Stop talking about culture - deal with behaviours

This is Eat Sleep Work Repeat. It's a podcast about workplace culture. Hello, I'm Bruce Aisley. There's a moment in today's episode where the guest, Professor Rob Brinner, says there's a whole group of people who love talking about culture and they love making culture a big deal, and I don't believe that culture is a real thing. And I felt seen in that moment. We were in the midst of a discussion about the things that are easy to define in work, that are easier to create, and that are meaningful to build. It's an absolutely brilliant discussion. Rob Brinner is a professor at London Queen Mary University, and he spends his time really just talking about evidence-led interventions. So the idea that we shouldn't just do something because a best-selling book suggested it without knowing that it's going to work. Rob takes a position as a contrarian, not a position he necessarily wants, but a position where he marks our homework. He holds people accountable for the claims they make. If you've found yourself seeing an Instagram reel of something or a TikTok of something and thinking, oh, that sounds like a good idea, almost certainly Rob would be there with a clipboard asking you to check whether it's actually true. And in that regard, he's an incredibly valuable contributor to the debate about how we do make work better. You know, in the first instance, we kick off with a discussion about engagement. And his whole point is, why do you need to measure engagement? Engagement doesn't seem to correlate with anything. It doesn't seem to demonstrate anything. It doesn't seem to achieve anything. Why do you need to measure it? And in that regard, it's, I think, a really valuable contribution to just the discussion about why we're doing stuff. You know, at points we have sort of quite a sort of pointed disagreement over things. But I left thinking very explicitly that Rob is a really important person to listen to on this stuff. You know, if you've seen yourself picking up a book in an airport to try and get something done, almost certainly Rob would be there standing next to you saying, I'm not sure that's going to work. And the suspect he's right. Brilliant discussion. I've put loads of stuff in the show notes. Firstly, Rob is involved with something called the Corporate Research Forum and these are work psychology network as part of that. If you're interested in this podcast, almost certainly you should at least click the link and explore that because it's all about evidence-based interventions, either as a leader, as an HR person. Absolutely brilliant discussion. I think you're going to enjoy this one. This is my conversation, second conversation, actually. I did speak to him a long time ago, pre-COVID. Second conversation with Professor Rob Brinner. Thank you so much for joining me. I wonder if to kick off, you could introduce who you are and what you do. Yeah, so my name is Rob Brinner. I am a professor of organizational psychology at Queen Mary University of London. And I'm also director of research at the Corporate Research Forum. So I have a kind of partly academic job, but partly a job working with HR practitioners as well. Now, not only have you been on the podcast before sort of talking about evidence-led work, but you're one of my favorite follows on LinkedIn. And I've linked to you on the topic of the show notes, largely because you feel to me like you play the role of the kid sitting at the back of the classroom saying, I'm not sure there's any proof for that. You've got like, to me, you've got this compelling ability to ask us to check the facts of what we've been told. Is that how you see your role? Is that how you see your role as sort of the troublesome challenger? Well, I happen to be doing things and then people told me, like you, well, that's what you're doing. And that's what I realized I was doing. And I kind of thought, well, doesn't everybody do that? And I realized after some time, no, everybody doesn't do it. It reminds me a bit, it's a bit like maybe the kid at the back of the class, or it reminds me, of course, of the emperor's new clothes. So everyone's saying, aren't the emperor's clothes beautiful? They're lovely, aren't they great? And the kid's going, but the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. So I see a lot of naked emperors. And I see a lot of people saying how beautiful the clothes are. And I suppose, yes, it's not even necessarily consciously what I'm trying to do, but it turns out that's what I am doing. And I say, I think it's because I hope, I generally hope everyone's doing this, but as I say, apparently they are not. What's the origin of your cynicism? What do you think the origin of your skepticism is? Yeah, well, I'm definitely sceptical, not cynical, because a lot of what I do is not driven by the idea people don't want to do good and want to help. I think people do want to do good and want to help. So the scepticism is about saying, what are you offering trying to do? I don't think it's necessarily kind of very useful. And I guess what it's driven by in a way is a number of things. I think it's things like waste. So I see businesses and organizations and individuals within them just wasting a lot of time and effort on energy on things that just aren't very effective or maybe even quite harmful. And I find that sort of irritating to the irritating thing, like the kid saying, the emperor's got new clothes. The kid gets irritated because everyone's saying they can see something the kid thinks isn't there. So I think it comes a bit from the waste, but it also comes from, and this is why it's not sceptical, so not cynical, I think it's sceptical, is that I think organizations and businesses could be doing so much better. I'm sure you'd agree. They could manage people, they could manage businesses. They could be much more effective if they got rid of some of this stuff that just isn't helping very much. So it's driven, I think, by that. I think by A, it's a waste. B, I think organizations just could be doing so much better than they are. Yeah, so like as someone who comes across your posts pretty frequently, actually, I think because I sort of tend to like all of them, you've taken on some of the big topics. I just wonder if we could do a sort of a fun, a little run through some of the, not necessarily fads, but terms we've pushed back on. The first one is the idea of workplace engagement. I wonder if you could sort of talk about whether that's a helpful term. I'm sure you sort of talk about the challenge of trying to categorize that. Yeah, so my engagement with engagement has actually been quite long-term. So I think I first got interested. I think we're probably past peak engagement now, but it's kind of plateaued into very common practice that lots of organizations appear to get involved with. When it first appeared and got popular, I guess the issues that happened were manyfold, but I think the most important ones are firstly, this whole issue, what on earth do we mean by engagement? And, you know, I've had the experience, I'm sure many of us have, if you ask organizations, HR managers to tell you what they mean, they don't really know, or they give you multiple different definitions or the definitions they give you is nothing to do with the engagement survey that they use every six months, every year, every month or whatever. So people are not, people are very, have multiple different definitions. The thing they're measuring with it doesn't seem to often coincides with what they think it is. So the first fundamental problem, you know, from evidence-based practice perspective is, can you define what it is you're trying to affect or understand and are you measuring in a way that's consistent with that? That's one thing. The second issue is that broadly speaking, measures of engagement correlate really highly with standard, almost a hundred year old now, measures of job satisfaction. So there's an issue there they're not measuring anything new, but what it also means is we can look at some of that job satisfaction literature. If they overlap hugely, which they do seem to, is job satisfaction particularly relevant for job performance? And the answer is not really. So the search for the link between job satisfaction and job performance has been described for decades in the scientific literature as the holy grail. Something really desirable, but it's actually very hard to find in terms of the research we conduct. Now, of course, some people probably thinking now, well, sure, someone's really, really satisfied, won't they perform better than someone who isn't? Well, no, they might be too satisfied. They might be just complacent. They might love work and not perform well. Similarly, someone who's not satisfied may be doing a fantastically good job. So a lot of assumptions there about it and people often talk about extremes, that someone's really unhappy, then they won't perform well, but maybe. If someone's really happy, then they will, well, maybe. But that's not what this is about. There isn't actually, it doesn't appear to be a very general or strong relationship between those two things. So in the case of engagement, going back to that, people are happily merrily investing again, going back to waste, a lot of time and energy measuring engagement, looking at scores, poring over spreadsheets where on a seven point scale, it's gone from 3.5 to 3.7, double thumbs up for that, or it's gone down from 4.6 to 4.3. Oh my God, what's going wrong? These things on the whole probably don't really matter much if at all for performance. Add to that, most organizations that I certainly work with rarely check that their measures of engagement actually predict anything, anything important for the business. There's an assumption they do. It is rarely checked. Quite popular concepts. I did this as part of the Work Psychology Network, which is set up at the Corporate Research Forum, which is trying to look at theory and evidence from work psychology and how it's used or misused kind of in the workplace. And yes, I chose Psychological Safety, which is a very common, very popular thing. So the questions I would always ask about this is, can you define it? And again, you know, there's a lot of question marks over actually how you define it. And one of the challenges here is that people come at it instantly, they know what it means. They feel it's very intuitive. Oh, yes, I've got it. Well, do you? Do you actually get it? Or is it just, what is it you're getting? Are we all getting different things? So because it's intuitive and instant, that's a big red flag for me, normally with most kind of constructs. So can you define it? Yes, to some extent, but again, the definitions are rather different. Secondly, can you measure it or assess it? There are again questions over the validity, reliability of the measures, even some of the quite popular ones. So again, if you look at the actual items in those measures, it's often quite hard to link it back to the definition. So you're measuring something potentially, but what it is, is it a little unclear? So a bit hard to define sometimes, a bit hard to measure sometimes, there's debates about the measures. But the key thing is, does it predict anything important? So you can measure this stuff about engagement. There's no point in measuring it unless it's telling you something important. The challenge here scientifically is that just are not many longitudinal studies looking at where this engagement, so psychological safety goes up, where it has these outcomes of where the psychological safety goes down, it has other kind of outcomes. So we just don't know too much about it. And I think psychological safety is an example of maybe, you know, if I wrote the same thing in five years' time, 10 years' time, it might look very different. So I'm just talking about what it appears we know at the moment, what seems the case at the moment. So is this idea, does it, is it a cause and effect thing? And the trickiest thing of all about all this is, can you actually intervene? Can you do something to increase psychological safety? And again, there's very little data and evidence about that. So even if it does link longitudinally to something kind of important, we don't know much yet about how you can increase it. The challenge, therefore, I think about, like a lot of these concepts in the Is This a Thing series, it's people seeing an idea, like psychological safety, and they grab it and say, can we use this thing to help us? And again, my question was, but what are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? Not, is there a thing out there you could use that might be useful? It seems to be working completely backwards. What are you trying to achieve? And with these concepts like culture change or engagement or attitude, they're starting with a thing and then trying to work out if it's useful, instead of saying, do we actually understand what the issue is? So maybe in some contexts, psychological safety is very important, and it links to important things, and you can actually do something to improve psychological safety. That may be the case, but it also may be the case through a huge number of other contexts where it just doesn't really matter very much. But you have to start off with, what is it you're trying to do? Psychological safety may be the intervention you want. It may not. It may be something totally different depending what you're trying to achieve. But you've got a leader here, and a leader has just done sort of an internal piece of work, and maybe it says we've been tolerating bad behaviour inside the organisation, or that, you know, some sort of bullying or something has come to light. And the leader says, look, our objective for the next year is we want to build a psychologically safe environment. We want to have a place where people can speak up. We're not going to have those domineering characters displacing things. All that being said, then what would you advise them to do? That's their goal. It's quite a noble objective they're trying to do. You know, you've said, look, I want you to know what, I want you to tell me what you're trying to do. So how would you achieve that goal, even if the concept is a difficult one to measure? What actions would you take in that situation? Well, the first, I think it's to understand the specific behaviours you're talking about. So you sort of, you said people are bullying people and players, and there's been some incidents of people feeling like they can't speak up. Are they related or are they not related? People could be horrible and mean, but people still speak up. So they're not the same thing. One doesn't necessarily affect the other, but they might. If, for example, you're interested in specific behaviours, so again, we did a report on behaviour change in organisations. The first thing you need to focus on and understand is what are the specific behaviours you're trying to change, number one. And secondly, what's the incidence and frequency of those sorts of behaviours? And typically, if you look across lots of organisations, it may be psychological safety they turn to, but often what they turn to is culture. So time and time and time again, you see various reports, for example, from police services, from the Grenfell Tower disaster in the UK, from other kind of incidents, people see, to your point, bullying, what this is, bullying and negative behaviour, and they say, we must change the culture. And typically, I don't think that works at all. It's not clear what people are trying to change. So the starting point is, if you think there are some behaviours which you want to change, fairly obviously, you've got to understand what those behaviours are and their incidence, the frequency, where they're happening. That's the most important starting point. So I was going to come on to, like, if we've gone through engagement, we've gone through psychological safety, I was going to ask you about culture next. And, you know, I've seen you write a lot talking about sort of whether culture, we're talking about the climate, whether we're talking about behaviour. Could you break down your frustration then when people talk about culture and how would you tackle something as holistic then as the idea of culture? As sort of far-reaching as the culture in the NHS or the culture in the police? Well, this is, you just, I think you just identified one of the key problems, all-encompassing and holistic. It's everything, isn't it? It's everything. And you can't, you know, tackle something that's everything. It's just impossible. You can't do it. It can't be done. So that gives you an important clue about some of the, I think, the main issues I think more of the culture change ideas. It's not true. I mean, you know, I get it. And I get. I get that you're sort of the contrarian voice who's pushing back, but let's look specifically at some of the issues in the police. An issue where WhatsApp groups were openly sort of undermining the authority. There was a sense of they were tolerating things that, there was almost like a counterculture within the organisation just tolerating bad behaviour. Or in the NHS one recently, the Nottingham report, senior leaders, for whatever reason, weren't participating in the exploration of wrongdoing. You know, you could say, again, you can say, well, this is not just a campaign. This is not just posters on the wall. It's not just one person standing up, but I just don't fully buy that you cannot re-engineer an organisation to eliminate certain behaviours. And I get it. I get that, you know, standing up and saying this is difficult or beware of simple answers to complicated problems. But I just don't fully buy that being cynical about things gives you a pass. And that sort of is the is the solution. So can you repeat that question, Bruce? What's the question? Yes. Yeah, specifically, you seem to be suggesting that you cannot change the culture within the police. No, I'm suggesting the absolute opposite. I'm suggesting you absolutely can change. Okay, it's really important, Bruce. I'm not saying you can't change behaviour. There's hundreds of years of theory and evidence and data that you absolutely can. So I have no doubt about that. So let's just dispel that. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is culture is not a good route to doing that. Right. It's not a good way to do it. In fact, it's a very poor way to do it. So I agree with the objective. Let's say we have, and it doesn't happen much, but let's say we have got good measures and good assessments of these behaviours. I totally agree. They are things we want to change. My question is, what is the most effective way of changing them? And my understanding is culture is pretty useless. And I'll tell you some of the reasons why. You actually mentioned one of the problems that we've talked about kind of counterculture. One thing is, do people assume organisations have a culture? That is highly contentious because it's making assumptions. We feel we can see the culture. You go to a new workplace, you go to a new office, you say, I can feel this culture. The amount of data you have about that organisation is minuscule. So you're not in a position really to judge it. But I guess, as you know, a cognitive bias is we want to see patterns and things that are consistent in the world around us and we think kind of help us make sense of it. It's kind of a bit ridiculous. It's a bit like Observe them. Model them. It doesn't mean anything. So you might get, you know, things like 360 appraisers where people got these vague terms in, and then no one knows what they mean. Or be innovative. What on earth does that mean? So again, if you want someone to say, like saying to your mates who's trying to encourage you, oh, come on, you've got to be get fit. It's utterly meaningless. If you say, no, let's go to the gym on Tuesday, bang, at two o'clock, bang, you've got something. Telling someone they've got to get fit, pointless. No, we've sort of taken on, you've written about engagement, is it a thing? Psychological safety, is it a thing? Culture, is it a thing? What other topics have you taken on there? I've seen you at one point took on wellness apps, but what else have you sort of said, is this a real thing about that? Yeah, and I would say that in this thing, I'm not, I'm not debunking them. I like to think of my role, well, actually someone told me, I'm not a thought leader, I'm a thought provoker. And to go back to the beginning, why? Because I think some of these concepts are not necessarily helpful and people need to think a bit more about where they are or not. So I'm not trying to debunk, and obviously if you debunk, people don't like it. So if you tell someone, Bruiser, their favourite thing is organisational culture, and then you tell them it's not a very useful idea, they don't like it. So I'm not trying to do that in those columns. I'm trying to sort of say, let's think about it a bit more. So other ones we talked about, some of them are more obvious, and I guess they probably are a little more like debunking just because the evidence is so clear. Things like MBTI or personality type indicators and the issues around that, that they're not really valid psychometric measures. However, in that one, I also pointed out that there's maybe other kinds of validity that people just like it. So people just like using them. So although I may be coming to it and a psychometrician might be coming to it as, is this a good measure of personality? Actually, the users don't really care. And that's kind of OK, as long as they're aware they're not measuring personality. There's still questions around the ethics of that, but anyway, that's another one. Learning styles is another fairly kind of straightforward one where there's a reasonable amount of evidence now. And it doesn't seem, A, that people have learning styles, to begin with, they have preferences, sure. But if you match someone's preferred way of learning with the way you deliver the learning, it doesn't seem to make any difference. That's kind of another one. Another classic one is 70% of change initiatives fail. That's a very common one. Another one is growth mindset. So the idea you can split, you know, you can measure people, their belief in how much they can change and learn, and this again will predict outcomes. And this is a really good example because growth mindset is used really widely in schools, for example. So anyone listening to this who's got probably kids in primary school, high school, will probably have come across their kid coming home with something about growth mindset. And what's interesting about that is, A, you've got the problem of defining it, it's not very clear. B, you've got the issue around measuring it, where it's measured invalid. And the third thing is, some of the biggest kind of meta-analyses that pulled together lots of studies in the educational setting seem to suggest reasonably clearly that it doesn't actually predict much at all about whether people will learn and progress and attain more. So therefore, why have interventions to try and increase this thing called growth mindset, even when it's quite difficult to do, if, as a consequence, it won't actually help attainment very much? So again, so they've really got it itself. I mean, growth mindset sounds like a great idea, doesn't it? We all want to have a growth mindset. We don't want a fixed mindset. Let's help everyone have a growth mindset. The problem is, maybe it doesn't really matter very much for attainment. So we can try and measure these things, but it's just pretty much a waste of time. And actually to go back to the school example, there are probably other things you can do to really help kids learn. That is probably not one of them. Yeah, I mean, you're speaking my language there. I just wonder though, I mean, one of my favourite podcasts is, there's a podcast which sort of disabuses us of all of these things about growth mindset. It's called If Books Could Kill. And it's sort of like a quite, yeah, it's quite a gently caustic dismantlement of all of these popular things. And it's brilliant because, you know, especially sort of taking on books that are, I think, disprovable, like grit, Angela Duckworth, you know, sort of… It goes into the really sort of savages the pseudoscience behind them, which in its own way serves to discredit the whole field of psychology when people are sort of putting these things out there. And it extends beyond that. You know, the Jonathan Haidt book is probably one of the most influential books in the last couple of years. The book's about anxious generation and most of the science in that is disproved. So it sort of, it does damage to the field. But I guess the question then might be, in that perspective where so much evidence that is presented to us turns out to be untrue, if someone who finds themselves listening to this podcast with the goal of trying to improve their work, trying to make their work better, how would you help them orientate themselves? What would you say to them as a manager, a leader, listening to these, thinking, what might make my own work better? I've heard that engagement isn't good. I've heard that we shouldn't just be doing these sort of pulse things. Psychological safety, I've now put a sort of question mark through it. Growth mindset, I've decided not for this year. What would you advise them with a sort of a slightly more positive perspective that they would set about trying to use to sculpt their own workplace? Well, I think, first, I don't think it is negative to say maybe that's not very useful. It can sound negative in an age where everyone has to be very positive about it. But actually, it's an incredibly positive thing to say, to say to someone, that thing you're doing probably isn't really helping. Maybe you should think about it in another way. That's fantastically positive, you know? I know it doesn't sound like that and it's framed because of this positivity bias we have. But it is about, what I would suggest is, it's a bit like, it's almost surrounded by a box of tools. And they kind of, well, you know, I tried a hammer, that wasn't really good. Then I tried a pair of pliers, that wasn't great. I used a screwdriver. Yeah, maybe, you know. What do you say to them? You say, what are you trying to do? What are you trying to do? Forget the tools. Just put them aside. Put all these solutions, grit, psychological safety, whatever, put them to one side and think about what you're trying to do. And I think that is the key starting point. In the case of organisations and businesses, what is the business trying to do? What is the business trying to achieve? And how can you, as a manager, help the business achieve those things? So firstly, you need to know what the business's objectives are. Don't just assume. Find out what they are, or hopefully someone would have cascaded those to you. Think about your role and think, what can I do to help the organisation achieve those objectives? And be very clear about understanding what the issues are before you do anything around thinking about a solution. So I would say the key thing is to not get distracted by all these shiny objects and think, you know, come on, let's go back to basics. And the problem, I think, with that is it sounds really boring. That's the problem. It's not exciting. It is actually, you know, going back a step to what are the issues you're trying to deal with. It's not about finding a bestselling book. It's not about having an inspirational TED Talk person telling you about a great thing in a wonderfully inspiring story. Sorry, it's a bit dull, but it's about trying to do what works, given what you're trying to do. So I think that's a really important starting point. And I'd say all those things you mentioned, I think typically are just distractions from helping the organisation be successful. There may be circumstances, absolutely, where you go through that whole process, you identify, you understand the issue really well, you understand what you're trying to do, you look at a range of options and solutions, you look in this toolbox, and it may turn out, yeah, you do actually need a screwdriver. But it may also turn out you don't need any of those things. You need something completely different. So again, it's about saying, what is the issue? And then once that's understood, what can we do about it? Is the villain here scale? Because what you've sort of described to me is that if I had a manager running a team of six people, 10 people, their issue is going to have a specificity to it. It's going to be involved in… It's going to be very precise. And the problem is, when organisations scale to 100, to 200, to 1,000, to 10,000, there's an attempt to try to bring a consistent holistic solution. And that's where conversations of scale come in. And you're exactly right. You know Okay, so what I mean by that is, is quite often, my senses, people do have a good understanding of what might be effective. But what it means is, is rather than just saying, oh, I need a solution, most of the problems we're dealing with, there aren't solutions. Solution implies there's a thing you can do that will fix it. There isn't. There's multiple things you can do. We're not solving a math problem or an algebra thing. There isn't an answer. There are no answers. There are lots of things we can do. Each of them will have costs and benefits and maybe have no effect. So I think that second stage of what can we do about it is thinking, what are the different options we could have? We maybe could do this, go back to the mesh problem. So please, for example, it could be a selection problem. Okay, that's one potential solution. It could be a leadership problem, maybe. That's the other thing. It could be a blah, blah problem, whatever it is. Look at those potential interventions and actually try and understand which ones you think are more likely to work. And actually put them, actually compare them. So again, a really important thing in general decision-making processes is never just looking at one intervention and saying, is that going to work? That's a big mistake. You always have to have at least three or four different things you think you could do and start to actually compare them. And it may turn out the two are equally, equally valid. And that's fine, toss a coin. But I mean, I think that second stage is really thinking, what are the different things we could do? I would say, generally speaking, when you're thinking about solutions, looking at a best-selling book is, I can't, I think it's highly unlikely that's where the solution's going to lie. It may be, absolutely. But it seems to be very unlikely that one idea that someone has promoted the hell out of, often using dodgy data or exaggerated data or partial data, I just can't see that. It could, it could be, but it seems quite unlikely as opposed to thinking about other kinds of intervention and other kinds of solutions. So I would really encourage people to sort of think it through for themselves about the beginning where I was a little bit sceptical or cynical. You know, in that sense, I'm not a torso. I think people can work out more stuff for themselves, but they go over time in all kinds of ways. And for a better word, they've been slightly disempowered to feel they can do that. They've been a bit beaten down by, look, this is what Google's doing. This is what this best-selling book does. I saw this guru. I have to do those things because they're the smart people and I should do. No, they're not. You're the smart person. You can work it out, but it does require critical thinking and it does require using data and evidence of different kinds. I got it. So it's sort of advocating for trusting yourself, building experience, sort of learning on the job, pushing back against the TikTokification of advice, really. You know, like if you see something in sort of 90, if a 90-minute clip, it's probably about 90 seconds. If you see something in a 90-second clip, almost by its very nature, it's too simplistic to be meaningful, to be universally applied. Yeah, I think so. And I think it's also really crucial that people, once they feel that idea they loved isn't maybe very useful, the key thing is not to just jump on the next popular idea that seems really appealing. It's almost to say, I'm going to, you know, get onto a better diet of theory and evidence and knowledge rather than a lot of this stuff which probably isn't very sound because the temptation, people often say to me, what's the alternative to engagement? What's the alternative? So I will say to you, well, there isn't one. It doesn't work like that. It's not about that. It's about saying, what's the issue and what can you do about it? So, yeah, absolutely questioning some of these ideas you hold to be true is always important, but equally, it's not jumping onto the next thing you think is cool. Love it. I loved that discussion. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking so long out of your day to do it. I'm immensely grateful. Thank you. Thank you to Rob. Great discussion. I've included a transcription of that and all of the links in the show notes. As ever, best place to stay in touch with the podcast and everything to do with this is on the newsletter. 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