The Power of Culture: Why Companies Get It Wrong and How to Fix It with Laura Hamill, PhD

In this special episode, Michael and Tessa sit down with our very own Laura Hamill to discuss her new book "The Power of Culture" published by The Economist.

Laura shares insights from her decades of experience studying organizational culture, explaining why companies struggle with culture change and how leaders can build intentional, powerful cultures that drive business success.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why organizational culture is both critical and incredibly difficult to change
• How unconscious cultural norms shape behavior and resist change
• The vital connection between culture and business strategy
• The "Intentional Culture Circle" framework for cultural transformation

Quotable Moments: 
"Culture is like water to a goldfish - when you're in it, you can't even see it anymore." - Laura Hamill

Practical Takeaway: 
Culture change is challenging but achievable with intentional leadership focus and commitment. Start by getting clear about what kind of company you want to be from a cultural perspective and how that connects to your business strategy and purpose.

Get Laura's Book:
The Power of Culture is available now from Simon & Schuster!

Learn more about why culture is both challenging and critical to business success, and discover practical frameworks for creating positive, intentional organizational cultures that drive results.

To stay connected and continue the conversation, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.

And don't forget to check out our previous episodes for more tips and strategies to boost your workplace happiness. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform or on our website.

If you have any questions, comments, or topic suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!

Stay inspired, stay motivated, and stay happy at work!

Transcript

Michael McCarthy: 0:06

Music, welcome back for another episode of the happy at work podcast with Laura Tessa and Michael.

Tessa Misiaszek: 0:14

Each week, we have thoughtful conversations with leaders, founders and authors about happiness at work.

Michael McCarthy: 0:22

Tune in each Thursday for a new conversation. Enjoy the show. Welcome to the happy at work podcast, and today, it's going to be super special, because we're interviewing one of our own, Laura Hamill, Laura, yeah,

Laura Hamill: 0:53

thank you so much. It's so it's kind of a little surreal, but it's so fun to be talking with you all about this, and yeah, I did. I did. I wrote a book.

Michael McCarthy: 1:03

You wrote a book of culture, the power and published by The Economist that's big leagues. Good for you. Congratulations.

Laura Hamill: 1:10

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Michael McCarthy: 1:12

So how did tell us from the beginning? How did this book come about?

Laura Hamill: 1:16

Yeah, well, luckily, I left a job that I felt a lot of emotional attachment to, and I had a really hard time figuring out what I wanted to do next afterwards, because it was such, it was such an important part of me and my identity and my career. And so I had gone away. I went away by myself for a week, and just sort of tried to process everything. And in that kind of process, I was journaling, just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing, and I just decided not to censor what I was writing and just kind of let it all out. And about three and a half days into that, I just stopped, nothing else came out. It was awesome. Like, it's almost like a purge, right? Like, it just got it all out, and then I went and took this huge nap. I napped for like, three and a half hours, and I woke up, and it was like I was 100% clear of what I wanted to do next. And it was multiple things, but one of them was write a book, so and the other one was actually, and I think I might have told, I might have told you all this Well, the other one was do more podcasts, and I didn't. And it was soon thereafter that you all reached out to me to be part of this team, which was weird, right? Like, how does? And then the other one was to reboot my consulting practice, so I sort of I got some clarity that I wanted to write a book. And then Tessa helped me kind of get some connections going and I started thinking about this idea of writing a book, and I knew that I wanted to write about culture that's been my, like, my kind of underlying favorite topic in for a long time now, actually, probably since the late 90s, that I've loved the topic of culture. So I'm interested in it. I'm, like, inherently geeky about it. I can talk about it all day long, and I can go on and on about it. And at the same time, I also feel like I know a ton and I know so little, you know, it's like, one of those topics where I'm just constantly intrigued by it. So those are some of the reasons. But then also, and I know you all know this, but culture is underlying most of the problems that organizations and so all the work I've done in lots of different organizations, whether I'm focusing on employee engagement and how you improve employee engagement, or focusing on well being and how you improve well being, or how do you Make better managers and leaders. Underneath all of it is culture. And so if you think about how important that is, and then how little we know about it, and especially how poorly the practice of culture actually is in organizations, you just say, gosh, there's there's so much to understand. There's so much to write about. So I just see this huge disconnect between kind of the science and what science tells us about culture and then the practice. So those are just some of the reasons. It's just a great it's a great, interesting topic with so much opportunity for improvement that

Tessa Misiaszek: 4:16

that is, first of all, I am so excited for you that you have written a book and that it's out, and everyone from North America to Europe to all over the world can now access this book. I think you had your UK launch date happened a few weeks ago, but now it's available in North America. So it's just so exciting. But I do want to dive into some topics you speak about in the book, sure, because you have some amazing examples of companies who get it right and who don't get it right. And one of the, one of the kind of most interesting aspects that you, you really discuss in the book, is around why it's so hard. It's like people get culture. Certainly, I understand the power of culture. You understand the power of culture is. Individually, we get it. Even on teams, it's like, okay, we can create our team culture. But when you think about, how do you scale it to an organization, it's like, organizations just can't get it right, and they're incredibly challenged by it. And you know, there's a lot that when you look at big topics like mergers and acquisitions. A lot of the failures of mergers and acquisitions with the fact that you can't merge culture. Why is or what did you find, why organizations have such a hard time culture?

Laura Hamill: 5:32

Yeah, what's fascinating about it? It's the very nature of culture that makes it so elusive, so challenging. And I think because we don't talk about the very nature of culture and those those challenges, it's we don't ever address them. So I'll just give you a couple, because there are many, many aspects of culture that are make it really hard. The first one is that it's really abstract. We don't have language for it, right? We don't have a common way we talk about what does collaboration look like from company to company? What does it mean to focus on the short term versus the long term from company to company? We just don't have good language or frameworks, and so that prevents us from being able to really do a lot of research on it, to study it, to be consistent, to be able to compare companies when we don't have when it's really abstract. So that's one reason, another one, and this is my favorite reason, is that culture is unconscious. When you first start in an organization, you actually can see it right? You start in your first day, in your first week, you're like, looking around. Why do people do it this way? Like, what you mean, nobody asks questions in company meetings like you mean, they kind of look away when a leader walks by. Right? There's all these things that happen when you first join a company that you really can see loud and clear. But once you're there for a while, you start to learn how it goes down, you start to learn how things are, and you start to become part of it, so much so that you don't even see it anymore. It's that analogy of thinking about, does a goldfish know it's swimming in water? Cultures like the water that we're in, and do we even know that? I always think it's funny when we use animal analogies, though, like, how do we know goldfish don't know that they're swimming in water, but that's another story. But we don't have an understanding when once we're in it, we can't even see it. And if you can't see it, then why is it a problem? Right? If you can't see it, how are you going to change it? So a lot of times, also, to even complicate that, more people who are in positions of power have come through this culture, in many cases, right? They've been they're a product of the culture. They think, not only do I not see it, but this is awesome, right? Because it promoted me, it reinforced and validated me, and so there's not a lot of motivation to change it. So that's a really important part of understanding culture and why it's so hard to change it also. I'll just give you one more. There's many, many more, but let me give you one other reason why it's so hard. The other reason is that we can't just take what works for one company and slop it onto another company, right? You can't take a culture cookie cutter and say, oh, let's take that culture cookie cutter and put it over on this company. So take a company, you know, like books about Netflix's culture. Well, that's interesting, but there's not a lot we can probably apply to our individual, unique company that we that Netflix did. So because there's no culture cookie cutter. You have to do the culture work yourself. You have to dig deep. You have to ask a lot of hard questions. You have to face a lot of realities that most organizations don't want to face. So when you have to do that kind of hard work that takes a long time, it's really easy to not do it right. It's really easy to say, You know what? I've got all these other things that the board's asking me to do that actually know how to do, like I know the approach I should take. Let me go do those things, and let's just cross our fingers that the culture thing will work itself out.

Michael McCarthy: 9:13

I love this, and it really resonates with me how we don't seem to have a language about this fuzzy thing that we can't see or touch, but we know it's there. And I'm curious, what do you think is the impact of a fake culture where they say, Okay, we're x, but in reality, we're really over here. What is the that?

Laura Hamill: 9:38

It's huge. Michael, I mean, so I have a term that I'm using in the book for that very thing, and I call it cultural betrayal. It's just this idea that, especially when you are drawn to an organization, maybe you might hear about its values, or read its values, or think you have an understanding of what the company stands for, or what they say they stand for, and you start to work there. And you start to realize that has nothing to do with your experience. So when your experience of the culture is so different from what the aspirations of culture are, that deep kind of feeling of you betrayed me. You told me this one thing, and it's not true at all, and I came here because of that. It is pretty deep, and it can really result in in withdrawal behaviors, where people start to feel resentment, they start to distance themselves, and maybe they believe so organizations, I see this over and over again, where companies get that they're supposed to have values, right? They're supposed to focus on values work, but then they do that, hire an outside consultant, you know, somebody like me and I come in and help them create those new values attached to their strategy, and then they just flop them up on their website, put them up on a nice little decal on the wall, and then check they're done. And they don't do the work to make sure that it's what's actually experienced in the day to day work behind closed doors. It's real.

Tessa Misiaszek: 11:06

So one of the, one of the questions I wanted to ask because, you know, I wrote the book on branding, and we want this a little bit because, again, it's, you can have a fantastic external brand, but your people are the should personify and be the ambassadors of your brand. And actually, at corn ferry, we did a we looked at a large database around employee engagement and for younger people, only one in two, 50% would recommend the products and services of the company they work for to friends and family, so that's saying that half of the people who are under the age of 40 felt comfortable enough, felt proud enough about the company that they work for that they would actually recommend the products and services to their friends and family. Wow. And I think this gets to the fact that the company may be espousing a great message, but then, when you look and lift the hood internally, the culture is not reflective of those same values that they're, you know, saying externally. And one kind of, I think, core piece of this is the how culture and what we want to try to convince the CEO the culture is important, how culture actually connects to strategy, and I don't know, get this old adage correct, but is it that culture eats strategy for breakfast? Is that it for breakfast, for dinner, for an appetizer, whatever the case may be. So what's your take on connecting strategic objectives with culture?

Laura Hamill: 12:36

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's imperative, right? You have to do that. There's so many reasons, a couple of them. One of them is, if we don't do that, if we don't show that culture is is completely required, or focus on culture being aligned with the strategy is required. It's not very likely you're going to achieve that strategy right, because we need to make sure that the behaviors that people are all day long work in the direction of strategy achievement. And so let me give you I'll just give you this quick example. This is an example that I use a lot, but it's my favorite example. I was working at a large tech company, and I just started there, and I was writing a memorandum, and this is in the olden days when we typed that at the top right, we memorandum, and I'm sitting in my office. Everybody had offices for themselves, and everybody sat in their office with their doors closed, right? That's just the way you did. So I was thinking, Gosh, it would be great if somebody would read my memo, because it's new. I'm new. I hope it's good. And someone's thinking, Oh, what about my manager? I know he's not available for me. That which is telling then I thought about, wait, there's somebody who sits right next to me. I can hear her clanging on her keyboard. Let me she's on my team. Shouldn't she be like, helping me? Right? And so I go over, knock on the door and ask her, and she's still typing. Well, she says, come in. So go in, and she says, yeah. And so I said, Hey, you know I'm new. I'd love for you to read this for me and just tell me what you think. And she looked at me kind of oddly, and she said, Okay. And so I said, Okay. And I just sort of slid it over and left it there. And then I thought, How much time do I give her? So I wanted to give her plenty of time. I knew she was busy. I went back the next the next day, knocked on her door. She's still in the same place, doing the same thing. And I said, Hey, did you have a chance to look at and she said, Yeah, it's fine. Okay, great, thanks. And I grabbed it, thinking that there was some feedback on it, right? I will go back to my office look at it, and it doesn't have anything on it. You know, there's not even, like, a little smiley, any feedback. And so the message I got right then and there was, I wasn't supposed to do that. We don't do that here. We don't ask each other for help. And I continue to get messages like that from this organization. Conversation that we you're on your own. In fact, not only on your own, you're competing with that woman next door and that you have to show up better, and you have to toot your own horn. In my first performance review, my manager said to me, stop helping people. You're helping people too much. I want to hear more about how you are shining by yourself, right? And so the thing that's interesting about that is I would love to say I just said, You know what? That's not what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna keep helping people. But no, I didn't. I learned. I adapted, and I bet you I was just like the woman who was next door to me in no time, in a few months, right? I learned that that's how we do things. Here we are competing. We're standing on our own. We're individualistic here. And so I'm connecting it back to the strategy piece. So the ironing of this is, guess what we were doing as a company? Guess what our strategy was as a company at that time, it was around developing collaboration software. So this is the irony, and this is what I see over and over again, are these huge disconnects between what's happening in the day to day work, like how people are kind of pushed to a path that fits with the culture in their behavior, and how disconnected that can be from what they're actually trying to achieve. So I worked with this big insurance company on helping them with their culture, and they were trying to create a whole bunch of new innovative mark, innovative approaches in their marketplace. And it sort of sounds like an oxymoron, right? Insurance Company innovation, but they were trying really hard, and they had these big goals around innovation. And when I first started working with them, I was shocked at how scared people were in the very top of the leadership team. They were like scared stiff. They were they could hardly talk to each other. In fact, the very first meeting I had with them to talk to them about the culture work, I go up to this room where they're all sitting there, and they're nobody's talking to each other, there's like, literally in their suits and like, just completely still, and then at the end of the table was the CEO and the COO whispering to each other, like, holy smokes. What is going on here. So how can you imagine that the top leaders are scared? They're scared of the CEO and the COO and they're going to create market changing innovation. How is that going to happen? Because I bet you, the employees feel way more scared than those leaders did, and so there's no way that they're going to be able to actually generate new ideas. Feel comfortable making a mistake, you know, iterate on new, new approaches. There's nobody, if people are scared. So that's what I see over and over again, is these disconnects between who you say, what you say, you're trying to achieve, and what the actual experience is for for the people who are in that company,

Michael McCarthy: 18:06

it's so interesting to talk about the disconnect, because I see it all the time. When I do consulting, I always, I always walk out and say, How are you in business? By doing this? I don't let it. I don't know how you're still surviving. It leads me to my next question, what happens when an organization is not intentional about culture? Because from what I've seen my limited experiences, they seem to have just been sleepwalking.

Laura Hamill: 18:32

I think there's all different kind of combinations of not being intentional about culture, right? I think there's the one that we're talking about around culture, but cultural betrayal, right? When you claim to be something and, boom, you're so not. I mean, that's sort of an extreme version of, you know, not living their culture and not being intentional. I think there's also sort of the meh version of not being intentional about culture that can also just be pretty painful to work with meaning. They haven't really articulated the culture, or maybe they have, and they just don't really talk about it that much. And it's not bad, but it's also not good, and it's sort of just one of those places that you just go in and you almost bore yourself to death, right? Like you just feel like, Is this my life, right? This is all I'm doing. I actually worked in a company for a while that was extremely boring in that way, and there was nothing about the culture that I felt connected to. I think I lasted was like three weeks, and so I was just over it, right? And so I think that being intentional is a strategy that more organizations need to take on. They really need to think about what kind of company they want to be in the future. Where are they now, and how are they going to get there? And that's what that is part of the book that I really focused on, is I have this approach called the. Intentional culture circle. And it was basically a pretty simple model that I started using in 2006 I think, something like that. And I started using it because I was working with some clients who were saying, like, I get the culture is important, but it seems so hard. What should I do first? And so I put together this really simple model to use at this, these clients that basically just to kind of take you step by step, start with this, and then do this, and then do one more thing after that, just trying to make it clear that you can step into it. You know, it doesn't have to be this thing that feels so ambiguous and so impossible that you can never make any progress on it. And so this the idea of it is you just need to start getting clear, right, getting clear about what kind of company you want to be from a culture perspective, how that's connected to your business purpose or your strategy, while you need the culture to be that way. That's the That's the very first step. And a lot of organizations have never done that work by just trying to articulate that. And then there's a bunch of other steps that are in the book, but yeah, lots, lots behind each one of them. So I you know, as we, as we start to wind down, because, of course, we want everyone to buy the book. I i do have a kind of a final question, which is, we had we spent the last half hour talking about how hard it is, and I can imagine, for really large companies have been around for decades, if not 100 years, that to try to start to think about changing culture, or shifting culture, even into a slightly into a new direction, would be really difficult. So my question is, why are you so optimistic? This is such an important thing to be talking about, if it's so challenging for organizations to do? Yes, that's a good question. It's because I've seen some companies really do it right, right, and I've seen the benefits of it. I've seen the magic of it. And that is, you know, I wanted to call this book The Power of Culture for a couple reasons. One is because and this, we didn't talk a ton about this in this podcast, but how important leaders and positional power really is to forming and shaping culture. I mean, that's a whole other conversation. That's a big part of why I wanted to call it power of culture. But the other reason was because when you get it right, it's so positive and beautiful and magical and powerful when employees feel connected to the culture, when they feel inspired by it, but when they feel like they want to be part of it. And so when you can get it right, it is just beautiful. In fact, that's the reason why the cover it has sunshine on it, because I think about the power of culture like the sunshine, and how what that can do to you right, how that can make you feel. And so that's why I'm optimistic about it, because I do see organizations do it right? And I've got some good examples in the book of real companies who have figured it out. And a lot of it, though, it really requires the top leaders to understand it, to grapple with it, to do the work that's required to make culture come to life.

Tessa Misiaszek: 23:16

You know, I think, gosh, I just had a huge aha moment, because it's interesting. In conversations I'm having at work lately, we're thinking about power and and what does power really mean, and what does having power, you know, what can you do with that, and what should you do with that? And how do you define that? And you just really talking about the power of culture and that it really, if you have a change in leadership, and that can be, I would imagine, an impetus for how to actually really shift culture in a dramatic way, and if it starts at the top of the house, so that that was just a huge aha moment for

Laura Hamill: 23:57

Yeah, absolutely, it's a perfect time to do it right a perfect time to do it. So yeah, I that's I love the idea of how much organizations can radically change their situation by focusing on culture, and that's why I'm so optimistic about it. It's hard, hard work, but once you commit to it, once you really see it, you can do so much with it. So, yeah, I think it's a it's a beautiful topic. It's just one of those things, you know, the always get this saying wrong, but if it's the hard stuff right, it's the hard stuff that really makes the biggest difference. And so even though it's hard, companies absolutely should still do it right. It's the thing that's going to make the biggest difference for their employees, but also for the success of the business.

Michael McCarthy: 24:43

I love how you frame it, that it's really hard. In fact, when we had the founder of North Face, Hap clop on the show, he said that culture is usually no one's really directing it intentionally, as you mentioned, and it just sort of like forms like coral. When it does, it's like cement, and when you get it wrong, it's awful, and when you get it right, it's incredible. And I think you make a really interesting case that it's hard, but it's really worth it,

Laura Hamill: 25:11

and it is doable. It is doable. I've seen companies do it.

Tessa Misiaszek: 25:15

I think that there's, there's just so much richness to what you write about and I and of course, now I'm keeping like the ripple effect of culture, like the way it can impact, you know, the employee value proposition, and the way you think about the kind of total rewards of attracting top talent to your company to keep going. So we'll have more conversations. For sure. I Congratulations, my friends.

Laura Hamill: 25:44

Thank you so much. I appreciate both of you so much and all your support for this book, so And for me, thank you amazing.

Michael McCarthy: 25:52

Thank you. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll see you next time. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to hear future episodes, be sure to subscribe to the happy at work podcast and leave us a review with your thoughts.

Tessa Misiaszek: 26:10

Are you interested in speaking on a future episode, or want to collaborate with us? Let us know you can send us an email at admin, at happy at work podcast.com,

Michael McCarthy: 26:22

and lastly, follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for even more happiness. See you soon. You.