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Culture is not engagement, and the difference is expensive
On the last Tuesday of August I spent the morning at the Melbourne Convention Centre. Attending this event was several hundred people who care about culture as much as I do, at the 28th Human Synergistics Culture and Leadership Conference. I have been coming to this gathering for years and I always leave with something.The morning gave us three organisations telling their stories. A 155-year-old cricket association. A commercial construction business grown from one city to five. The organisation behind the Formula 1 Australian Grand Prix. Three industries with almost nothing in common, and three versions of the same lesson. Your culture determines whether your strategy will land, if your AI technology will be adopted, and if your people are not just happy, but productive.
One story that will stay with me came from the South Australian Cricket Association.
Their CEO inherited an organisation losing millions a year. He did what a lot of capable leaders do; he focussed on structures, costs, and systems. He got the finances back under control and saw the team improve on the pitch.
And then two numbers went the wrong way. Turnover climbed from the mid-teens to the mid-twenties. Engagement fell from the mid-seventies to the low sixties.
Here is the part that should give all of us pause. Before any of this started, their engagement scores were high. People described it as a lovely place to work. It was comfortable, it was warm, and it was not performing.
He highlighted that comfortable is not the same as constructive. Engagement measures how people feel about being there. Culture measures how people behave once they are. You can score beautifully on the first while quietly going backwards on the second.
What eventually shifted it was not another restructure. It was doing the culture change work at the top first, then with the next layer of leaders, then across the organisation. Alongside rebuilding the strategy so that five pillars ran through the whole business rather than four departments each pursuing their own. Back-to-back Sheffield Shields followed. So did a culture people actually want to work in.
Charlie Hodgson and Lisa Coderre from the South Australian Cricket Association
AI will not fix an unproductive culture
The final session was delivered by Human Synergistics consultant Ash Smith.
His warning was the most commercially useful thing said all morning.
If you add the capability of AI to a culture where people are interacting in defensive and unproductive ways, the technology will not fix this. In fact, it may exacerbate the issue, because people in negative or unproductive cultures retreat quickly when things get disrupted.
I have made a version of this argument in my own work. AI will augment human work, but it will never replace human work. The organisations that get the most from it will be the ones whose people have the capacity to be curious about it, and curiosity is one of the first things to go when people are more interested in protecting their jobs or themselves from burnout.
Ash Smith presents an outstanding deep dive on the accumulation of pressure through technology
Enjoyed catching up with past clients and friends from Pentana Solutions, Tammy Kokkino's and Jason Wang.
Ask yourself these before you plan the next quarter
How do you know if you’re operating in a constructive vs defensive culture? Not just think, but know? (And no – engagement surveys do not measure culture).
When did your leadership team last go first on something, publicly, before asking anybody else to change?
Are you adopting AI to solve a productivity problem? Or are you actively building a more adaptive, agile, workforce who use AI to improve their processing speed? Because these are two separate issues, and it’s important you know the difference.
For inspiration or assistance, take a look at my programs page, or pick up a copy of Curious, Connected & Calm: How leaders are better together.
I would love to hear what this raises for you. Just hit reply.
I was honoured to receive the Human Synergistics Transforming Culture Award on behalf of Gnosis by Lesaffre. Pictured left with David Byrum
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