Podcasts and Commitment Culture

I only really discovered podcasts during the Covid lockdowns but for me they now form a key part of any long car journey or long hike/run.  It is incredible how an industry has developed for podcasters in such a short time with the recent trend moving to the presenters going on sell out live tours. 

One of my favourites is the High Performance Podcast.  My son and I went to their live show last year and we had the chance to have a Q&A session with the presenters Jake Humphrey from F1 and BT Sport and Professor Damian Hughes before the event.

My son Matthew posed a  question that I think applies to all businesses today with a distributed workforce by asking “when you have an office in the UK and an office in the US how do you maintain a high performance and consistent culture?”

Hughes who is an organisational psychologist and has worked with many businesses and sports  teams answered by sharing research at Stanford University who for seven years tracked Silicon Valley tech companies and concluded there are broadly five cultures within organisations that they called Star, Autocratic, Bureaucratic, Engineering and Commitment and dependent on each one the company has different chances of success and failure.  

A Star organisation recruits the most talented people, may pay them the most and then hope that cumulatively their efforts will be bigger than the sum of their parts. They concluded that when this works, it’s spectacular, but when it fails, it’s also likely to be spectacular.

An Autocratic organisation may be dominated by one powerful leader, sometimes the founder, who totally dominates what people do and how they behave. Without them the culture becomes dysfunctional and the organisation likely fails.

A Bureaucratic organisation is run by middle management, often based on policy, procedures, rules and regulations which often slows the company down.

An Engineering organisation recruit technically brilliant people. People become attached and buy in through challenging work and the influence of peer group control but they are not the most likely to succeed.

A Commitment organisations build a culture where the leaders work on building an emotional tie between the organisation and team members.  The researchers found that this culture by far had both the best team retention rates and highest chance of succeeding.

Hughes passionately believed that for him a focus on developing and maintaining a commitment culture was the answer to Matthews question.  

This chimed with my thoughts as well where I think with any team there needs to be a clear sense of purpose and emotional buy in to why we do what we do, and also a clear view of what success looks like. 

Th research described that in a commitment culture the team understand and acknowledge that it’s their behaviour that determines the culture and the brand, and therefore a focus on behaviours is vitally important. Ben Horowitz the widely known west coast VC published this blog a number of years ago describing how when he ran his tech company he gave all new product managers a training document that clearly outlined the behaviours of a good product manager.  Whether this means his company was an Autocratic or Commitment culture I am not sure but it’s certainly an idea I have also developed at Mercia Ventures for investors and managers.

After the event a quick google led me to  learn that Hughes had written numerous articles and books on the subject where in one he had focused on FC Barcelona with a great quote from the then Director of Football Txiki Berigistain (he is now at Man City).

“Talent will get you into the dressing room but how you behave determines how long you remain there”.