If you ask someone for a quote about culture, they’re most likely to give you Peter Drucker’s well-known, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” But these days it’s possible that a different quote about culture may be more likely to spring to mind — one that is commonly (but mistakenly) attributed to Nazi bigwig Hermann Goering: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ … I reach for my revolver.”
The quote is actually from a different Nazi no one has ever heard of, and was resurrected by punk band Mission to Burma in the 1980s. While we don’t generally quote either Nazis or punk bands here, there’s something about the phrase that speaks to the frustrations that many leaders at firms are feeling about culture.
To start, they’re deeply concerned about their ability to create, instill and maintain a vibrant firm culture across a hybrid workforce. There is a strong sense that culture is crucial to the future success of a firm, and that the current work environment is making it much harder to build a culture than it used to be.
The second source of frustration about culture is much older, and much less frequently discussed — and that is that many business leaders aren’t sure, exactly, what culture is.
It is, in fact, a notoriously squishy idea, the kind of thing you can’t describe, but that you know when you see it. Many firms confuse it with the idea of being nice to their staff, and loading them with benefits and flexibility. Those don’t really constitute a firm’s culture — they’re byproducts of it. Instead, culture is the sum total of dozens of often unconscious attitudes about every aspect of work and the workplace.
In most cases, those attitudes aren’t decided; people bring them from home and school and previous jobs, and they bubble up naturally from the interactions between staff and managers and partners, getting reinforced by hiring and promotion decisions that favor people who have the kind of attitudes the managers and partners have already adopted.
So most cultures are naturally occurring, and it can be frustratingly difficult to change them. One way to avoid this is to stop trying to build the perfect culture, and to focus instead on cleaning up any areas of your current culture that are toxic. Toxic cultures and toxic staff do more damage than even an ideal culture can undo. The staffer who never does their share but is never held accountable, the partner who gets away with belittling everyone below them, the client who’s never satisfied and shouts at everyone, anyone who microwaves fish in the breakroom — if you want to see cultural improvements right away, get rid of those people, or at least outlaw their behavior.
Please do not do it with a revolver, however.
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