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Workplace Culture Conflicts
Dear HBR: answers your questions with the help of SAP CMO Alicia Tillman.
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Are you at odds with your company’s culture? Dan and Alison answer your questions with the help of Alicia Tillman, the CMO of SAP. They talk through what to do when your company celebrates one kind of worker and ignores others, everyone seems to fit in but you, or a hard-charging culture is hurting performance and employee morale.
Listen to more episodes and find out how to subscribe on the Dear HBR: page. Email your questions about your workplace dilemmas to Dan and Alison at dearhbr@hbr.org.
From Alison and Dan’s reading list for this episode:
HBR: The Culture Factor by Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng — “Culture is the tacit social order of an organization: It shapes attitudes and behaviors in wide-ranging and durable ways. Cultural norms define what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted, or rejected within a group. When properly aligned with personal values, drives, and needs, culture can unleash tremendous amounts of energy toward a shared purpose and foster an organization’s capacity to thrive.”
HBR: Why Great Employees Leave “Great Cultures” by Melissa Daimler — “What is the criteria to become a manager, director, vice president? What are the expected behaviors that earn a person said title? What technical and leadership skills are needed? These are all expressions of culture and values, but too often they are perceived as random.”
HBR: Create a Growth Culture, Not a Performance-Obsessed One by Tony Schwartz — “Here’s the dilemma: In a competitive, complex, and volatile business environment, companies need more from their employees than ever. But the same forces rocking businesses are also overwhelming employees, driving up their fear, and compromising their capacity.”
HBR: Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate by Bryan Walker and Sarah A. Soule — “And remember that culture change only happens when people take action. So start there. While articulating a mission and changing company structures are important, it’s often a more successful approach to tackle those sorts of issues after you’ve been able to show people the change you want to see.”
DAN MCGINN: Welcome to Dear HBR: from Harvard Business Review. I’m Dan McGinn.
ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Work can be frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t need to let the conflicts get us down.
DAN MCGINN: That’s where Dear HBR: comes in. We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts and help you move forward. Today we’re talking about difficult workplace cultures with Alicia Tillman. She’s the global Chief Marketing Officer of SAP. Alicia, thanks for coming on the show.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Thanks so much for having me today.
DAN MCGINN: So, Alicia, as a top officer at a big multinational, how much time do you spend thinking about your company’s culture?
ALICIA TILLMAN: I would say it’s the majority of my time.
ALISON BEARD: It’s interesting because I would expect that from a Chief Talent Officer, or CHRO, but you’re the CMO. So, it’s just as important for you?
ALICIA TILLMAN: It is. And honestly, any leader of any function of a company that isn’t thinking about their culture, then I’m not sure that they’re focused on the right things.
DAN MCGINN: How so?
ALICIA TILLMAN: People are absolutely the lifeblood of our company. And I need a team of people who are motivated and inspired. I see being a steward and being an architect of our culture, something that I need to do if I actually want to get the things on my job description accomplished.
ALISON BEARD: First question! Dear HBR: I’m struggling with how to deal with pettiness between two distinct types of workers in my organization. Our team is a mix of doers and enablers. Doers work directly with demanding customers on location. Enablers are non-managers of equivalent or higher rank who work at the company headquarters. The doers sit in high-level meetings with clients, travel, things like that. The enablers get more face time with our corporate bosses, so they’re more likely to be promoted, win awards and the like. This has led to friction and an us-versus-them mentality. It permeates our work environment. Organizational efforts to fix the problem seem to make things worse. For example, we now have more all-hands meetings. But since these are about promotions and awards, which tend to disproportionately go to enablers, it only further highlights the divide. I previously worked at a university and saw this issue with faculty versus staff. I was also in the military where there’s the officer versus enlisted divide. The difference is that in my current company this climate causes people to set each other up for failure. It has the potential to really hurt the organization. What can leadership do to resolve this? And is there anything I can do from where I sit?
ALICIA TILLMAN: Yeah, I mean I think it’s a great question and let me talk organizationally first. You know, I would understand what’s the length of time spent in each of these roles? It seems to be there’s clear roles that are in the doer category and clear roles that are in the enabler category and have they tried to say, in each of these roles you will have a max tenure of two years? And then you need to switch to another side.
ALISON BEARD: It sounds like you’re saying that all the employees need to better understand what each other is doing and how it creates a mutual benefit.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Yeah. No, for sure. I mean that has to be and I was going to say when this person had said, what can I do? I think that that’s absolutely something that needs to happen. I do find that oftentimes, a lot of conflicts in the workplace across function is due to a lack of understanding of each other’s responsibilities. And getting underneath, hey what are you being held accountable for? What are you measured on? Those are, I think easy ways to sort of understand where the person is coming from. The organizational design I think can support making sure that employees have experience in different roles so that there is not only the understanding, but there’s also the hands-on experience and everybody gets different levels of exposure to the different kinds of roles that exist and how they all work with each other.
DAN MCGINN: Sometimes goals set different silos within an organization against each other that maybe the enabler’s goals are kind of coming at the expense of the doer’s goals. Do you think part of this process should be looking at the goals and whether they can get aligned in some ways, or maybe there are goals that the two groups share instead of having just their own?
ALICIA TILLMAN: I fully agree with that Dan. The people on the teams can talk forever about how to work more closely together, but if the goals are not properly aligned, so that they can coexist with each other, and almost even, if I even say, if I take it a step further with coexistence, but there needs to be a dependency on each other. So, if one team cannot be successful with their goals, unless they work with this team, obtaining whatever services that they enable, and vice versa. So, forcing those dependencies through the goal process and absolutely to your point, making sure that in no way they’re in conflict with each other, that organization I think is something that leadership absolutely needs to pay attention to.
ALISON BEARD: This specific problem that she mentions here is this idea that all of the promotions and awards are going to the enablers who have more face time in the office. So, how do you get around that problem? They’re not going to go, want to go to the doing role if that means giving it up.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Yeah. Those are things that number one, they need to be transparent to leaderships. So, you need to be aware of your actions and certainly of the feedback from the team in terms of how they’re feeling, and then you need to construct work programs that are equally recognizing the work that goes into making things happen. Because cross-collaboration is how companies operate. We have all of these functions, they’re all working together at some level and when it comes to particular recognition related to a project, we as leaders have to be sure that we’re understanding end-to-end what it took to bring that project to fruition and rewarding appropriately the players that contributed to it.
DAN MCGINN: Now, you’re talking at the organizational design level. These are all sort of high-level fixes. We don’t know exactly what kind of role our listener, who wrote the letter is in. But let’s assume she’s sort of a typical middle manager.
ALISON BEARD: And we do know that she’s a woman.
DAN MCGINN: We do know that she’s a woman. That’s right. What can an individual do in this kind of situation?
ALICIA TILLMAN: In this case, if the enablers is the one receiving the award, and that remains how it’s going to be, I’d love to see a situation where when the enabler stands up to accept the award, they are recognizing the doer’s that worked in support of them, to lead to the final outcome of the project.
ALISON BEARD: So, how does our letter writer make that happen though?
ALICIA TILLMAN: By having, making sure the enablers are clear on their contribution to the project. You know, provided the doers are effectively, in fact, contributing to the outcome of the project, then yes, I think that that’s a way that it could happen. But if there’s, if it’s not on a project by project basis, but things happen more naturally and more by the nature of the day to day work, because maybe it says I said it’s more day to day and less about a single initiative where you have clear owners and responsibilities associated with it. Then we need to make it a leadership issue. And I don’t think it means to be aggressive and you know, in a way that people get sort of turned off by the way in which you’re positioning it, but more to say hey. I think a way to make sure that we are recognizing people accordingly is by ensuring that if there’s clear work where we’re seeing the enablers being recognized for, there’s also a tremendous amount of work with success that the doers are doing as well. So, can we also either recognize them together or can we create a separate program that’s primarily focused on the doer population? And I think coming to the table with ideas like that instead of saying, well this doesn’t work. We’re never recognized and we do a whole pile of work, and it’s not fair. Leaders want to hear solutions. They want to hear yes, we have a problem. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. Number two, give me an idea of how we can solve for this. So, I think the more that recommendations can come up, this reader to recommend how to kind of solve for spreading the wealth of the recognition, I think would go a long way.
ALISON BEARD: Before she does that I would love to see her enlist a few more allies. We published a great piece about starting a movement within your own company and it’s based on research into social movements. And the advice is that you need to start with a small group of passionate enthusiast and get a few early wins. And so, I would like to see her reach out to colleagues and figure out who also sees this problem, who also shares a concern, maybe even if it’s a slightly higher level than her. I just wonder how she might find those people.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Yeah I mean, I mean I’m sure it’s probably easy for her to look if she can find a collective three or four individuals and say hey, I’m not feeling like this is entirely fair and I’d like to kind of bounce my point of view off of you to see if this is a perspective that you also share. And what I would encourage in that discussion is for them to collectively think about how they can solve for it and put together a plan. The plan could be to see what they could take over themselves in working with the enablers to perhaps think about how they could jointly put forward a recommendation between the groups.
ALISON BEARD: I think that’s a great point. It needs to be people from both sides.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Yeah, I think that for one of the doers and one of the enablers to come together and have a conversation with the leader of the group, or the leaders of the group to say hey, here’s what we see. We think it’s having an impact on things such as morale and overall effectiveness in terms of working between the teams, and we think that this is something that if we solve for it, we think it could change it. And here’s how we see that happening. I think at the end of the day, it’s only people that are able to solve problems in companies. There is no other way than us to be able to solve the problems and if we can practice openness and transparency, it goes a long way for us to creating workplaces that we feel very comfortable working in.
DAN MCGINN: This reminds me a little bit of a sports team in which the players have become too concerned with who’s getting the most minutes, who’s scoring the most points, who’s making the All-Star Team. It seems like organizationally and the leaders need to do this, they need to focus more on the opponents they’re playing against, are they winning games? It seems like this is all sort of intermural skirmishing and they need to sort of focus a little bit more on the external environment and whether as an organization they’re beating the other competitors they’re supposed to be beating.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Yeah. I mean it’s such an interesting point because we often forget about ultimately who we’re working in service of and it’s our customers. And we spend a lot of time internally sometimes on working out the operations between teams. And we also need to ensure that when we talk about our operations, is how we operate actually having a negative effect on our customers? And that’s always a good way to frame up challenges in the workplace. And then also, to your point Dan, does this not set us up appropriately to be able to compete effectively? So, for example, if it’s marketing, we think our competitor is excellent at marketing, yet in our own marketing team, we have sort of operational challenges across different functions within marketing. It’s absolutely going to have an effect on our ability to compete in marketing with that competitor. And so, we need to think about it from that perspective as well.
DAN MCGINN: So, Alison, what are we telling this listener?
ALISON BEARD: So, we do see some organizational solutions. First, we think the company should do a better job of ensuring that doers understand the enabler’s roles and vice versa. We’d like to see more movement of people between the roles. We’d like to see more visits to each other so everyone gets to know each other on a personal level. We think that the corporate leaders should also ensure that everyone’s inline on goals and focus on external competitors, not internal divisions. And that promotions and awards are more evenly distributed which starts with tracking and acknowledging everyone’s contributions. What can our letter writer do though? So, we think that she should make her concerns known to leadership, but not just pointing out the problem, suggesting solutions. We think it would help if she could enlist a few allies who feel the same way and get them involved in this cultural change movement, including reaching out across the divide on an individual level.
DAN MCGINN: Dear HBR: I work in a small company. It sort of has a family feel, which is nice. However, I don’t seem to fit into the company culture. I don’t get excited about the things they get excited about. We have long inefficient meetings and we often have poor planning and execution. High performers who can plan and execute well end up being overburdened. Most people don’t have the ability to proactively solve problems. They would rather cross that bridge when we come to it. I believe many of our issues could be avoided with just a little bit of planning and writing things down, and I often say so. Some people have even admitted they remember me predicting the future and that they were wrong to dissuade me from being too thorough. Even so, the bad habits of rushing into projects without planning haven’t really changed. I’ve only been here for three years, but I keep hearing things like this is the last time we’ll ever manufacture a product with such poor planning. I think they want to change, but I struggle to trust them. My spouse, family, and friends tell me I should jump ship, but my conscious tells me I should sink with the ship so I can at least say, I did my best. Plus, it’s hard for me to look for a new job when I’m so drained after work. I’m starting to apply for jobs now. In the meantime, I still want to try to fix my current situation, even though I’m discouraged and out of ideas. I don’t like being the first naysayer every time. What can I do about not fitting into the company culture? What are some effective ways to help others become more disciplined and become better planners?
ALICIA TILLMAN: My initial reaction is this person needs to absolutely have a conversation with their leader. And be open about some of the challenges that they’re having. Here’s what I would though counsel on because I know there’s a line in here where this writer said that they don’t get excited about the same things. And I think we need to get underneath why? Are they not excited about the same things because they maybe see a different way of perhaps solving a problem that they’re trying to solve for, or this person has a different idea or a different way of looking at things?
ALISON BEARD: Well, I think definitely it feels as if there’s a disconnect between what he, we know this is a man, thinks is important for the success of the company and what his colleagues do. Planning and execution seemed to be pretty crucial things for any company and according to him, all of his colleagues are falling down on it. And although they say they want to change, they’re not making any effort. So, how do you as this sort of you want more rules and structure and all that, how do you get a bunch of people who aren’t buying in, to move that way?
ALICIA TILLMAN: Well, I would assume that this is why this person was hired. I’m sure through the interview process and the checks that were done, it was pretty clear the way that he operated. I mean these are typical things that you look to determine during an interview process, and if the person who brought him on board, maybe it’s his current leader, is still there and brought him on board, and is the one who brought him through the process, I would have an open conversation with his leader and say, here are some of the things that I’m seeing. I think there are ways for us to get better as it relates to planning and execution. Here are some things that I’m thinking about in terms of how to help that. Do you agree with my point of view? And I would remove, the thing that kind of went up for me, I would remove things like I don’t get excited about the same things. I would frame that a little bit differently and say, here are some of the things I’m seeing. I’m also not grasping certain things. That becomes up to him to then ask those questions, to pull out information from people, to help him be able to truly understand so that he can be able to work effectively. So, those are some initial things that I would suggest here.
DAN MCGINN: One of the things he says that concerns me a bit is when he says my conscious tells me I should sink with the ship so that I can at least I did my best. That’s sort of a troubling attitude about it. It suggests sort of a passivity that he’s going to let the ship sink and that he thinks sinking with the ship is a good outcome here. And I do wonder if he is going to stay there, which he seems intent on doing in the near term, whether there’s anything he can do to sort of increase his role in the planning. So, they have these long and inefficient meetings. Maybe if he sends out the minutes after the meeting and describes what the next actions are going to be, or schedules the next meeting. Is there a way that he can kind of arrest some of the control in some of these situations from these undisciplined people? Especially if it’s a small company, the things that will determine a little bit more discipline in scheduling.
ALICIA TILLMAN: I agree.
ALISON BEARD: I had both of those thoughts too. I wrote down in my notes —
DAN MCGINN: I had them first though.
ALISON BEARD: I know. [LAUGHTER] But I wrote down in my notes, and I’m no expert on sailing, but don’t only captains need to sink with their ships? Don’t the passengers get off?
DAN MCGINN: Leonardo went down. [LAUGHTER]
ALISON BEARD: But anyway, I agree also that I think he could push the organization to not only put himself in those more planning and execution roles but also find out if there is anyone else in the organization who’s moderately good at it because surely there are. And then he could sort of help them job craft too such that the people who like doing this, and feel the same way that he does, are doing those jobs and then the people who are more visionaries, or whatever they are bringing to the table are doing the things they do best.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Yeah, and I think you’re right and I’ll go back to why he was hired and use those skills to really help course correct the direction that the ship is going here. To say that he perhaps could throw in the towel and sink with the ship, it’s, that’s a personal issue that he needs to solve for very, very quickly. If that’s the role that he wants to play, OK. But if he truly wants to help be a leader and solve some of the challenges that he sees, then he needs to kind of grab the steer in some ways and I would recommend he does that in partnership with support from his leader. And say hey, I see some better ways for us to go about organizing and planning, and thinking through strategy. Can we together lock arms and recommend some ways and I’m happy to come forward with the suggestions and maybe together we can present different ways and different points of views of doing things.
ALISON BEARD: So, Dan, what is our advice to this guy?
DAN MCGINN: We think he needs to have a conversation with his manager, presumably the person who hired him and be open about the challenges he’s facing. Recognize that the fact that he’s a disciplined, experienced operator is probably one of the reasons they brought him into the organization in the first place. So, we don’t think that the signal here is shut up and stop talking about planning. We think that this is probably something they want you to talk a little bit more about. Recognize that especially in a small environment, he might have the ability to incrementally gain some power here by scheduling the meetings, controlling the agendas, sending out the follow-up points, imposing deadlines. Don’t just give up control, seize opportunities to take it. And we don’t think that he’s in a situation where he should be contemplating going down with the ship. If his friends and his family and the people who know him well see this taking a toll on him and think it’s just a bad cultural fit, then it might be time to start looking for other options.
ALISON BEARD: Dear HBR: I’m an HR director for a global hospitality and entertainment organization that’s very successful. I’ve been with the company for a year. The General Manager for whom we work is very apathetic about managing. He feels no remorse in pushing people to the limit to meet financial goals, his own and the organizations. Staff are spread so thin their health and stress levels end up being severely affected. We’re constantly asked to do more with less. He demands so much with shrinking resources. Unfortunately, there isn’t someone else to report this to. My regional uman Resource Director is very much in cahoots with the GM and doesn’t stand up for others either. It seems this is the culture from the very top. What can I do?
ALICIA TILLMAN: This is a tough one. Here’s what I would recommend. I would say, this is a great opportunity for a few employees to get together on this. This writer should solicit some feedback from other employees across the business. If it’s isolated to a particular function, then I would take a couple of people from the function, but I would also get some feedback from other functions as well to see if this behavior is having an effect on them as well. So, I would grab some people and have a conversation about it.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I would actually encourage her to take one step before she does that. We have literally published so much on how to deal with a hard-driving boss. How do deal with a boss who stresses you out. What to do when you have a bad boss. Tips for working under a Type-A boss. How to tell your boss you have too much work. And all of them, say that one very important thing to start with is empathy. So, understanding why he is so driven. Is it because he’s a jerk and has his own view on what the team should be doing? Or, is it because he’s under a great deal of pressure? We’ve published research showing that when managers are overworked themselves, they treat workers less fairly. So, I think if she could start from that before she goes out and figures out how they’re going to fix him, I think it would go a long way.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Yeah, I would agree. The only challenge there is it seems like this writer said that this is a common issue across many different leaders. And it’s not to say that really understanding the pressure they’re under, should be understood. Of course, it should. To your point, maybe this would be something that would be welcomed by her immediate leader to know that hey, the employees are really kind of stressed out by the pressure and maybe this leader needs this type of feedback to be able to support his or her position with their leader. Sadly I will say though there are not always problems that we’re going to be able to solve for. These may be systemic, historical challenges that leadership chooses to not see your point of view on. And before you arrive at that conclusion, you have to first give it a chance. Hopefully, there can be an understanding around that and then ultimately if there’s not, this is a case of you then needing to make a personal choice if this is the company that you want to spend your career with.
ALISON BEARD: Dan has been nodding vigorously ever since you suggested that it might be an unfixable problem.
DAN MCGINN: Well, I wonder if the top leadership of this company would even recognize this is a problem at all. I think when I read this description, this letter writers describing a high-performance culture with a lot of personal accountability and a lot of stretch goals, and not a lot of sympathy for how those conflict with people’s personal lives, or needs. And I think leadership has decided that this is the kind of culture we want to have. It’s a function of the economics of the industry we’re in probably. It’s a function of what the financial markets may be demanding form this company right now, and I suspect that if you engaged in a frank conversation with leadership over this they’d say well, a lot of people probably won’t fit well in a culture like this and if you find yourself to be in that group, the exits are available.
ALISON BEARD: But what if you come in with all the studies that show how overwork leads to negative outcomes, that it’s counterproductive? People perform poorly when they are burned out.
DAN MCGINN: I am just not sure that’s an argument you’re going to win. It might be worth a try. The other thing I was struck by in this letter is that this letter is an HR Director in a global company. And I wonder if that’s a position where there’s a lot of authority or influence. It would be interesting if this letter came from another General Manager. An individual manager might be able to say OK, I’m going to let my workers work remotely more often. I’m going to draw boundaries around when we’re responding to emails and when we’re not. An HR Director, I think it will be harder for her to have the leverage she wants to have.
ALISON BEARD: Especially without support from her regional manager.
ALICIA TILLMAN: And that’s a great point. I mean I’ve always worked for companies where HR is a steward of the culture and also very empowered that when they see something that is in conflict — it’s not aligned to our values in the way we’re operating, or things are happening at the expense of our employees — I’ve always worked for companies where the HR leader is very empowered to flag that and hold people accountable for it. And it will absolutely be backed up by senior leadership. And so, that’s why this is an interesting one in a sense where I do think this writer should put forward some effort to align with other employees and to bring forward their concerns. But if they are met with a lot of the same behavior, quite frankly, this employee can make a life out of trying to change that, or they can make a faster decision to go find a company that really listens to truly what is driving the overall success of their company and that’s their employees. And so, to me, those are the two choices here.
DAN MCGINN: Alison, what’s our advice?
ALISON BEARD: So, we think that she could start by soliciting feedback from others to see if they also see this problem. Do what Bob Sutton, one of our other expert guests has called forming a posse. We think she should try to empathize with leaders and really understand the pressure they’re under. And then, also figure out if they actually want a hard-charging, high-performance culture and are actually trying to weed people out based on it. She should figure out whether someone at her level in HR, even with a posse, has the ability to change the situation. In the long term, we think she’s probably going to be better off finding a company where the culture is more in line with her values.
DAN MCGINN: Alicia, thanks for coming on the show.
ALICIA TILLMAN: Thank you so much for having me today.
DAN MCGINN: That’s Alicia Tillman. She’s the Chief Marketing Officer of SAP. Thanks to the listeners who wrote us with their questions. Now we want to know your questions. Send us an email with your workplace challenge and how we can help. The email address is DearHBR@HBR.org.
ALISON BEARD: We also want to thank Louis Weeks and Nick DePrey for composing our theme music.
DAN MCGINN: We hope you liked today’s episode and if you want to get the next one automatically, please go to your podcast app and hit subscribe.
ALISON BEARD: And if you liked the show, please give us a five-star review.
DAN MCGINN: I’m Dan McGinn.
ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Thanks for listening to Dear HBR:.