is your culture built for creators or consumers?
Creators and consumers have fundamentally different attitudes toward created work.
The creator has risked something and realized something. She has skin in the game.
The consumer has received something and, these days, rates that thing.
There are team cultures where everyone runs with the attitude of the creator. It’s zesty, collaborative, and rich in feedback (often quite blunt feedback). People feel like they own what happens around here, even if it’s not in their lane or job description or wing of the building - and they do. Culture is a thing that is built and tuned and made gleefully weird, together. These are really fun teams to be a part of for those who can swallow pride and draw confidence from the unapologetic cycle of shipping stuff, improving it, and then shipping better stuff.
There are team cultures where most people run with the attitude of consumers. It’s complacent and complain-y in these places. People take pride in having the right answer, but they keep it to themselves or DM it to their work friends. There’s often rampant belief in an unbridgeable divide between Corporate and The Field or brass and rank and file. Culture is seen as a fixed, centralized product served up for the indifferent assessment of all the non-leaders. These places are a bummer. 2 stars, would not recommend.
I’ve found that the character of the people in cultures of creators is not necessarily that different from the character of the people in cultures of consumers. In the wrong conditions, almost anyone can take on the role of snarky gossip. In the right conditions, almost everyone can be a generous collaborator. The big difference is the expectation that has been set (and modeled) by leaders in the two cultures.
Some moves you, the leader, can make to inspire and instill a culture of creators:
Seek feedback from folks “lower” than you in the hierarchy and praise the hell out of them when they deliver it.
This is the most convincing way to model your seriousness about feedback across lines of difference. Keep your word on this in a visible way. One of the biggest killers of feedback is fear of offending powerful people.
One form of this praise is pointing to features of a finished product and crediting the person who gave the feedback that brought them to a better place. That finished product could be anything: a deck for an all hands meeting, a proposal to a client or partner, a line of code invisibly running underneath a new widget on the homepage.
Institute a “no complaining” rule and be super clear about what it means and doesn’t mean.
It doesn’t mean withholding critical feedback.
It does mean giving feedback to the author of the work (the builder) instead of someone else. It does mean genuinely offering to own or co-create changes the feedback might require, especially when the problem you’re observing doesn’t have an owner or builder already.
Build feedback mechanisms into your regular rituals and structures. This doesn’t have to be fancy - in fact, it’s better if it’s not.
One example: you can block a few minutes at the end of your all hands to solicit keeps and tweaks from the team and record them live on screen in a google doc.
I’ve gotten mired in debates with folks about whether or not feedback should be anonymous as a default (I usually vote against anonymity). I’ve realized that the argument is a distraction - it becomes a relatively moot point if the volume and frequency of feedback is high enough. Lots of prompts and a consistent expectation to share feedback help build a sense of ownership and de-risk both sides of feedback (delivery and receipt). Once it’s something we all do and get praise for, on the regular, it’s not as big a deal whether the feedback has your name attached to it or not.
Acknowledge builders - especially builders of typically unseen stuff like backend process, compliance, customer service improvements - for how they build and iterate
What’s cool around here isn’t being the smartest. What’s cool is making stuff and then making stuff better and bringing inspiring enthusiasm to those two things as if they require each other (they do).
Assign small, unlikely groups of people the job of building stuff together.
These people will build trust in each other - making it likelier they give feedback to each other outside of this context.
It’s easier to have a healthy hive mentality (we’re all in this together) if folks aren’t specialized all the time.
Owning responsibility for something forces people to think and learn like a leader - building and using a team experience to get something done, rather than just having a team experience and then having a hot take on that experience.
-Eric
