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Chapter 5. Build Leaders That Build Your Culture

Rather than have a culture that celebrates “failing fast,” you should consider building a culture that celebrates “learning fast.” Celebrating experiments that can be directly tied to revenue results is easy; it’s tangible. However, trying to uncover learning that isn’t directly tied to a revenue number is much more difficult. These learnings are just as valuable because they invalidate our hypotheses and help us avoid costly mistakes.

Yet, so many product teams still celebrate only when a product or feature ships on time.

I’ve talked with many product team members who become frustrated because they’ve felt like they did all the requisite customer research, but it didn’t result in a business opportunity. They feel their work is wasted because it didn’t produce a product to sell or a feature to ship. What they don’t often appreciate (and I often remind them) is that they helped move the organization forward. While their experiments might not have produced a product worthy of putting into the market, it did give us other valuable insights. Learning what’s not worth building is just as valuable as learning what is.

Throughout this book, I’ve made the case that being customer driven is actually being learning driven. Therefore, a customer-driven culture is one that builds leaders who are willing to learn.

In this chapter, we explore why developing leaders who demonstrate the vital behaviors of your culture is a useful hack in building a customer-driven culture.

Model, Coach, Care

We’ve been discussing the three vital behaviors of change (awareness, curiosity, and courage) as the foundational behaviors that are directly tied to change. However, if you want those behaviors to go viral within your organization, you must engage in three additional behaviors: model, coach, and care.

In fact, at Microsoft, management training is based on a model, coach, and care framework. This framework defines the three behaviors as follows:

Model: Set the tone for culture and leadership; Act with integrity; Be accountable
Coach: Define team objectives and outcomes; Enable success across boundaries; Help the team adapt and learn
Care: Know everyone’s capabilities and aspirations; Attract and retain great people; Invest in the growth of others

Essentially, managers at Microsoft are expected to invest in learning and the development of others. One of the most powerful ways they can encourage their team to adopt a growth mindset is by modeling the mindset themselves, coaching it in others, and caring about the individuals on their team.

Agents of Change: Julia Liuson

Corporate Vice President of Developer Division Julia Liuson is a perfect example of a leader who models, coaches, and cares about the customer-driven, learning-first mindset at DevDiv.

For example, I’ve had the benefit of seeing her in numerous settings in which she’ll admit when her idea is only an assumption that hasn’t been tested. When she models this behavior, it’s a powerful moment because she’s indirectly telling us, “I’m still learning,” and it makes it OK for us to admit that we’re still learning, too. When you work with Julia, learning becomes the objective—knowing does not.

In product review discussions, she coaches teams by asking questions that spark their curiosity. It’s not uncommon to hear her ask questions like, “Which customers have you talked to?” and, “How do we know this feature solves the problem for the customer?” or, “What are your hypotheses?” She’s not only asking these questions to determine how connected the team is to its customers; she’s also modeling to the team what she values most: learning from our customers.

Getting to know Julia, I’ve realized that learning is an essential part of how she works. For her, learning is a strategic advantage and part of how she sees the world.

Julia Liuson was born in Shanghai, China, but grew up in Beijing during the mid-1970s. It was a poignant time of change for that country as it began its journey toward digital transformation, moving toward a modern economy.

Julia’s mother and father were academics, working as faculty members within the halls of the prestigious Beijing University. Her father was a mathematician and her mother specialized in software and hardware engineering.

During this time, the Chinese government was looking for top talent within its university system to help modernize the country and compete with the explosion of technology innovation in the United States. Julia’s mother was selected to work on an incubation project that explored how to bring complex Chinese characters to modern printing processes, like laser and thermal printing. The head of the project was Professor Wang Xuan, who was a legend within the Chinese tech community. Julia remembers him frequently stopping by her family’s apartment to discuss new ideas with her mom. Together, Julia’s mom and Professor Xuan’s work eventually established an industry standard in Chinese printing that contributed to the success of many well-known Chinese tech companies, like Toshiba and Lenovo.

These were formative years for Julia, and she was surrounded by learning.

In 1987, when she was ready to leave for college, the cultural revolution was coming to an end in China, and it was very difficult to leave the country. Food was being rationed and only residents of major cities had the right to buy their own goods and services.

Julia still had a strong desire to develop her education, so in light of these challenges, she boarded her first-ever plane ride and traveled to the United States to study at the University of Washington.

When she came to America, it was a bit of a culture shock.

“My host parents took me to see Pike Place Market,” Julia recalls, “I was, like, ‘OK, so it’s a market.’”¹

To her, Seattle’s iconic farmer’s market, which is renowned for its employees who toss fish through the air to enthusiastic tourists, was like any other market in China, and she’d seen plenty of those.

“Then I went see Safeway afterward,” she continues, “and I was completely shocked. There was nothing like that anywhere. It was so big, with shelves and shelves of merchandise. You could just push a cart and grab whatever you want. That, to me, was a culture shock.”

Julia uses her own personal stories to help product teams appreciate the value of diverse experiences. She says that these stories help them appreciate that they often overvalue their own experiences, and if left unchecked, they can bring their own biases into their product making.

At the University of Washington, she had access to technology and eventually pursued a degree in electrical engineering. She was introduced to programming and began using Applesoft BASIC (a dialect of Microsoft BASIC) and Microsoft DOS, Microsoft’s earliest operating system.

She’d later join Microsoft as an entry-level engineer, working on Project Cirrus, the company’s first attempt to sell a relational database product. The project would later become known as Microsoft Access.

At the time, she wasn’t even sure she was going to stay at Microsoft. “I was debating about going to grad school. I was waiting for grad school acceptance. I said, ‘Well, let’s see how this thing goes, if I like it, I’ll stay, if not I’ll go.’”

Clearly, it turned out to be an opportunity that she liked. Twenty years later, she would become the corporate vice president of DevDiv. When asked why she stayed, her answer is simple.

“It became clear that within the first couple of months, I was going to get paid to learn,” she says. “That’s what impressed me. Within the first couple of months, I had learned so much from just doing day-to-day work and that was, like, wow! That was amazing.”

As a leader, she has taken that value of learning, one of Microsoft’s greatest benefits to its employees, and made it a centerpiece for her organization. Many times, she instructs teams to go out into the world and learn from what others are doing—to reject our hubris and learn from others’ success.

[When thinking of solutions], we need to move away from a mentality where we have to invent everything ourselves. What other implementations are out there? How do other companies do this?

During engineering reviews, she makes it a practice to constantly ask, “What have we learned?” She believes that it takes the emphasis off employees trying to prove what they already know or finger-pointing at each other to avoid responsibility.

My questions are highly predictable. I’m going to ask, what have you learned? What customers have you talked to? What are they trying to do? What are their challenges? Has anyone else solved this problem?

After a while, teams begin to get the picture. They can’t keep coming into reviews without answers to these questions. Julia is leading through the questions she asks. Those questions are an indication of what she values and what she wants the culture to value, as well. With a combination of the questioning and modeling, Julia is sending strong belonging cues to her employees. She’s signaling through language and her own behaviors what it means to be part of DevDiv.

Beyond modeling a learning mindset, Julia also looks for opportunities to celebrate teams that are investing in the customer-driven culture of learning.

“Julia does an amazing job of showing up as curious, as empathetic, and as empowering,” says Amanda Silver, Partner Director of Program Management in DevDiv. “She does a really great job of managing through positive reinforcement. When she sees the behavior that she’s seeking, she celebrates it and shares it broadly. Even in cases where she’s not thrilled with the result, she’ll frame it as a learning opportunity.”²

As an influencer of change, it’s your job to seek out, mentor, and give visibility to the individuals who exemplify the new culture you’re trying to build. People in your organization need examples of the behaviors they need to copy in order to belong to the new culture. Therefore, you should look for ways to build leaders who are bound to vital behaviors of your new customer-driven culture.

Celebrating the Vital Behaviors

Earlier in the book, we discussed the three vital behaviors for culture change: awareness, curiosity, and courage. Although these are the essential behavior patterns that bring about change, you should be on the hunt for anyone who is exemplifying observable behaviors that fall into those three categories.

For example, it might be highlighting a team that demonstrated the curiosity to develop a new process, allowing them to better connect with customers. Or sharing the story of a team’s courage to admit that they launched a feature that customers initially resisted, but after listening to their feedback and making changes, customers began to adopt.

By shining a spotlight on these stories, you give your organization vivid examples of what the new culture looks like.

It’s much more than creating an “Employee of the Month” program that requires managers to nominate outstanding employees. It’s about highlighting the success of others through story. Companies that are built on top of a foundation of connecting with customers provide avenues for employees to share their own stories of success and customer learning.

Bruce Broussard, CEO of Humana, an American health insurance company based in Louisville, Kentucky, uses stories of exceptional customer service to inspire employees and highlight the vital behaviors he wants to see throughout his organization.

Humana has more than 41,000 employees and in 2018 was ranked 56 on the Fortune 500 list. What started as a nursing home in 1961 has become a massive managed care network, primarily focused on assisting elderly Medicare patients. Humana’s goal is to help employers navigate healthcare costs as well as reduce costs for patients by rewarding them for engaging in behaviors that lead to healthier lives.

To show employees what this looks like in practice, Broussard regularly shares the story of a Pharmacy Solutions employee who was working with a patient diagnosed with a diabetic condition. The patient explained that he was not only struggling to pay his pharmacy bills but was also struggling to buy food that wouldn’t aggravate his condition. Maintaining a healthy eating plan to keep his diabetes in check was proving to be prohibitively expensive.

Humana doesn’t want to just be a provider of healthcare; rather, it wants to be a partner with its members in seeking solutions that affect their care. Situations like this are all too common for their elderly members; they find their health in jeopardy due to negative social determinants like food insecurity, loneliness, and isolation. With its “Bold Goal” program, Humana seeks to apply a holistic approach to healthcare.

Under this program, the employee decided to take it upon herself to connect the patient to another group at Humana. That very same day, the employee and her coworkers contacted a local food bank to deliver healthy groceries to the patient, free of charge. For the patient, what started as a call to figure out his pharmacy bills resulted in an act of generosity and empathy from the Humana team. It was a powerful moment for both the patient and the company.

William Fleming, President of Healthcare Services at Humana, reflects on how this employee’s actions were a direct reflection of the company’s culture:

The point here is that, had we not established a culture in which this employee felt the freedom to extend herself beyond her routine duties, this member may not have been helped in all the ways needed. She felt comfortable not only thinking outside of the box but finding and connecting to resources in a different part of the organization, while keeping the end goal—helping our member—her North Star.³

With its Bold Goal initiative, Humana created a culture that encouraged employees to be aware, curious, and courageous. This employee applied all three to deliver an indelible experience for one of its members.

The company wanted to highlight this story for all employees to reflect on and aspire to. It became a sort of legend; the story made the rounds in leadership meetings, the intranet, and was featured on a company podcast.

By celebrating the vital behavior or thinking of the Humana member as a human in need rather than a person to charge and collect money from, it gave all employees a roadmap to mirror desired behavior. It gave them a framework of what it looks like to belong to the Bold Goal philosophy of the company. The courageous actions of a single employee created a script for the rest of the company’s 41,000 employees.

In our Customer-Driven Workshops in DevDiv, we spend three to four days with new employees as they work together in groups on a real business goal that has been given to them by our leadership team. As we discussed in Chapter 1, the business goals they are given are audacious and broad. The goal is to get them engaged in deep conversations and learning from the customers and one another. Essentially, it’s a few days to be immersed in the framework and tools we’ve written about in The Customer-Driven Playbook.

Here’s a bit more about how the week develops:

Day 1: Teams evaluate and discuss their business goal. They identify their assumptions about the customer, their motivations, the behaviors customers engage in to achieve their goals, and the problems they encounter. Then, they formulate those assumptions into hypotheses and create a set of questions to interview customers to validate or invalidate their assumptions.
Day 2: Teams get a chance to talk to three to four real customers who have already been scheduled in advance. After the customer interviews, teams engage in sense-making exercises and discuss what they’ve learned.
Day 3: Teams talk more deeply about the unmet needs they uncovered during their customer interviews (or any other relevant data they’ve discovered). They begin to ideate on potential solutions and prioritize how those solutions can affect the customer and our business.
Day 4: The final day is what we affectionately refer to as the “Science Fair.” Members from our leadership team attend and teams get a chance to present their learnings by using their “Journey Wall,” a low-fidelity collection of learnings affixed to a portion of the wall in the room.

There are a handful of moments during the week that always deliver meaningful results for our participants. Being able to work on a real business goal, working together in teams and making things, and getting a chance to connect with real customers are always highlights.

However, it cannot be overstated how important the final day is. When our leaders show up and invest their time to hear from what these new employees learned from our customers, it sends a massive belonging cue. It tells every new employee, “We care about what you’ve learned from our customers.”

After seeing each team’s presentation, the members of our leadership team pick a team as the “winner.” They frame the decision based on the team they believed best exemplified the three vital behaviors (awareness, curiosity, and courage). Teams that demonstrate an awareness of their own assumptions, show gumption or a willingness to experiment or find new sources of information, or teams that have the courage to challenge the leadership team on the business goal itself are all worthy candidates for being selected as winners.

In some cases, our leadership team will pick three winners, one for each vital behavior. The winners typically attend a lunch with John Montgomery, corporate vice president and head of program management in DevDiv. Although a lunch is a relatively small gesture, having the chance to meet, face-to-face, with a senior leader, especially because you exhibited desirable cultural behavior, is a powerful moment that encourages our teams to continue to invest in our vital behaviors.

Scripting the Vital Behaviors

Although stories are an excellent vehicle to inspire the vital behaviors of awareness, curiosity, and courage, it won’t be enough to help employees internalize it. Change can be paralyzing. You can’t very well go out and ask your employees to be courageous or more curious. They need a smaller set of instructions that helps them align to the greater organizational mission.

Sociologists refer to public-facing goals, such as Satya’s mission statement to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more, a manifest function. This is the reason that Microsoft exists. However, all the other goals that derive from that mission—goals that might not be expressed explicitly—are latent functions. The goal of any organization or team is to take the manifest function of the organization and derive a set of latent functions that employees can utilize in their day-to-day work.

An example of this can be found on Interstate 10, between San Antonio and Houston.

If you’re driving along that route, you’d be hard pressed to miss a series of billboards for Buc-ee’s (Figure 5-1), a massively popular, Texas-owned chain of convenience stores. One sign might read: “Jerky. One of the five basic food groups,” or, “Only 262 miles to Buc-ee’s. You can hold it,” or, “Everything is fresh, even the junk food.”

As the saying goes, “Everything is bigger in Texas,” and it would certainly hold true for Buc-ee’s. In 2012, Buc-ee’s unveiled the world’s largest convenience store by building a 67,000-square-foot megaplex in New Braunfels, Texas. That’s 20 times larger than your average convenience store and longer than an American football field. The store touted 60 gasoline pumps, 84 toilets, 80 soda dispensers, 31 cash registers, 23 flavors of its signature fudge, and an endless maze of popcorn, candy, beef jerky, and other roadside snacks.⁴ In Katy, Texas, the company is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having “the world’s largest drive-through car wash.”

Buc-ee’s gas station in Temple, Texas (credit: Stacy Huggins)

The roadside stops are famous in the region and have a cult-like following. This has caused the chain to expand well beyond the founder’s initial plans. As of this writing, Buc-ee’s has 37 locations after eventually branching outside of Texas into Alabama and Florida. Customers love Buc-ee’s-branded merchandise, teenagers wear T-shirts emblazoned with the store’s iconic beaver, and it’s not uncommon for tourists to show up and take selfies in front of the store. However, one signature attraction stands out above all the rest: Buc-ee’s claims to have the nation’s cleanest bathrooms.

In a travel study conducted by GasBuddy, 37% of drivers said one of their worst fears of traveling on the road was being “unsure of where to stop for a clean restroom.”⁵

That’s why Buc-ee’s travel centers have restrooms with large entryways that are decorated with Texas-themed memorabilia. They have high ceilings and bright lighting. The toilets are separated not by thin dividers, but actual walls that support heavy metal doors.⁶

Buc-ee’s co-owner, Arch “Beaver” Aplin III, keeps the mission and goal simple: “Be clean, be friendly, and be in stock.”

Even though the chain of gas stations might be a complex operation, the core mission for all employees is simple. They must be constantly friendly, keep the shelves full, and obsess over cleanliness.

That’s why restrooms are staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, by uniformed employees whose sole focus is to keep them immaculate. The mission isn’t to sell Buc-ee’s-branded food or merchandise, nor is it to have the lowest prices on gas (although Buc-ee’s does strive for those things). It’s to have a safe, clean refuge for customers traveling on the road.

Aplin could’ve easily been distracted by the myriad ways to serve customers, coming up with gimmicks like discounted prices or branching out to as many locations as his balance sheet would allow, but he decided to obsess over the things that travelers cared most about, like clean restrooms.

“Be clean, be friendly, and be in stock,” might indeed be the manifest function for Buc-ee’s, but the latent function is to have the cleanest bathrooms of any gas station in America. Latent functions take the broader mission and break it down to its more actionable goals. It provides a roadmap for employees to engage in smaller actions but provide support to the larger mission. It makes achieving the mission far less daunting because it prescribes what behaviors to obsess about. In the case of Buc-ee’s, one of the ways that you can participate in Aplin’s mission to be clean, friendly, and in stock is to obsess over the cleanliness of the bathrooms.

Do Less, Then Obsess

In a study conducted of 5,000 managers and employees across a wide range of jobs and industries, it was discovered that participants who engaged in a “do less, then obsess” mentality performed 25 percentage points higher in performance ranking compared to those who did not engage in this activity.⁷ Essentially, those who picked a strategy and obsessed over it did better than those who pursued multiple strategies and goals.

In the book Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, authors Dan and Chip Heath refer to this concentration of core ideas as “scripting the critical moves.”⁸ The key is to find the right moves for your organization. “Be clean, be friendly, and be in stock” is perfectly crisp and clear for a franchise of convenience store employees, but far too constraining at a company like Microsoft.

In The Customer-Driven Playbook, we highlighted the key behaviors to be consistently applied at all stages of the HPF. As the book became more widely used in DevDiv, it gave teams a script of behaviors to drive customers into their day-to-day work. The script was simple: we formulate our assumptions into hypotheses, we run experiments to validate or invalidate those hypotheses, and we apply sense-making techniques to identify patterns and insights.

As discussed in Chapter 2, the customer-driven cadence is applied through each stage of the HPF. Essentially, the cadence scripts learning behaviors throughout the entire development life cycle of our products, as demonstrated in Figure 5-2.⁹

The customer-driven cadence is applied to all stages of the HPF

This cadence acts as one of the many ways we script the vital behaviors in our organization. The cadence functions as a consistent model of behaviors that can be applied to any problem. You can also relate this customer-driven cadence to the language of learning we discussed in Chapter 2 (see Figure 2-1).

During product engineering reviews, teams give our leaders updates on the progress of their projects by sharing the status of their hypotheses. This practice has proven to be an effective way to communicate where the team’s current thinking is and what they have learned.

Consider how you might distill your organization’s mission statement into a set of key behaviors that everyone can identify and adhere to. These distillations can be highly effective in helping groups put the organization’s mission into action.

Demonstrate Your Values Through Belonging Cues

To understand the impact of belonging cues, let’s explore an imaginary scenario in which a new employee navigates her first day on the job.

Example Scenario: Adriana’s First Day

In this scenario, Adriana, our new employee, has accepted a job as a junior sales associate on a large sales team for an even larger organization. On her first day at the company, she enters the building, excited and nervous. This job represents the opportunity she’s been waiting for, and she can’t wait to meet her new team. She’s a bit frazzled, however, because she just spent the last 20 minutes trying to figure out where to park. Even though it’s a bit embarrassing, she reassures herself that these sorts of things are expected on someone’s first day.

As she walks up the stairs to where she thinks her new team is, she’s already noticing that she’s overdressed. She’s wearing a suit, while everyone around her is dressed down in business casual.

“It’s OK,” she says, trying to convince herself. “I’ll just look like I’m eager to make a good impression.”

After a few wrong turns, she finally enters the team room and immediately begins to scan the large space, looking for a familiar face. It’s a maze of cubicles and it’s impossible to see anyone beyond the tiny barriers.

It’s been two months since she interviewed for the job, so the only face she remembers is her hiring manager’s. From what she can see, she’s not in yet, so she walks through each cubicle, looking for a space that might be her future home. She finds an empty, unmarked cubicle and because she’s starting to feel a bit embarrassed, she decides to sit down and wait for her manager to arrive.

It’s still early, but the office is already buzzing with activity. She can hear the trill of phones ringing softly throughout the office.

As people walk by, they avoid eye contact. They appear to be too busy to engage in pleasantries. Adriana decides to read through a pamphlet that was sent to her home after she had accepted the position. The document is mostly boilerplate, predictable, and uninspired. It’s full of platitudes and obvious statements around the company’s dedication to employees and its customers. It also champions what appears to be a new “culture movement” at the company. It walks through the “three pillars of success”: family, pride, and customer service.

It extols the virtues of “maintaining a work–life balance that is healthy for you and your family.” It outlines how the company is “one big family” and that “it’s important to embrace diversity and respect others.” Adriana’s parents were Cuban immigrants, and she finds it ironic that the stock photos used in the pamphlet are lacking anyone that looks like her or her family.

It goes on to talk about “taking pride in our product and services” and the importance of “giving the very best to our customers.” Finally, it concludes with the company’s mission statement: “To enrich the lives of our customers with quality service and quality products.”

She sets the pamphlet down and begins to listen to office chatter as more people arrive. Most whisper a silent “hello” to one another, but from what she can tell, conversations don’t extend beyond that.

An hour goes by, and Adriana begins to worry that maybe there was a mix-up and she started on the wrong day. Just then, her manager notices her as she walks by.

“Oh, there you are,” she says, “We have a cube for you over on the other side. How did you end up over here?”

She can feel her face burn red-hot with embarrassment, “Sorry, I didn’t know where to…”

“Never mind that, we have a staff meeting. Follow me,” the manager says as she whisks Adriana away toward a conference room.

As Adriana enters the room, she observes something odd. Everyone is standing around the table, lining the room with their backs against the wall. Her manager sits down at the table, followed by a few other people she doesn’t recognize. She assumes that the people sitting at the table must be managers or have at least earned the right to sit. Not wanting to presume she’s achieved this status yet, she safely retreats to the corner of the room and squeezes herself in with the others lining the wall.

She looks around the room and, while she concedes that maybe it’s just Monday, people look tired and despondent.

The meeting begins, and everyone goes around the room to give the group their respective status report. When it comes to Adriana, she nervously introduces herself. Everyone says hello and the meeting moves along.

Her manager then says, “Hey, just as a reminder, we all need to take the diversity training by the end of the week.”

Everyone groans.

“I know, I know,” she says with a pained look on her face. “Our leadership is just making sure to check the box for the ‘politically correct police.’” She makes an “air quote” gesture with her fingers as she rolls her eyes.

Light chuckles are heard around the room. Adriana feels a sinking pit in her stomach.

“How am I supposed to have time for these things?” a man from the other side of the room pipes up. “I’ve been on the phone all weekend with the team in Germany.”

“Work–life balance, right?” her manager replies with a smile on her face.

The group erupts in laughter.

“Sure. Right,” the man responds. “Well it turns out that our biggest customer over there is not happy with our new pricing. They’re saying that this new pricing model is going to have a huge impact on them.”

“That’s what they always say when we make these changes,” her manager replies. “Don’t worry, they’ll fall in line. They always do.”

He smirks and then replies, “Well, I suppose that would happen if the product they purchased wasn’t completely failing.”

“That’s not our fault,” her manager shoots back. “We just sell this stuff, it’s not our job to make sure it works.” She looks around the room as several people nod in agreement.

Inside Adriana, a growing sense of regret is starting to form. She’s beginning to envision lots of late nights and weekends, trying to sell a product that customers hate. She was so excited to work for this company, but now she’s getting the dreadful feeling that she’s made a huge mistake.

She reflects on the pamphlet she read earlier, and she wonders whether anyone on this team has seen it. She’s confident that if she were to ask anyone in the room about the three pillars, they’d probably think she’d lost her mind.

She feels a lump rise in her throat as she begins calculating the steps that would be required to get her old job back.

The Importance of Belonging Cues

We’ve talked about the importance of defining your organization’s core purpose and how to script vital behaviors that align with that purpose. However, the third and extremely powerful connector to your culture are belonging cues.

These are the observable behaviors that we see in the everyday interactions of our organizations. They’re expressed by what we choose to talk about, what we focus on, and the things we say. They’re both verbal and nonverbal, intentional and, many times, unintentional. These cues can be so subtle that we’re often unaware how much they are affecting our culture.

In his book The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups, author Daniel Coyle writes that we have used belonging cues to develop cohesion with one another since our earliest ancestors. Our evolution as a species has been highly dependent on our ability to form tribes and work together for common survival. To that end, our brains are hardwired to look for what behaviors are necessary to belong and thrive in a social group. Coyle writes:

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group. Like any language, belonging cues can’t be reduced to an isolated moment but rather consist of a steady pulse of interactions within a social relationship.¹⁰

Based on the cues she saw on her first day on the job, Adriana safely assumes the team she’s joined doesn’t put much stock in the company’s overall stated values.

We see this discontinuity all the time. The CEO that champions diversity and inclusion, yet the company’s board of directors is full of men. A product designer who says that she always “puts the customer first” but pushes back any time the team wants to get early feedback from customers on her design ideas.

What you talk about, what you focus on, and what you nonverbally communicate all send signals to your employees of what you value. We are biologically and psychologically wired to look for these signals. As soon as we observe these signals, we are susceptible to adopting those behaviors and eventually those values.

Doctors Tanya Chartrand and John Bargh call this the Chameleon Effect: it’s our propensity to adopt the behaviors and attitudes of those around us. In their research, the mere perception of another’s behavior automatically increases the likelihood of engaging in that behavior oneself.

Some behaviors seem inconsequential: inside jokes, acronyms, office pranks, and water cooler talk are all ways that we unintentionally signal to others what it means to be part of our “tribe.” Yet, the content of those interactions can be incredibly powerful, especially to those who are new to the group and are foraging for ways to demonstrate that they belong.¹¹

In fact, scientists believe that this type of mimicry is so essential to our survival that we have developed mirror neurons, located in various regions of the brain. They’re pathways that cause us to copy one another.

In the book The Best Place to Work: The Art and Science of Creating an Extraordinary Workplace, Dr. Ron Friedman illustrates how these social norms come into play:

Consider the last time you rode an elevator with a group of strangers. If you’re like most people, you entered quietly, moved to a location maximizing the amount of space between you and your fellow passengers, and faced the front to watch the floor numbers change. No one provided you with explicit instructions on how to behave, and you certainly didn’t need to wait for your mirror neurons to kick in to tell you what to do.¹²

These mirror neurons activate instinctively and unconsciously. Over time, we adopt the behaviors and attitudes of those around us. Eventually, we might end up wondering to ourselves, “How did I get to be such a downer?” or, “When did I get to be so aggressive?”

A company’s mission or purpose sets the global course, and the vital behaviors script the actions each member should take, but the belonging cues are what determine the real value system.

How Belonging Cues Influence Your Organization

Changing a culture requires us to be constantly vigilant about the belonging cues that we and our leaders are sending out into the organization. Of course, for leaders, your belonging cues will speak much louder than any email missive or state-of-the-union address. What you do, what you talk about, and what you spend your time on will far outweigh any other type of communication. As a leader, change agent, or employee, consider your day-to-day interactions and reflect on whether you’re exhibiting the proper belonging cues. In the next section, we discuss key moments where you can position these positive belonging cues. Belonging cues don’t have to happen organically; they can be scripted, just as we discussed earlier, by scripting vital behaviors.

Although it can be difficult to assess just how much influence a CEO has over their organization, research suggests that there is a correlation between the CEO’s personality and how the organization acts. For example, one study of over one hundred CEOs found that the more a company features its CEO on its website and the higher the CEO’s salary is than the next-highest paid employee, the greater the chance that the company makes volatile and impulsive business decisions. In short, narcissistic and ego-driven leaders have companies that are full of narcissistic and ego-driven employees. Likewise, warm and trusting CEOs have more cohesive senior leaders, and intellectually curious CEOs have teams that are more flexible and tolerant of risk.¹³

For individuals who are not in a leadership position, it’s important to be aware of how susceptible we are to adopting behaviors and attitudes. If you don’t want to work in a culture that delights in gossip, you must resist the urge to engage in it. If you want to encourage your company’s desire to create a more diverse and inclusive workforce, you must make demonstrated efforts to include others in the decision making of your workgroup.

In DevDiv, we make concerted efforts to demonstrate, through belonging cues, exactly what our cultural values look like. For example, the Customer-Driven Workshop, we discussed earlier has proven to be a great environment to demonstrate our belonging cues. During the workshop we’re mindful of participants’ anxiety. For many of them, they’ve been on the job for only a few weeks.

That’s why we craft every experience in the workshop to celebrate when a hypothesis has been proven wrong or when a team realizes that it must pivot on its approach. When participants see us frame these adjustments as a new discovery to be celebrated, they’re seeing us model that learning is valuable in DevDiv.

For instance, during one of our workshops, two groups from completely different parts of the company realized that they were talking to similar customers. They decided that they could increase their overall learning if they combined forces.

As facilitators, we celebrated these two teams and used them as an example for the rest of the group of just how much more powerful our company would be if we all were willing to engage in similar behaviors every day. Shortly thereafter, other teams in the workshop started wandering the room looking for inspiration in one another’s work.

As you reflect on the purpose of your organization and the vital behaviors you want to see, think about the subtle cues you send each day. Are there situations in which your comments or behaviors are not aligned with your company’s values? How might these behaviors be affecting those around you?

Take Advantage of Key Moments

In the last section, we looked at Adriana’s challenging first day on the sales team of a large organization. The first day of work is an incredible opportunity for an organization to impress what they value on new employees. Yet they’re often reduced to menial tasks like getting your email working or getting access to applications and files. Little thought is given to creating a lasting impression that will stay with the employee forever.

In The Power of Moments, the authors suggest that our lives are defined in moments, typically in the form of the following:

Transitions: Graduating college, starting a new job, kicking off a new project, reorganization of a division
Milestones: Getting married, purchasing your first home, retirement
Pits: Getting laid off, losing an important client, failing a midterm exam

These moments can have a powerful effect on the trajectories of new behaviors or resolve.

However, so many organizations are ambivalent to these moments. They don’t wholeheartedly invest in things like first-day experiences, morale events, team bonding, or retirement parties. They’re seen as superfluous, time consuming, and costly.

Yet, it doesn’t take a lot of resources or even money to invest in these experiences.

Contrast Adriana’s first-day experience to the real-life, first-day experience at John Deere, an American corporation that manufactures tractors and other farming equipment. In The Power of Moments, the authors detail what it’s like on your first day at the company:¹⁴

Shortly after you accept the offer letter from John Deere, you get an email from a John Deere Friend. Let’s call her Anika. She introduces herself and shares some of the basics, where to park, what the dress norms are, and so forth. She also tells you that she’ll be waiting to greet you in the lobby at 9 A.M. on your first day.

When your first day comes, you park in the right place and make your way to the lobby, and there’s Anika! You recognize her from her photo. She points to the flat-screen monitor in the lobby—it features a giant headline: “Welcome, Arjun!”

Anika shows you to your cubicle. There’s a six-foot-tall banner set up next to it–it rises above the cubes to alert people that there’s a new hire. People stop by over the course of the day to say hello to you.

As you get settled, you notice the background image on your monitor. It’s a gorgeous shot of John Deere equipment on a farm at sunset, and the copy says, “Welcome to the most important work you’ll ever do.”

You notice you’ve already received your first email.

It’s from Sam Allen, the CEO of John Deere. In a short video, he talks a little bit about the company’s mission: “to provide the food, shelter, and infrastructure that will be needed by the world’s growing population.” He closes by saying, “Enjoy your first day, and I hope you’ll enjoy a long, successful, fulfilling career as part of the John Deere team.”

Now you notice there’s a gift on your desk. It’s a stainless-steel replica of John Deere’s original “self-polishing plow,” created in 1837. An accompanying card explains why farmers loved it.

At midday, Anika collects you for a lunch off-site with a small group. They ask about your background and tell you about some of the projects they’re working on. Later in the day, the department manager (your boss’s boss) comes over and makes plans to have lunch with you the next week.

You leave the office that day thinking, I belong here. The work we’re doing matters. And I matter to them.

Wow.

What John Deere has created with their “First Day Experience” is a powerful moment of connection and belonging. Employees who encounter that experience have a sense of the mission and values of the company, not because they read it in a pamphlet, but because they were demonstrated in all the belonging cues sent by employees and management.

This wasn’t done by happenstance or luck. The team at John Deere engineers these moments. It is in all the little touches and coordination. For example, by ensuring that you have a “John Deere Friend” helping you navigate your first day, even before you arrive. The welcome signs in the lobby and above your cubicle not only make you feel special, but are also reminders to the rest of the employees of their responsibility to stop by and introduce themselves. They script the vital behaviors that are required when a new employee joins the team.

As agents of culture change, you must recognize the power of belonging cues and make certain that we’re not inadvertently sending mixed messages to your employees. You must also be on the constant lookout for moments for which you can script belonging cues.

An Example of How DevDiv Scripts Belonging Cues

An example of this was our “PM All Hands” event in DevDiv. This is an internal meeting that brings together all our program managers in DevDiv. I was asked if there were any stories we could highlight or topics we could discuss to fill an available time slot in the schedule.

After reviewing the other presentations that were on the agenda, I pointed out that all of them were demonstrating new or upcoming features in the product. There was nothing inherently wrong with that; the All Hands is a great way to get a sense of what everyone is working on. However, it was also a missed opportunity.

“We’re an organization that is all about learning,” I said. “But we’re not showcasing any stories here where someone did something innovative to learn.”

I explained that, if we were only going to bring program managers up on stage who shipped something, everyone in the audience would wisely assume the quickest way to get equal visibility would be to ship something as well. Keep this going and you’d have an organization motivated to get something shipped, regardless of whether customers want it.

After that realization, we looked across the organization for an exceptional example of learning. Thankfully, we had plenty to choose from and landed on a great example. We decided to feature a junior-level program manager who had discovered new ways to get in contact with our customers. What made the story great was that he had discovered an issue (through our telemetry) that suggested our customers were having trouble deploying a specific application type to Azure, Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure offering. Rather than just sending the discovery over to the Azure team, he decided to conduct a quick round of interviews with some of these customers and learned how the deployment issue was affecting them. After talking directly with these customers, he was able to gain a better picture of the issue and could better relate those experiences to the product team and ultimately improve the experience for those customers. What he was able to demonstrate, through his own story, was the willingness to be curious and learn, even though the issue he uncovered wasn’t directly tied to his product team’s responsibilities. He could’ve easily said, “Yeah, this issue isn’t my problem. This is another team.” Instead, he decided to connect with our customers and learn how he might be able to help them.

Allowing this enterprising program manager to take the stage and share his story was a way for us to communicate a strong belonging cue to other employees: there are many ways to gain recognition in DevDiv. Shipping features our customers love is one way, but so is finding innovative ways to connect with and gather feedback from them.

It not only gave us a chance to celebrate this employee’s unique contribution, it allowed us to signal to everyone else what it takes to become a leader within the organization. Since then, we’ve become far more mindful of these belonging cues, especially during large events and quarterly staff meetings. We’re using these stories to get others to mimic the vital behaviors. It has now become the norm to highlight examples of innovative learning in our All Hands meetings.

What you shine a spotlight on, who you reward and give visibility to, and which outcomes you choose to celebrate are all incredibly powerful ways to build new leaders that will ultimately build your culture.

So when you have an opportunity to shine a light on someone’s work, consider the following:

Why is the work being chosen? Do the reasons align with your cultural values?
Is there diversity in your selection process? Are you always showcasing the same employees, or are there opportunities to share new faces and voices?
Do you have a platform in place to adequately celebrate innovative or groundbreaking work?
How do you typically send out these examples? Is it over email, video, or live presentations? Are your employees engaging with these messages or ignoring them?

Also consider this:

How are you taking advantage of key moments throughout your employees’ careers to reinforce your company’s values?
What’s the experience like for a new member joining your company or team? Have you asked them?
What’s the experience like for a member who’s leaving the team? Are they acknowledged, or is their departure met with silence and tension?

Building leaders is an essential function for any organization to maintain longevity. Spend time reflecting on the ways you build leaders in your organization. Are your cultural change initiatives including opportunities to raise the visibility and career capital of those who are investing in the new culture?

Rethinking How We Interview New Candidates

As we began to shift our culture to emphasize our learning-first mindset, it became clear to us that the way we were searching for new candidates needed to change as well. John Montgomery, corporate vice president and head of program management in DevDiv, decided to assemble a team to explore how we might reveal skills in potential candidates that reflected learning, questioning, and a willingness to connect with customers.

Throughout their exploration, the team landed on three major epiphanies.

Epiphany 1: Our Interview Questions Didn’t Reflect Our Values

We discovered that our questions tended to trend toward assessing a candidate’s ability to apply existing knowledge and relate it to, in some cases, irrelevant situations.

“I started at Microsoft when we were still asking questions about why manhole covers were round, how many ping-pong balls would fill a 747, and how to reverse a linked list,” John remembers. “In 20 years here, I’ve yet to have to write the code to reverse a linked list or fill a 747 with any kind of ball.”¹⁵

Even though DevDiv had moved on beyond asking those types of questions, we found that our interviews were overly focused on assessing a candidate’s existing knowledge. Domain expertise and technical competency are important, but we were unsatisfied because it didn’t give us the complete picture.

When Satya visited DevDiv, I’ll never forget something he said to us: “People think I hire them because of what they know. Sure, I do. But I also hire people for their capacity to learn.”

Epiphany 2: Not Everyone Does Their Best Work in Fast-Paced, High-Pressure Situations

As the company committed itself to creating a more inclusive environment, we had to admit that the interview process overemphasized a candidate’s ability to “think fast” or come up with a solution to a difficult question on the fly. This simply didn’t reflect how we worked in DevDiv. We were thoughtful decision makers who welcomed debate and collaboration. Having the “right answer” all on your own, in a matter of minutes, just didn’t reflect the reality of how we did our work.

Epiphany 3: The Best Way to See How Someone Works Is to Work with Them

During our exploration, John met with a couple of engineering teams and learned that they were beginning to work with candidates to solve a bug or feature as part of the interview process. This was producing promising results, and it felt more collaborative and open. It also gave the candidate an ability to envision what it was like to work with us.

Armed with these learnings, John wrote an email with his findings and shared it more broadly with our teams. He asked for feedback and asked for us to pilot new ways of conducting the interview process. We started small, experimenting with different approaches in our interviews, eventually creating the “alternative interview framework” for our program managers.

Here are some of the things we began doing differently:

Sharing the interview in advance: A few days before the interview, we give candidates a detailed outline for the day, including the problem we’ll be asking them to work on with us. This gives them time to process our goals and even do a little research on the topic beforehand.
Work on a real problem: We now give candidates problems that are closer to the types of challenges they’ll get in their everyday work. The goal isn’t to get “free ideas” from potential candidates. It’s to give them a clear picture of what the job entails, and it gives us a chance to assess their performance within the context of the real challenges we will assign to them.
Give access to data: In DevDiv, we make decisions based on what we learn from our customers. This requires our teams to have access to data and research. Therefore, during the interview, we will often supply a candidate with customer development research, interview notes, usage data, designs, mockups, or whatever relevant data we have regarding the problem we’ve assigned to them. It gives the candidate a chance to make informed decisions and gives us insight into their willingness to learn new information before solving problems.
Make it interactive: Question-and-answer interviews aren’t how we work with one another in DevDiv, so we don’t want that to be the only way we look for candidates, either. Getting “in the trenches” and working together is really the best way to get to know someone. Toward that end, we create moments during the interview for those types of interactions to occur.
Follow a single scenario: To avoid overloading the candidate, we focus their attention on a single scenario or problem space. Throughout the day, our teams take a candidate through understanding the customer and the problem, ideating on a concept, discussing how we might bring the solution to the customer, and strategizing how we can continue to learn after its release. The day ends up being a microjourney of an entire PM project.
Pair interviewers: We found that having two people interview the candidate at a time creates a more dynamic environment, with multiple collaborators. It also helps us by having two sets of ears on our end to ensure that we are listening to candidates closely. Additionally, by pairing interviewers together, we create opportunities to help train future interviewers and diversify our network of available employees to interview future candidates.
Hold feedback until the end: We ask our interviewers to hold their feedback until the completion of the entire process. This helps us avoid biasing one another before we all have had a chance to spend time with the candidate.

At the end of each interview loop, we assess how it went and reflect on our process. We admit that the process is time consuming and it can be difficult to schedule all the necessary employees to interview a candidate for the day, but we’ve been encouraged by the positive reaction we’ve had from candidates. In a few cases, candidates whom we eventually hired stated that our interview process was one of the major factors as to why they chose DevDiv over competing offers.

Applying the Hack

Here are some smaller hacks that you can implement to build the next wave of leaders who exemplify the customer-driven culture you’re trying to build:

Create a list of individuals who exemplify a customer-driven culture. Have a manager or leader from your team send each of them a small thank you note to show appreciation for their hard work. John Montgomery routinely sends handwritten thank you notes when someone has gone above and beyond for a customer. Many employees (including myself) treasure these little gestures. A small act of recognition goes a very long way.
Many times, your organization’s leaders need help recognizing others. They have busy schedules and have difficulty seeing the work that’s happening on the ground. Give them updates and point to key individuals who are making progress.
Create opportunities for exceptional employees to have intimate “face time” with your leaders. Scheduling a free lunch for a team and their VP is an easy and low-cost way to shine a spotlight on exceptional behavior.
If you’re in the culture business, you’re in the storytelling business. Identify members of your team to act as the “investigative reporters.” These people will actively seek out stories that exemplify the new culture. They’ll take time to get all the details of the story and create a complete write-up. They can also prepare a set of presentation slides, so that leaders can easily distribute these stories when asked for examples of the new culture.
Create a platform for others to share their work. At Microsoft, we have a “brown bag” series, in which anyone, from any team, can invite others to bring their lunch and listen to them speak about emerging technology, customer learnings, or new features in the product. These avenues are a great way to highlight exceptional employees in your organization.
Create a culture room: a section of your team room, lobby, or break room full of pictures, customer testimonials, or stories of employees engaging in vital behaviors. Seeing these stories of success on the walls instead of in their email inboxes can create an energy that breaks the script and literally surrounds employees with the new culture.
Invest in others. Actively help them achieve their goals and advance in their careers. Delight in their promotions and recognize their achievements. When people feel like you’re invested in them, they’ll invest in you.
Town halls, executive Q+As, and divisional meetings are all excellent opportunities to celebrate behaviors that align with your new culture. Reflect on the belonging cues you’re sending out during these meetings. Who gets to come up on stage? Who gets the spotlight? Why are they getting the spotlight? Is it because they’re exhibiting vital behaviors? If not, consider revising your roster.

¹ [Liuson]

² [Silver-2]

³ [Fleming]

⁴ [Bustillo]

⁵ [ABC13]

⁶ [Carbonara]

⁷ [Hansen] pp. 19

⁸ [Heath] pp. 49–72

⁹ [Lowdermilk-Rich] pp. 9–10

¹⁰ [Coyle] pp. 10–11

¹¹ [Chartrand]

¹² [Friedman] p. 209

¹³ [Friedman] pp. 212–214

¹⁴ [Heath-2] pp. 20–21

¹⁵ [Montgomery-2]