Culture

While watching an assigned Lynda.com course on “Building Accountability Into Your Culture,” I came across a very simple definition of culture that really resonated for me:

Culture is nothing more than the sum of our daily actions.

My first reaction, was, WOW – yes, it really is that simple. Collectively, how we behave every day as an organization creates our culture by default. Having been in this IT organization for 13 years, I can definitely say I’ve seen our culture shift, and in many ways for the better. Most of that change was driven by a desire from our leadership to evolve our organization by adopting practices to make us more efficient, accountable, and accurate with our work (for example, implementing ITIL processes and ServiceNow). These practices are now (for the most part) part of our culture, as these processes really do infiltrate our work daily, and we are all held accountable to practice them.

A few years ago (2013), there was a push to define our organizational values – not from the top down, but from the bottom up. The ITS Ombuds Team bravely led us forward. Many meetings were hosted, ideas brainstormed, and  a great list of 5 core values was created:

  • InnovationWe are an organization built on the power of creative thought.
  • CommunicationWe are committed to meaningful, honest, and rigorous communication with our partners and our peers.
  • TeamworkWe believe our expertise is most valuable when we work as a team to implement solutions.
  • EmpowermentWe empower one another through open dialogue, compassion, and trust.
  • AccountabilityWe take responsibility for both our successes and our failures.

We held a town hall where the values were revealed and explained, we printed up nice posters to put around our offices, added them to our performance evaluation form, worked them into the ITS Stars Nomination, and patted ourselves on the back.

However, I never felt we truly incorporated these values into our daily work or consistently used them to shape our decisions. In 2014 some helpful management guides were put on the wiki. But I could go months without hearing anyone mentioning or invoking our core values. I personally always thought we could have done more to fully incorporate these core values and impact our organizational culture. I’ve been trying to analyze why I felt this way – and my realization was that I don’t know that I was ever really held accountable to actually make conscious changes to better incorporate the values into my daily work life.

The Lynda course I watched went on to talk about how an organization could actively try and evolve their culture:

Communicate those values. Let people know who they’re accountable to. And then figure out those small desired daily actions that you want to see out of your people. Be patient, reinforce those behaviors, and when you see somebody do it right, celebrate that success. Communicate it broadly across the organization so people know what you’re looking for. And if you’re able to be patient, have that clarity of principle, over time, you’ll have the culture… you’re looking for.

Maybe there are some groups or managers that have incorporated these values into their regular check-ins with staff, highlighted successes or failures of those values in their group meetings, or built employee goals around these values (again, not sure that I did). But to really evolve ITS as a whole, I feel like we need figure out how we hold ourselves accountable to these values on a daily basis.

I think most of us would agree its a great list of values. Yes, right now, some of them may be more aspirational the actual, but that’s OK – we need inspiration to push ourselves and our organization to always be better at what we do. And if we do believe in these values, could holding ourselves accountable improve our overall engagement? What if we could link our IT Services core values with some of the University’s core values? What if demonstrating our core values helped us better demonstrate IT Services’ value to the institution? (This might need another blog post!)

Do you agree or disagree? Are core values just cheesey business talk, or can they really make a difference? I’d love to hear other experiences with our core values implementation.

Why are you here and not somewhere else?

IT Services Engagement survey results. Re-formation of the IT Services Project Management Office. Executive Program for Emerging Leaders. Lynda.com courses for managers. Lots of things have been trying to make connections in my brain lately, so I am going to try and write them down. This is the first of several posts where I will try and connect the dots and help myself make sense of how we/I can better understand the best way to contribute while working at UChicago.


 

This fall, I have the privilege of attending the Executive Program for Emerging Leaders for UChicago staff that is run annually by The Chicago Booth School of Business. Last Friday was our first class, and we had the honor of hearing directly from the new Provost, Daniel Diermeier. Some points that really struck me in his talk with us regarding leadership and careers were:

  1. always think about your role in context of the whole organization, and
  2.  periodically always ask yourself, why am I here, and not somewhere else? This second question had two corollary questions:
    1. can I add more value in different role? and
    2. how is my current role connected to the overall mission of the organization?

Next, in conversation with a relatively new employee (now here a year), she has told me more than once that she’s scoured the UChicago website trying to find its explicit mission somewhere, but that it doesn’t appear to exist. That spurred me to go and look around myself. While I think that the initial About page does a good job of bringing out the important areas (intellectual destination, transformative education, groundbreaking research, a commitment to enrich society), it really isn’t formatted like a typical mission statement. As an alumna, I am more familiar with the school’s motto, “Crescat scientia; vita excolatur,” translated to, “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.”

Now, I’ll concede, the motto is a fairly abstract concept – many people probably ask themselves, what does that really mean? Another set of materials provided to us in the EPEL course included an excerpt of “A Report of the University of Chicago Committee on the Criteria of Academic Appointment (Shils Report),” which can be found on the University Provost’s website. Here in the introduction, is a much more concrete explanation of how the University achieves this motto.

The existence of The University of Chicago is justified if it achieves and maintains superior quality in its performance of the three major functions of universities in the modern world. These functions are: (1) the discovery of important new knowledge; (2) the communication of that knowledge to students and the cultivation in them of the understanding and skills which enable them to engage in the further pursuit of knowledge; and (3) the training of students for entry into professions which require for their practice a systematic body of specialized knowledge.

Now that’s a clear explanation as to why UChicago exists!

Finally, we recently took an engagement survey across IT Services. One area that scored low almost across the board was this question: The mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important. On Gallup’s site, they explain this as, “This element measures how much an individual identifies with his or her company’s mission and purpose.” So, if we in IT Services are scoring really low on this, it says to me that most people feel so far removed from the University’s purpose that they cannot see how their work supports it. Maybe many of us just feel like a cog in the wheel, feeling siloed, and disconnected from any larger purpose – well, yeah, that is kind of depressing. And it begs the question, why are you here and not somewhere else?

My next role will take on the task of reinventing our IT Services Project Management Office (PMO). We had one in the past, but over the years as leadership, funding, and projects evolved, it was not maintained. One of the goals of the new PMO will be help us better communicate to the rest of the university (and ourselves), the value of IT Services through the important (and often strategic) projects we’re engaged in every day to support the University. I am hoping that through this work of thoughtfully communicating about the work we do, that the PMO can, in our own small part, help drive a better understanding of how each person’s role in IT Services actually does support the purpose of the University, and in my own small way help to fulfill Crescat scientia; vita excolatur.