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Unleashed
In their new book, Unleashed: The Unapologetic Leader’s Guide to Empowering Everyone Around You, HBS professor Frances Frei and Anne Morriss (MBA 2004) make the case that leadership is due for redefinition. Leadership is not about you—it’s about elevating everyone else, they write. “Full stop. That’s it. That’s the secret.”
Morriss is the executive founder of The Leadership Consortium; Frei, the consortium's co-founder, served as senior vice president of leadership and strategy at Uber. They draw from their work with companies like WeWork and Riot Games to outline a leader’s imperative: to create the conditions that allow everyone else in an organization to realize their own potential and power. When done well, as the authors explain in the following excerpt, leadership is about creating an impact that endures even in your absence.
In addition to strategy, culture is the other major lever you have for leading organizations, arguably the more vocal one. Whatever strategy has not made clear to your extended team, culture will unapologetically fill the void. Culture establishes the rules of engagement after leadership leaves the room; it explains how things are really done around here.
Culture tells us how to behave in a meeting. It tells us who gets to take up space automatically and who has to work for it. It tells us whether we should follow the rules or cut corners, whether we should share or hoard information, whether we should stick our necks out and try to make things better or simply adapt to the status quo. What’s more important, growth or excellence? Action or analysis? Being direct or saving face? Strategy drops hints, but it’s culture that has the definitive answers.
Culture carries its guidance to the farthest corners of the organization to places you may never go and people you may never meet. There’s a story about the salvation of FedEx that Michael Basch, one of the company’s founding officers, likes to tell. In 1973, FedEx was on the ropes, bankruptcy looming, nothing going right fast enough. The company’s iconic founder and CEO, Fred Smith, had done everything he could think of to save the organization, including gambling the only capital he had left in a desperate trip to Las Vegas (astonishingly, this bought him some time). Smith was out of next moves.
As this existential crisis unfolded, a customer called FedEx in tears because her wedding dress hadn’t arrived yet, with less than twenty-four hours until the ceremony. A frontline service employee named Diane jumped into action, tracked down the dress, and chartered a small Cessna to deliver it—all without wasting precious time by asking anyone for permission. (We’ve tried and failed to find her full name.) The gesture created so much buzz at the wedding that it got the attention of some executive guests. The following week, those same guests decided to take a bet on using a young, wobbly FedEx for shipping some of their products, driving up demand from three packages a day to thirty. It was enough to save the company.
FedEx’s strategy in these early years was simple: deliver time-sensitive packages with speed and certainty. But Smith and his team had also built a strong, “bleeding purple” (the company’s primary logo color) culture marked by a get-it-done ethos and disregard for external signifiers, including race, gender, and company status. Everyone mattered. Everyone had the agency and obligation to contribute in meaningful ways. Diane’s bold decision making created a lifeline for FedEx, and it wasn’t a charismatic CEO or a well-defined strategy that made the difference. Those things may have pointed out the finish line—deliver packages quickly—but it was culture that unleashed her to go all the way.
What is culture?
Culture usually becomes “a thing” when people realize that something about their culture needs to change. This awareness often comes later in an organization’s life cycle than it should, and part of our mission here is to shorten that timeline. For pedagogical reasons, we’re going to simply assume that there’s something about the culture of your own organization that you already know you want to change.
Let’s start there: If you could change anything about your culture, what would it be? Is there more than one thing on the list? Take a few minutes to think about it and then write down your answers. We ask these questions right up front because the reflection itself can be empowering. Most people—even the most senior leaders—can feel, at times, as if culture is something they have to endure, not something that’s within their power to change. They couldn’t be more wrong.
As a starting place for discovering how possible it is to change culture, we like former MIT professor Edgar H. Schein’s iconic framework, which loosely divides organizational culture into artifacts, behaviors, and shared basic assumptions. As Schein argues persuasively, to get people to reliably behave the way you want—even in your absence—you have to get them to reliably think the way you want.
David Neeleman famously flew as a crew member once a month when he started JetBlue. He would put on an apron, serve coffee, and introduce himself up and down the aisle with a friendly, “Hi, I’m Dave.” Neeleman electrified the organization every time he did this and reinforced the company’s shared basic assumptions, including the belief that everyone, at every level, was in service to JetBlue passengers. The most important assumption he surfaced—a somewhat radical idea at the time—was that customers are people. JetBlue’s mission was to “bring humanity back to air travel.” Seeing the CEO treat a passenger like a human being was a warning shot to everyone that no one flies steerage on this airline. That’s how things are really done around JetBlue.
Another way to describe culture is that it’s our collective agreement about what is true. What is important. What is a crisis. What is cause for celebration or pride or shame. Culture even determines something as fundamental as what is funny. Humor is not a universal truth; it’s a cultural one. For example, a culture challenge at Riot Games was that behaviors that were coded as funny and harmless at an early stage in the company’s history, when it was a relatively homogeneous group of young, primarily male gamers—things like physical gags—were no longer funny or harmless once more and varied people joined the team. …
Schein once went so far as to say, “The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture.” We have a hard time disagreeing with this statement, except maybe quibbling with the “only” part.... We’d argue that culture is in the running for most important because—among other things—it stays behind long after you’ve left the building. You may move on from the company, but a strong culture can endure for generations.
Culture also has incredible reach, spilling out beyond the boundaries of your organization. Culture changes the people it touches, who, in turn, change the people they touch, and so on. Anyone who has felt more optimistic after walking into Starbucks—or felt cooler when they chose that indie coffee shop instead—knows that culture can influence anyone who interacts with it. If your ambition as a leader is maximum impact, then learn to become a culture warrior.
Among the most effective culture warriors walking the planet is Patty McCord, former chief talent officer at Netflix. You won’t find empty values statements on the walls of a Netflix conference room, not on McCord’s watch. As she helped to build Netflix into a media giant, McCord articulated the behaviors the company prized most—there are nine—and then used them to drive all hiring, compensation, and exit decisions. She socialized new recruits on these behaviors in a famous hundred-slide presentation on Netflix’s unique culture, and then reinforced them constantly, for example, invoking “honesty” (number eight) if colleagues withheld feedback from each other. (Sheryl Sandberg [(MBA 1995)] described McCord’s presentation, known as the Netflix Culture Deck, as “the most important document ever to come out of [Silicon] Valley.”) McCord also challenged employees to question each other’s actions if they were inconsistent with Netflix culture, an act she explicitly labeled an expression of “courage” (number six). By the time McCord left the company after more than a decade in her role, Netflix was behaving exactly as she and CEO Reed Hastings had designed it to behave: curious (number four), innovative (number five), and passionate (number seven). Not long after McCord made her culture deck public, Netflix dropped a complete season of House of Cards and forever changed the way the world consumed content.
McCord designed Netflix’s culture to attract high-performing creative leaders who thrive in work environments where they have a high degree of freedom and, in McCord’s worldview, are so self-motivated, self-aware, and self-disciplined that they’re also worthy of that freedom. These “innovator-mavericks” (her preferred term) hate almost everything about being trapped in a typical role or organization. They don’t want to be told what to do with their discretionary behavior, and they’re certainly not wasting time reading the company handbook. They even resist restrictions such as vacation or expense policies, which Netflix has essentially abolished. The company’s expense policy is, “Act in Netflix’s best interest.”
McCord did everything in her power to lure these autonomous creatures into the building and then set them free with a culture that told them everything they needed to know. She and Hastings stayed out of their way and made sure everyone else did, too. In other words, the most senior executives at Netflix were often intentionally absent, leading from the sidelines, where their most valuable, freedom-loving employees preferred them to be. It’s a model that reveals another foundational truth about leadership: some of your best people don’t always want you in the room. Culture gives you the confidence to exit.
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