Does Company Culture Exist? Dr Richard Claydon

Quite a brainy episode today. Dr Richard Claydon is a someone who likes to question why we claim things - he's a natural challenger. He describes himself as a Transdisciplinary Behavioural Scientist and Ironist. He writes some interesting (if a bit too long) things on Linked In that a few people sent to me. We had a brilliant chat for well over an hour but i've tried to edit it into something enlightening and digestible. Richard says something that I've been thinking a lot. We shouldn't be worrying about company culture. Office culture or more probably team culture is the most important thing for us to be focussing on. Richard runs a company called Organisational Misbehaviourist We talk about how the ideas of strategy and culture have an ongoing battle in business circles. In the 1980s and 90s there was a lot of talk about work culture - he explains that this was because the Japanese businesses that were idolised tended to seem to have a good culture. Here's why I find academics have such a valuable contribution to this debate. Richard talks about the work of Professor Joanne Martin from Stanford University who spent time looking at whether you could observe a single culture in organisations. And the answer was you never could. Company culture is a nice story we tell ourselves but it's an illusion. When it's most aggressively implemented it leads to people pretending to go along with it with ironic attachment. What a fascinating idea we talk about Project Aristotle which is a massive piece of work that Google did that looked at the best performing teams. The finding of that work was that the secret of good teams was psychological safety - people feeling comfortable in speaking up with no fear of punishment. Where people could be their complete selves.. This finding drew on the findings of Amy Edmondson - if you're interested in these things here's: A TED talk by Amy Edmondson Read more about Google's Project Aristotle hereSign up to the Make Work Better newsletter or check out the best ever episodes at the website.Eat Sleep Work Repeat is made and hosted by Bruce Daisley. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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