The most direct way to open the company culture is by getting to know your people personally, by changing the quality of your relationships. A simple way to do this is with what we call The Cultural Interview. This is a structured but informal conversation where two people get to know each other better.
By building a relationship, this interview strengthens the culture’s foundation, setting the stage for improved communications. In addition, these interviews help managers understand how people experience the company’s culture, and where to focus management’s attention. These interviews should be part of any culture development effort.
Build a Relationship — Not Solve a Problem
The Cultural Interview is an opportunity for two people to understand each other better and share experiences. It is not intended to gather information or solve operational problems. The interview lasts about 40-90 minutes, is confidential, and is held in a neutral private place, such as a lunchroom or meeting room, over coffee, or at lunch, or just walking together around the facility. Do not hold the interview in your office. Neither person should sit behind a desk. The ideal arrangement is two people sitting in comfortable chairs, informally.
This is a time for the manager to step out of his or her usual role as an information giver, decider, or question-answerer. In the Interview, the manager or supervisor listens, understands, and builds a relationship. The Interview is best understood as part of the larger process dedicated to a more open, engaged, cooperative company culture. Getting to know someone more closely is very rewarding. Some managers become so enthusiastic that they do several interviews a week, urging their associates to do the same.
Each Interview Is Different
Like people, each interview is special. Relax, make it a part of your personal style, and go with the flow. Make sure you share some of your own experiences during the Interview Sometimes the person will immediately start talking about work or personal topic. If they do, just stay on that topic for a while. Try to touch on something from each of the three general areas suggested below, but if you do not, that’s OK. Enjoy.
Some Suggested Conversation Topics:
Past:
• How did you come to be with the company?
• What did you do before that? And before that?
• Childhood, school, where grew up?
• Parents, where from, occupations?
• Children, spouse, home, hobbies, weekends, vacations?
• What do you like people to know about you?
• What would you like to know about me?
Future
• Future hopes, plans, work, and non-work?
• How do you see things down the road?
• What do you look forward to?
Present:
• What was it like when you first came here? Work history and highlights?
• Tell me some things that stand out recently here
• What did these mean to you?
• Tell me about communications? And relationships?
• What parts of your work do you enjoy the most?
• And what parts do you enjoy the least?
• What things would you like to see changed around here?
Interviews build personal relationships and introduce new kinds of discussions and experiences into the workplace. After 10 or so interviews, the manager will sense common or recurring cultural themes, on which he or she can then act appropriately, without violating the confidentiality of individual interviews.
Who Should Interview?
Anyone at any level in any organization can conduct interviews.
• The Interview should be part of any formal top-down culture change process.
• A supervisor can interview his or her team.
• A person in one arm of an organization can interview a person in another, e.g. Receiving clerks, frustrated by delivery schedules, have interviewed buyers and improved their working relationships.
• Operations managers and supervisors have interviewed across into technical support and maintenance functions, resolving long-standing issues.
• People have used the Interview to cut turnover.
• One employee used it upwards and was promoted, see Managing Your Boss.
• Managers tell me they have used it to talk with their teenage children.
While the interview is usually between a team leader and the team members at any organizational level, it is also an excellent way to get to know anyone you work with, but don’t know very well. Perhaps you have talked for years with this person but only by phone. Just invite them to coffee or lunch, and very informally interview them. You don’t have to mention “The Interview”. You can interview people informally or formally, anywhere you think improved relationships would help.
Discuss Interview Themes at the Management Meeting
For the top management group, these interviews provide accurate, essential information about how people experience the company’s culture. This helps leaders shape and direct the culture development process. After each manager has conducted 10 or so interviews, they can discuss the emerging themes at the manager’s monthly Culture Leadership meeting. If you are the leader of the management group, you must not allow discussion of specific interviews. Discussing individual interviews, or who said what, would breach the confidentiality that is essential to the Interview program’s success.
Scheduling the Interviews
Management groups that decide to do these interviews sometimes keep a list of all employees and check off those who have been interviewed and by whom. This ensures that everybody in the organization will have an opportunity to participate in the Interview process. Ideally, every manager will do at least one Interview a week. If you are the group’s leader you must encourage each team member to follow their agreed Interview schedule. Part of that encouragement is you keeping to your part of the schedule. If you don’t do your Interviews, they probably won’t do theirs. Because the interviews are enjoyable, they usually soon become an ongoing part of the company’s culture with employees asking when it’s their turn.
When you begin interviewing, people might be suspicious, asking, “What is this all about? Why do you want to talk to me?” But after you have interviewed several people, and they learn that what you talked about was held in complete confidence, the feelings will change from suspicion to appreciation. This might happen during an interview. The person you are interviewing might suddenly relax and open up about personal areas — occasionally so personal that you might feel embarrassed.
You do not have to do anything about what people say in an interview. You are just two people, not a boss and subordinate. You’re not gathering information. You are building a relationship. If you feel that you must act on what they say, ask their permission and agree on what you will say. This might happen for example if someone describes a sexual harassment incident and corporate legal policy requires you to act.