the question beneath the question. So I'm, when I'm working with leaders on how to field questions, often the question that's asked is not the real question that they want answered, you know, so you're right. So the question might be, you know, when will we find out about the contract being renewed? And then when they get the answer on, well, we don't know, or the date, it's like they're not answering what the real question is, which is, as you say, that fear around, am I gonna have a job? Am I gonna be able to put food on the table this Christmas? You know, all of those bedroom problems. Oh, I might pinch that. That's, that's brilliant. Yeah. My other one that I say that involves boardroom is I'm talking about bringing your communication from the bolo to the boardroom, because I used to be, you know, grew up in Wollongong where the only place we used to go out for dinner was the bowling club when we lost electricity. And we go and have the buffet. And how it's really useful to be able to communicate with lots of different types of people, because, you know, if you can, you can have greater influence.
Shane:
Well, we talk about every kind of presentation is is a journey of tension to resolve, right? Which is, there's a, there's a pain that has a solution, there's a question that has an answer, and a lot of people show up and, and they go, I've got a really good answer, therefore people will wanna listen to what I have to say. Or I've got a really good solution, and therefore people will care deeply about that. Well, they don't just care because you have a solution. They don't care because you have an answer. You have to give them a reason to be able to ask the question or to be able to experience the pain of the problem. And so I think you, you talk about this a lot as well, which is, okay, we need to find ways to elevate the, the curiosity or the pain. And the, the best way to be able to do that is identify people's problems, which is, Hey, have you ever experienced this? Have you ever felt like that? Hey, let's talk about how we can resolve that. A good example of this, during COVID, Jacinda Ardern was essentially doing a Facebook Live, very, very raw unscripted. And it had been just in a,
Sally:
In a home, in PJs.
Shane:
Home in her PJs, just put a kid to bed. And it had just been after the day where the New Zealand warning system went off and it was essentially they were testing the warning system. Everyone's phones went off as like a military-style notification. And she sat down and she just looked down the camera and she said, You know, today this happened. And she goes, You know, as a mum, I could imagine that that would be really scary what that would feel like to not really have the clarity about what was happening, but then to experience this. And she immediately tapped into a fear response that people were experiencing as a problem. And she acknowledged it. She didn't try to solve it, she just acknowledged everyone went, Yeah, you're right. Oh, thank you. Thank you for acknowledging that.
Shane:
And if we go back to the culture conversation, there's an unseen element of culture, which are the things that we feel, but we don't talk about. One of these quotes by Tori Leto American Psychologist. She said, what isn't communicated is felt, what's felt is interpreted, and what's interpreted is often inaccurate. So I'll say that again. What's not communicated is felt, what's felt is interpreted. And what's interpreted is often inaccurate. So if we leave things unspoken and unseen and we don't elevate it through our language, through our communication, through our conversations, we leave people open to interpretation around certain things, and it leaves people feeling under acknowledged, unseen, unheard, and a little bit yeah, a bit unclear.
Sally:
Yeah. It's such a beautiful quote. I haven't heard that one before. It's, it's the eloquent way of saying lost in translation.
Shane:
Yeah.
Sally:
You know, and I hear from a lot of leaders who are like, you know, but that's not what I mean. You know, and they get frustrated that things are being, you know, misinterpreted or taken out of context.
Shane:
Mm. Patty McCord was the chief people officer at Netflix for many, many years, is attributed with so much of Netflix's culture at the time. And she said, it's not that people are too stupid to get it, it's that you made it too complicated to understand and I love that the emphasis is not on the listener, it's on the communicator.
Sally:
Oh, Shane. So much value. So there's so many good themes coming in around participating in the culture of the team that's already there. Really speaking to understanding the problems. It's, you know, the bedroom, what's keeping people up at night. I'm not saying it's not like what you say to them in the bedroom.
Shane:
You don't talk about the bedroom problems with people.
Sally:
But it's really that awareness of what can I do and what can I change about my communication or try something different to be able to make people feel in a way that they're going to interpret my message in the way it was intended.
Shane:
Yeah. Why does culture matter? Why is culture important? Yes, there's all the financial implications of culture, the engagement, the attraction and retention. There's so many good concrete benefits to culture, but at its core, what culture is ultimately about, is about helping people feel like they belong. And when we create cultural norms, again, this is not just a big organization stuff. This is for you as a small business owner with maybe one or two contractors, and you're saying, Well, how do I make it my team a space where my contractors feel like they're not just transactional to me, but they feel like they're part of my team? And culture allows you to create explicit spoken, communicated norms where we say, Hey, this is what it takes to belong. My good friend Fiona Robertson wrote a book and she defined culture, and it was the title of the book as our Rules of Belonging. And I love that language. What does it take to belong here? And if we are clear on that, if we communicate that, if we consider that, then it makes it easy for people to belong. And I think that's ultimately the core driver of culture.
Sally:
Oh, Shane. So beautiful. I'm so glad that we have the transcript of this episode that we'll be up on the website because there is so many really valuable pieces of advice to write down and to take on. Was there anything else you wanted to add?
Shane:
If you are at the early stages of culture, so in Let's Talk Culture, I give people five conversations. That's the whole purpose of the book. Here's five conversations you can have with your team. I think right now, start with one, and it's the most easy, simple first conversation that you can have. And that is to have a conversation about expectations with your suppliers, with your customers, with the people you interact with, that you, you are looking to build that and shape that culture with, have a conversation about expectations. And the simple question is, Hey, what do we expect of one another in this relationship, in this team, in this environment? What are our big unspoken expectations of one another? You are elevating that and you're bringing it to the surface, and it's no longer hidden anymore, which means it's not open to interpretation. And once we start to explore those expectations, then we start to realize, oh gosh, we have a lot in common and we probably have some similar values.
Shane:
And that conversation about expectations spit out the top of it, this core driving values that unite us. And once we've defined and articulated those values, we now have almost like a north star or a bearing for us to be able to go by, to start to define our behaviors, which is the way that we wanna show up and behave in this team. So if you're looking for a place to start, start with the conversation. Hey, what do we expect of one another on this team? What does that show us about what we have in common? And now what would we do to make that more intentional about how we operate and behave?
Sally:
Oh, I'm so glad we got that in. I'm not sure who said this, but one of my favorite quotes, I often say it is, Expectation is the source of all disappointment. Whenever people have been like let down or felt ripped-off, let's say in like a business setting or whatever it is, any sort of negative emotion, it's every time linked to an unmet expectation. So if you can have that conversation and have those expectations laid out upfront, I think that's such valuable advice. I'm so glad that you brought that up.
Shane:
Yes, absolutely. Couldn't agree more.
Sally:
So Shane, I will link to both of your books in the show notes, but where can people find you?
Shane:
Oh, I hang out everywhere online under, @ShaneMHatton. So you can find me on LinkedIn there, you can find me on Instagram. Look, my phrasing is if you want to hang out professionally, let's jump on LinkedIn. If you wanna hang out a little bit more casually let's hang out on Instagram. If you wanna hang out very casually, you can find me on Threads, occasionally.
Sally:
Amazing. And if you wanna hang out IRL, in real life, then head on over to London.
Shane:
Yes, come on over. It's freezing at the moment, but I'm sure people will love it.
Sally:
Oh, gosh, yes. We've got the aircon cranking here in Brisbane and it's, yeah, that's, we've had a hot couple of days and I'm missing those beautiful Christmas lights around. London. I'm not missing the sun setting at 4:30 PM though.
Shane:
Look, it's nice watching the sunset on your lunch break. And Christmas is beautiful, but Australia's always my home and I love it dearly.
Sally:
Oh, Shane, thank you so much for coming on That Voice Podcast.
Shane:
Oh, thank you for having me.