‘Mom, why don’t you just write it like you talk to me?’
When Laura Hamill set out to write a book about the subject she knew best – the subject she’d spent years researching in theory and practice – she naturally drew on all the studies, statistics and evidence she’d gathered together to support her argument.
Turns out, that’s not what the reader needed. (And it wasn’t just her editor who told her that, it was her son, too.)
Those in organizations with a problematic culture don’t need research studies, they need help. Laura had to learn how to step out from behind the screen of academic writing, how to own her experience and her opinion, and to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty and self-doubt that involves throughout the writing process.
The result is a book that allows leaders and indeed anyone at any level to look beyond the words stencilled on the lobby walls to see how the real culture – what’s expressed in how people speak and behave – is aligned with strategy, and what to do about it if it’s not.
Paris Phoenix Group: https://parisphoenixgroup.com/
Laura on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurahamill/
Alison on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/the-alison-jones/
The 10-day Business Book Proposal Challenge: http://proposalchallenge.com/
Write Strong writing workshop at Gladestone’s Library: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/write-strong-writing-workshop-tickets-1052312483967
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
Alison Jones: I’m here today with Laura Hamill who is an organizational psychologist, ex Microsoft director and Limeade co-founder, and now a consultant through her firm Paris Phoenix Group, advising companies on their cultures. She’s a sought-after thought leader and speaker and a host on the Happy at Work podcast. Love that title.
She’s also the author of The Power of Culture: Bringing values to life at work.
So first of all, welcome Laura, it’s lovely to have you here.
Laura Hamill: Oh, thank you so much for having me, Alison, and I’m excited to talk with you.
Alison Jones: Well, I am excited to talk about culture because I think it is such an interesting, loaded, problematic word…
… we use it all the time and it’s really hard to pin down. So I’m going to start there. How do you define culture and why does it matter?
Laura Hamill: Yes, so good. Fundamentally, it’s what we value and believe in an organization. And so it’s deep, right? It’s deep down under the layers. And that’s one of the reasons why it’s so hard, but it’s so important because fundamentally what we value and believe drives our behaviour, right? So that’s what’s really hard about culture and why we all say, what is your definition?
And, you know, why we can’t get our hands wrapped around it is because it’s deep, it’s under the layers, it’s under the surface. I use, of course, the good old iceberg analogy, right? A lot of the things that you see on the surface, they’re meaningful. But you have to dig deeper. You have to go way down and understand fundamentally what do we value and believe in the organization.
So it’s important to start there. And so people think culture is things like parties, having, you know, right, having parties or even your benefits or thinking about, you know, all the fun things we do or swag in an organization. It’s not really, those are some maybe signs of what we value, but we have to do the work to understand fundamentally what’s underneath.
And that was why I really wanted to write the book, The Power of Culture because I feel like there’s so much that’s just the nature of culture, like that it’s deep down and it’s hard to define, that really holds us back from really understanding how to work on it. So culture matters, so your kind of second question, culture matters so much because you really have to have a culture that’s aligned with your strategy in order for your organization to be successful.
And what I have found in my work is that over and over again, I see really blatant disconnects between what a company is trying to achieve from a business strategy perspective and what their culture is about. So, and I think we all, right, we, many of us have experienced culture, have worked in organizations, you know at employee level, how much culture matters, right?
That it can very much be something that can make or break your experience in an organization. It can be toxic. It can be a place where you feel like it’s misaligned with your values. Also can just be a, meh. You know, like a meh culture where there’s just not anything that’s energizing about it. There’s nothing that you’re connecting to.
So I think on an employee level, we care about it too, big time, like it’s a big influence on our experience working. It’s also a big influence on whether or not we stay. So it has a big impact statistically on attrition as well. So on an employee level, it matters and at organizational level, when you’re a leader in an organization, you really have to think about aligning the strategy and the culture.
And I think one of the ways that I feel like I personally have experienced this, that made it so, my eyes so wide open about it is when I was working in a large tech company, when I very first started in that company, I was so excited, right? This is all, this is going to be such a great experience as one of my, you know, I’m finally am doing the kind of work that I want to do. And I had just started in the organization and I was asked to write a memo about a project I was working on and this memo was going out to a whole bunch of people and this will absolutely date me because it was when, in the olden days, when we’d write MEMORANDUM in all caps, right, on the top of our document but I had wrote the memo and I sat in my office, because we sat in our offices, we all had individual offices with our doors closed and I sat in my office thinking, I just wrote this. I have no idea if it’s good or not. I’m wondering if maybe I could ask somebody to read it for me, right? What an idea!
Well, my manager wasn’t available, so that sort of tells you something right there. So I thought, gosh, I have a team member. I sort of know her. She’s sitting right next door to me. I can hear her typing away. What if I go ask her for some help? What if I ask her just to read my memo? So I went over, knocked on her door and she answered and sort of like waved me in and she’s still typing. She doesn’t really stop. She’s just kind of, you know, barely looking at me. And I said, Oh, I’m so sorry to bother you, but could you read my memo? You know, I just started and I’d love your feedback.
And she looked at me like, that’s odd. Why would you ask me for that? Right. And so, I said, well, if you just have a chance, please just take a look at it. And she said, okay. And just sort of kept working. Right. So I backed myself out of that office and I went back into my office and thought, gosh, I sure hope she reads it.
I went back, I gave her some time, went back the next day. It was sitting in the exact same place. She was in the exact same place doing the same thing. And I said to her, You know, did you have a chance to give me any feedback? And she looked at me and said, it’s fine. And so I pulled it and went back into my office and there was not a mark on it. Right. There was no indication of any feedback. And so what did I learn like really early in my work there, is that I wasn’t supposed to do that, right? I wasn’t supposed to ask for help. We’re not really in it to help each other. And I continued to get all of these examples as I was working that told me Don’t do this. Don’t help each other.
In fact, my manager told me I needed to stop helping people. So that was a really clear message that in this culture, you’re on your own. It’s about you as an individual. I know, it was quite an experience. And so that made my eyes wide open, especially because to me, sort of the punchline of it, the company at that time was working on the development of collaboration software. Right.
Alison Jones: You couldn’t make it up, could you?
Laura Hamill: Couldn’t make it up? We couldn’t have been more competitive, we couldn’t have been more kind of independent and siloed. How is it that that culture is going to enable us to do a really great job in creating collaboration software? And so in my work, that’s what I see over and over again, is organizations that have this blatant disconnect between what they’re trying to achieve as a business and then what the actual day to day experience is like.
Alison Jones: And I think that actually tells us an awful lot. It explains a lot about a certain collaboration software as well. But anyway, we’re not here to talk about that.
Laura Hamill: Exactly.
Alison Jones: But one thing I’m really, that really kind of comes to mind, so you talk about, we talk about cultural organizational levels, right? You just, the story you just told us shows how culture plays out between individuals, between co workers, and particularly at the manager level. And in a sense, organizational culture, it’s not monolithic, is it? There’s a sort of, there are so many different cultures depending on the different teams,
Laura Hamill: Yes there’s a lot that drives what the experience of culture is, right? And so it’s really, that’s what I feel is really interesting is how do we experience culture and every organization nowadays knows that they’re supposed to have company values, right? Every, almost every single one of them does that.
Alison Jones: Got them on the walls.
Laura Hamill: They’ve got them on their walls. They’ve got them on their websites. That’s a start, right? But most organizations kind of stop there. And the values are sort of this kind of exercise that we went through that doesn’t have a lot to do with the actual experience. And so that’s what I think the real need is now, is how do we connect that day to day experience with these set of values that we aspire to And I mean, it sounds a little bit dramatic, but in my work, I see when companies say, this is what we stand for.
And the experience is so different from that. I see that it’s a sense of what I call in my book, cultural betrayal. Like, I feel it’s a deep resentment, like you said this is who we are, but that what I experience in the day to day has nothing to do with that. And so that cultural betrayal is real.
And that’s I think what can happen at the individual, like manager kind of level. People can feel that. So that’s an important thing for us to understand. But I think there are also managers who understand how important that day to day experience is, and they can try to influence it, right?
And they can try to say, gosh, I know there’s this disconnect, but I want to try to make this real on our team. I want to make sure that my team understands that I do value them or that I’m trying to create trust or that we should be collaborating together. Right? So there’s some really good things that can happen at kind of the division or department or team level to make some of these experiences real.
But as I say that, I really also need to acknowledge the role that power plays in this whole conversation, because that’s one of the reasons why I wanted to call my book, The Power of Culture is that the power in the organization really influences culture the most. And so the more power people have, the more they have a culture megaphone.
That culture megaphone screams what’s really important, what’s really valued in the organization. And I think that a lot of leaders don’t understand that the things that they say, the things they do, their actions are absolutely influencing what people think matters in the organization, right?
And so people take a lot of cues from people who are in positions of power.
Alison Jones: Yes. And I can relate to that from my own corporate experience. But one thing that really struck me about your book, actually, was I think when we think about culture, we often do think it’s top down. We think that the leaders set the culture and so on. But actually, you talk a lot about how much power people have at almost every level in the organization to impact the culture.
Laura Hamill: Yes, absolutely. And I think that one of the ways, and this is sort of one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book, is democratizing the understanding of culture so that culture doesn’t feel like just this thing that only leaders should understand or only the Head of HR should spend time on.
That if we understand what culture really is at all levels, we could ask more questions about it, right? We could understand and even clarify: Wait, this message you’re sending me or what you’re saying to me is that this matters and this doesn’t matter. Is that what you really are intending to say, right?
It helps us have a language. It helps us really dig into what is going on in the organization from a cultural perspective so that we can ask questions about it and we can get clear for ourselves. Is this a place for us? Is this where we belong? And so I think that, I think we sort of have a feeling about it, but the more that we can understand what culture really is as employees, the more we can decide what we, you know, how we want to contribute to it and whether or not it’s right for us.
Alison Jones: And you do say that, don’t you, that actually you might take a decision: I’m okay with that. I’m going to compartmentalize it. It’s not a great culture, but do you know what? The pay’s good. The situation’s good at this point in my life. And I think that’s really interesting what you’re saying. It’s just about deciding what’s right for you.
Laura Hamill: Yes, completely. And this has been something in my career that I’ve kind of changed my tune about a little bit. In the beginning, I’ve done a lot of work in my career around employee engagement and well being and the engagement piece of like feeling this deep connection with your work and kind of being all in.
I think it’s a beautiful feeling when you feel it, right? It’s really great, but that’s not always possible, right. It’s not always possible to be in situations. Sometimes we have to work because we need the money for you know, a sick spouse or we have a situation that we feel like we need to just stay in for many reasons.
And so what I have sort of realized over time is sometimes it’s important to emotionally detach. Sometimes it’s better to kind of go through the motions for us personally as employees. It’s not great as employers when people do that, but as employees, sometimes we need to do that. And maybe being engaged all the time isn’t the best for us, isn’t what we need to do. Sometimes we need to maybe compartmentalize.
And I think just realizing that that’s okay. And it’s one of those situations where it’s sort of like what you get out what you put in and realizing you might not get out as much from the experience if you have to do that emotional detachment.
But that’s something that I’ve, I think, changed my tune about a little bit. It’s like, I found times where it was better for me to maybe not be as hyper invested in what I was doing at work as I was in prior situations.
Alison Jones: And that felt like a very pragmatic approach to me. I thought, and I hadn’t seen that much in books, so I thought I was really interested in that. I’m interested as well, you talk about the ways that culture is evolving and you’ve said how almost language can help us, you know, being really clear about what we’re espousing as our values and then being able to articulate the fact when we are, you know, not going on those.
How else do you think culture is evolving within organizations and our attitudes to it?
Laura Hamill: Yes one of the things that I love the most about how culture is evolving is related to the idea of emotions at work and how important emotions are. I really believe that there’s good science and logical things we should understand about culture, but just as much and just as important is the emotion of work and the emotion of culture, how we feel that sense of connection with each other, how we feel a sense of belonging, this inspiration that we can feel from work, that those ideas, those emotions are a huge part of our experience at work and I love that we’re finally talking about emotions and in a positive way at work and that we’re understanding that that’s a good thing.
I’m so like, I remember so well, you know, the days when we talked about leave your emotions at the door and there’s no place for emotions at work and that to me is so short sighted, it’s so, it’s like leaving out all the humanness of us at work, right by leaving our emotions at the door so what I love is that we are starting to embrace how emotions work at work.
And I still feel like we have a long way to go though, right? Because there are a lot of people who… We don’t have the right language, don’t know how to handle it. And so there’s still plenty of room for improvement around how we talk about emotions at work. But I think the thing that I’m excited about is that we’re acknowledging that they’re really important, that we should treat people like human beings and hear their emotions and feel their emotions and ask them for their emotions. So in the culture work, the way I talk about it is just this idea. It’s a simple one of hearts and minds, right?
We need to logically understand what’s valued and do that from a kind of more research and scientific perspective, but we also need to understand the hearts part of work and how people feel at work and those connections they have with each other. So yes, that’s the thing I’m most excited about. Yes.
Alison Jones: And that was something that was really accelerated in the pandemic as well, wasn’t it? Because we sort of lost that. You can’t leave your emotions at the door when there’s no door. You’re just in the same place that you just had the row with your partner.
Laura Hamill: Completely, completely. And now I worry a little bit that some organizations are saying, Okay, we’re done with that now. You know, like…
Alison Jones: That was then.
Laura Hamill: Put that back in the box. Exactly.
Alison Jones: I know, I don’t think you can put the genie back in the box. I think it has changed everybody. Well, I hope so, because there’s a lot of good came out of it.
Laura Hamill: I completely agree.
Alison Jones: Taking that emotion, segueing slightly just for the purposes of this podcast, what kind of emotions come up for you when you sit down to write a book?
Laura Hamill: Oh my gosh, that is a perfect question. I think the first thing that comes to my head was like vulnerability.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Laura Hamill: This was a real…
…writing this book was a real, like different than I would have thought it was going to be because I’ve always written, in my career, in, you know, going to graduate school and in different jobs I’ve had, I’ve always written.
And what I realize now is that I was writing very much from a science perspective, right? Lots of citing research studies, lots of statistics, and a lot of theory that I would, you know, look at journals to cite. And I was a little bit shocked when my editor, after my first chapter said I don’t want all that.
I don’t want all that research. I’m like, what? Oh no. What are you,
Alison Jones: I’ve spent hours on that.
Laura Hamill: I know, and that’s how, I thought that’s how you write, you know, it’s like by having all this research. And then the thing that happened at exactly the same time was that my son, he’s 24, and he’s amazing, and he had read my first chapter, and at the exact same time he gave me the feedback, he read it and I said, well, what’d you think, Griffin?
And he said, oh, it’s okay.
Alison Jones: Oh,
Laura Hamill: And I’m like, what do you mean it’s okay? And he said, Mom, why don’t you just write it like you talk to me? Because we talk about this all the time. I was like, oh, and I had just gotten the feedback from the editor at the same time, right? And so it was a real, like, eye opening experience to have both of that feedback of like, it’s not about all the academic stuff, even though that’s a great foundation, right? It’s really about what do you think, Laura? And that was really hard.
I realized how kind of naked I felt without all of the research, you know, citations and all of the statistics to back me up of just me saying, this is my experience and this is what I think. That was really hard. So I think, and I’m still with my books launching right now. I’m still like, ah, you know, this does make me feel like I kind of put myself out there.
Alison Jones: It’s so interesting, isn’t it? And it ties in so nicely with that point about, you know, work is so much more fulfilling and enjoyable and all the good things when we bring our whole selves to it. Same with writing, right? You can put out a dissertation, if you will, but there’s, there’s very little joy in it, and there’s certainly very little joy in reading it, but when an author dares to bring their whole self into it, so all their expertise, but also all their humanity, that transforms the reading experience.
Laura Hamill: Yes. Yes. And it’s really, it was a hard thing to figure out at the beginning, right? Like, ah, how do I change this whole way I’ve ever approached something and do this in a new way? And so I tried to just make it be more like talking to my son, you know?
Alison Jones: And well, tell us about the detail of that. What did that, so you had a way of writing, and you knew what you were doing, and it started with the research, and you had lots of citations. What had to change to get the tone that you finally achieved?
Laura Hamill: Yes it took me a bit. It took me a while. I just kept trying, right? I sort of realized the difference between when I was forcing it versus when it was just kind of coming out, you know? And those times where it just flowed. I was trying to find what are the circumstances for when that just, when things just flow, right?
How do you repeat that? That’s so hard. One of the things I found is that…
…and this is super probably obvious to people who are writing, but assuming that I was going to be able to write between one o’clock and four o’clock on Thursday afternoons, was a big learning. I have like a lot of things I’m doing. I’ve got a busy job.
And so I sort of tried to put it into this little space where it was all going to magically happen. And surprise, surprise, that didn’t work. Because it happened that Thursday at one o’clock, a lot of times I was exhausted from the week and I didn’t have a lot of energy. And what I found instead worked really well for me,
it happens that I’m an early morning person, but going to a Starbucks and going when they were opening at like five or 530 in the morning and being the only one in there and just listening to the, you know, the people working there and having a big, you know, cup of coffee, it started, it would flow for me then. Exactly. Maybe a refill or two.
Alison Jones: It’s funny, I do my best writing in coffee shops as well. There’s something about the undemanding background noise of it that just loosens you up, and maybe it’s the caffeine too.
Laura Hamill: I agree it’s the loosening up and the just the letting it come out versus forcing it to come out.
Alison Jones: And getting away from your desk helps as well, doesn’t it?
Laura Hamill: Completely and outside of the house too. There’s so many like, you know, distractions of things I, you know, are on my list of things that need to be done around here too, right?
Alison Jones: And I think that writing is hard, and therefore if there’s anything needs doing. The dishwasher, the dog, you know,
Laura Hamill: Oh Yes, my
Alison Jones: I’ll do that.
Laura Hamill: …the cleanest. Oh, my house was the cleanest, absolutely, when I was writing the book, right? Completely.
Alison Jones: If you’re looking on video, you can see my beautiful sort of color coded shelves behind me. That happened when I was on deadline, that happened. Oh Yes,
Laura Hamill: Exactly.
Alison Jones: You become really high level procrastination.
Laura Hamill: Exactly. Exactly.
Alison Jones: So, I’m going to ask you, Laura, if somebody’s starting out on this journey, what’s your best tip for somebody writing their first business book?
Laura Hamill: I mean, there’s the, I guess, just the cliché of finding your voice, you know, finding it, finding out and being patient to get it to come out. And so I think that that is, I think it’s the being patient piece is really hard, right? Because it sort of feels, you know, like, am I going to be able to do this? Am I not a writer? Am I, you know, what’s wrong with me?
But I think it’s just sitting in that for a little bit, you know, and being okay with it. And also not being too critical with yourself and what comes out, you know, just kind of being patient and letting it happen, I guess.
Alison Jones: It’s such a great point because I think when you are writing a book, you’re comparing yourself, you can’t help but compare yourself to all the other brilliant books out there, but they didn’t start like that. And you have to really have that patience and that sort of trust in yourself and in all the professionals you’re going to be working with that these kind of halting sentences that you’re grinding out today, you know, that you will be able to rework them, you’ll revise them, improve them, then the development editor will take that.
There’ll be stages of fine tuning and polishing and this will be a book that you can be proud of. Yes. Brilliant.
Laura Hamill: Completely. The iterative,
Alison Jones: Yes, but you have to have it down first or you can’t, you’ve got nothing to work with.
Laura Hamill: Exactly. Exactly.
Alison Jones: Yes, such a great tip.
And I also always ask my guests to recommend us a book. So please, you can’t recommend your own, it doesn’t work like that. But what have you read…
Laura Hamill: No, no, I would never.
So I have had the privilege of working with Barry Schwartz, Dr. Barry Schwartz and so he wrote a book that’s called Why We Work. And it is such a good book. It’s such a good book. I love the content of it because it’s a lot about motivation. And kind of how we think about meaning and purpose at work.
And so I love the topic of what he’s focusing on in the book. But I think also from a book writing perspective, I really like his book because he uses these examples that are, and the way he tells a story, that are so powerful and that just make you, they just stick with you. He’s got like one example around, and it’s a pretty classic example around janitors in a hospital system and how, you know, janitors could just go through the motions of doing their work, but if they have this connection, in this example, in this hospital system, they connected janitors to the patient experience and how important what the work janitors do is to the patient experience and talked with them about that and help them understand that and really reinforce that.
And it changed everything for the experience of the janitors, right? And so we can think of lots of different examples of that when we have that connection to meaning and purpose, but it’s the way he tells that story that I really, I really love it.
Alison Jones: And of course, it’s the stories that we remember, always, isn’t it? Yes, brilliant. It sounds fascinating. I don’t know the book, so thank you. I really, I’m going to go and hunt that out. Sounds brilliant. And I love it when you get a book that’s not just interesting to read in its own right, but actually can teach you something about the craft of writing the business book as well.
So that’s the win, isn’t it? Brilliant.
And Laura, if people want to find out more about you, more about your work, more about your book, where should they go?
Laura Hamill: Yes, that’s so awesome. So my website is paris, P A R I S, like the city, phoenix, P H O E N I X, like the city, group. com. parisphoenixgroup.com. And people ask, that is actually the name of my kids middle names. When I started my company a long time ago, I had started it right when I was leaving that big tech company that I was telling you about, and I wanted to start my consulting business with something that really mattered a lot to me, and it was my kids and being able to actually be present around them.
So, yes parisphoenixgroup.com.
Alison Jones: And we’re right back at embedding your values and what you really believe in, in your work. Love it.
Thank you. Oh, it’s been such a joy to talk to you. Thank you so much, Laura. I really appreciate your time today.
Laura Hamill: You too, Alison. It’s been so much fun. Thanks for having me.
