CHAPTER 7
STEP #4: DEFINE THE DESIRED BEHAVIORS
Setting the desired behaviors is critical to renovating your culture, as is walking the walk at the very top. But when the leadership team is obviously truly operating as a team, that’s very, very contagious throughout the organization.
—FRANÇOIS LOCOH-DONOU, CEO, F5
Once the path has been established via a strong purpose, a more detailed element of that direction is agreeing on what behavioral aspects of the culture will best support that purpose and require more focus.
Most CEOs I talk with have an idea of what they want more of in their company. “I’d like us to be better at execution . . .” and “I wish we were more innovative . . .” and “We need to be more inclusive . . .” are common refrains. As companies evolve, often the culture drifts away from traits that have been successful in the past, which sometimes causes deficiencies in important core traits.
Understanding your culture type (or more often types) is important. According to a Glassdoor study, 77 percent of adults would evaluate a company’s culture before applying for an open position. Fifty-six percent rank an organization’s culture as more important than compensation.1
Anyone who has worked at different companies knows that cultures can differ dramatically from organization to organization, and often the structure of the organization plays a big part in determining the culture. I’ve had the privilege of being exposed to many different companies, and the cultural and structural differences are sometimes startling. Organizational structures vary from hierarchical to matrix to flat to (sometimes) holacratic—and everything in between. Other companies have aspects of their culture that define them, from team-based to individualistic; diverse to homogenous; innovative to risk averse; or cutthroat to overly inclusive.
Those cultures manifest themselves in actions throughout the company. Usually, it starts with the leader. For example, Tom Coughlin, former executive vice president of football operations at the Jacksonville Jaguars, was a stickler on time. His philosophy—which dated back to when he was a Super Bowl–winning coach for the New York Giants—was that if you’re not five minutes early to a meeting or commitment, you’re considered late. To accentuate this, Coughlin had the clocks set five minutes ahead at the Jacksonville Jaguars’ facility, which internally became known as “Tom Coughlin Time.”2 He was so serious about punctuality that he often fined players for tardiness. Everyone usually complied, but begrudgingly. Immediately upon his firing in 2019, the clocks were all changed back to normal time.
“That’s the first thing I noticed when I got in here,” said A. J. Bouye, one of the Jaguar players, the day after Coughlin was let go. “I thought that I was late for meetings. I look up, I had an extra five minutes, so I was good.”
Companies often have a rhythm and habits. As opposed to a Coughlin-led organization, you often find cultures where being late to meetings is common, or multitasking during meetings is acceptable. Or you’ll see commonality in the way decisions are made. Slow versus fast, consensus versus authoritarian, evidence-based versus instinct. Whatever the cultural norm, it often emanates from the top.
Amazon is a great example of how cultural norms emanate from the top. Famous for its “no PowerPoint” culture, employees who are presenting on a topic instead create several-page narrative memos that are silently read at the beginning of each meeting—kind of like a “study hall” session, according to CEO and founder Jeff Bezos.3 Bezos created this process early on, and he freely admits that silently reading memos together is the “weirdest meeting culture.” Weird or not, it’s effective.
“If we don’t, the executives—like high school kids—will try to bluff their way through a meeting,” Bezos explained. “[The memo is] supposed to create the context for what will then be a good discussion. The reason writing a good four-page memo is harder than writing a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important.”
Bezos has additional reasons for this cultural oddity. “Often, when a memo isn’t great, it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard but instead a wrong expectation on scope,” he says. “These employees falsely believe a ‘high standard,’ six-page memo can be written in just a few days or even hours. In actuality, the process can take weeks. The great memos are written and rewritten, shared with colleagues who are asked to improve the work, set aside for a couple of days, and then edited again with a fresh mind.”
While I’ve not encountered another company with this type of memo culture, there’s certainly something refreshing about slowing down to put deep thought into preparing for a meeting—a practice today’s hectic environments in many companies often don’t allow. Cultural traits are reinforced every day through very overt actions, and every single company has these, whether intentional or not.
Culture Types
In our research on organizational culture, it’s clear that you can typecast cultures. There are many different culture types; our research team settled on 10 as the most common. The percentages in Table 7.1 represent what companies self-labeled as their culture type in a study we conducted. While there certainly are more than 10 culture types, these are a good starting point to identify your organization’s current culture and what type of culture you may want in the future. Keep in mind most companies have multiple types (these aren’t mutually exclusive), but almost no company exhibits all types.
TABLE 7.1 Culture Types
Supporting Behaviors
With clarity of what the desired new culture will (and will not) be, the next point of focus is to define the new behaviors that all leaders—from senior executives to middle managers to frontline managers—will need to exhibit (as well as avoid) to support the culture. These behaviors will likely differ depending on the type of culture desired, but it’s critical that the behaviors are clearly and constantly communicated, modeled, and embodied by the CEO and senior team. It’s also important to measure and reward the desired behaviors among the organization’s leaders; at the very least, the behaviors should be components of the company’s performance management process.
F5, a global company that specializes in application delivery and security services, is a good example of this. Core to the culture evolution at F5 is something CEO François Locoh-Donou and CHRO Ana White partnered on called BeF5—a set of five behaviors they believe are necessary for the success of the company’s long-term strategy, as shown in Figure 7.1.
FIGURE 7.1 Five Behaviors for F5 Success
Settling on those behaviors took time, however. Like many CEOs, Locoh-Donou inherited a strong 20+ year culture that had been in place long before he arrived in 2017.
“My first priority,” recalls Locoh-Donou, “was to respect the past. I felt this way because I’ve seen too many times the movie where the company is very successful, but then plateaus a little bit. A new CEO comes in and immediately starts communicating all the new things the company needs to do to be successful again. That talk track is dismissive of what’s been done previously, and it’s a very quick way to alienate all the people who have worked hard at the company for many years. The reason the company became prominent is because of them, so it’s important to honor that.”
Locoh-Donou, who grew up in the West African country of Togo, draws on his heritage when thinking about culture change.
“My philosophy on this is an African one. We very much believe in elders and the wisdom of the people who came before us. So, we are very respectful of the past. And I think if you’re renovating or changing your culture, you have to be respectful of the past because otherwise people won’t come with you. If you tell them, or even project, that everything they’ve done previously was wrong, you’ll have a hard time bringing them into the future.”
If you aren’t familiar with F5, it’s an interesting story. Founded in 1996 in Seattle, the company originally focused on virtual reality applications, a new and promising niche at the time. But the company ran into a problem that plagued many others: the servers weren’t fast enough. To compensate, F5 turned its attention to developing a load-balancing algorithm and brought in investment banker Jeff Hussey to run the company. The original developers left shortly thereafter to pursue their virtual reality dreams, while Hussey remained to build on the algorithm and create what would later become a multibillion-dollar technology company.
If you’re wondering, the company’s strange name was inspired by the movie Twister.
“A category five was the most stormy of the twisters in the movie and then it gave birth to F5,” explained Kara Sprague, executive vice president and general manager of application services.4 “This was late 90s and the whole idea was about the company coming out of the storm of traffic that was happening in the Internet.”
F5 launched its first product in the eye of the storm of the Internet in 1997, a load balancer called BIG-IP that controlled web traffic. When a server went down or became overloaded, BIG-IP directed traffic to other servers. This capability made F5 a hot start-up, which the company leveraged in 1999 by going public on NASDAQ.
After weathering the dot-com bubble burst and shifting focus to the enterprise market, the company found its niche in the security space and eventually as the central control point in the cloud. In 2017, the company hired Locoh-Donou as CEO. Locoh-Donou previously held senior leadership positions at Ciena, a network strategy and technology company, and had a reputation as a very solid technology executive.
Locoh-Donou holds engineering degrees from École Centrale de Marseille and Télécom ParisTech and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is on the board of Capital One Financial Corporation and is also the co-founder of Cajou Espoir, a cashew-processing facility that employs several hundred people in his native Togo, 80 percent of whom are women. A worldly individual, he was no stranger to the nuances of culture. But from a culture standpoint, Locoh-Donou was surprised at what he found in his first few weeks at F5.
“Generally, what I found is that people were quite loyal to the company, and loyal to one another,” he told me in a meeting, which White also attended. “I discovered that people at F5 care about each other—they had a soul, they had authenticity, and they truly wanted to help each other and did so all the time—and they wanted to do the right thing for the company. I found this trait interesting. Companies in the technology industry often have a mercenary culture where people come in for two to three years looking for the big payday and then move on to the next 30 percent salary increase. There often isn’t really a strong sense of mission. It was refreshing.”
That aspect of the culture was one to be retained, but he discovered there were other aspects that needed change.
“We had come to dominate our market, and I felt that our culture of customer focus, or customer obsession, had eroded a little bit . . . that’s one of the behaviors we had lost and I wanted to stress it, to bring it back,” Locoh-Donou continued. “When Ana joined as our head of HR, we put together the BeF5 behaviors, which were two things: One is codifying the existing culture, but also reemphasizing other aspects of the culture that were very important for the future of the company.”
“The help-each-other aspect was always a staple . . . it’s really like a family, and one of many reasons I joined F5 from Microsoft,” White recalled. “So, one of the first behaviors we codified was We help each other thrive. It was a natural behavior we wanted to reinforce, as was, We obsess over customer needs.”
But Locoh-Donou recognized there was a hurdle to overcome if he were to enact any change in the company. “I don’t think we have resistance to change. But we have resistance to the speed of change.”
“It’s important to remember that F5, like a lot of companies, was so successful for so long, they hadn’t previously had to endure or drive massive amounts of change,” said White. “As François and the team were transforming the company, we were introducing change rapidly in an attempt to be more agile. Speed on decisions was not our strong suit . . . but needed to be. Thus, the behavior of We choose speed was born.”
“But I would say in all transparency, there was some level of resistance to how much change we were introducing so quickly. And how much speed we were expecting employees to act with. Given that, we realized we needed an overarching guiding principle, and developed We do the right thing to sit above the behaviors. We still want to be as agile and nimble as possible, but We do the right thing trumps everything else. Employees really appreciated that.”
The other behaviors of We are owners and We create a more diverse and inclusive F5 came naturally to Locoh-Donou and White.
“Diversity and inclusion was very important to François, and me. It is key that every employee focused on creating the most diverse and inclusive company possible,” White added. “Including it as a core behavior was a unique opportunity to be something really great and differentiate ourselves in the tech industry.”
The F5 behaviors are a testament to what culture renovation is all about and are core to what F5 is as a company. Today, those behaviors are the first thing anyone sees entering the gorgeous offices in F5 Tower in the heart of Seattle. More importantly, Locoh-Donou constantly reinforces with leaders what it means to “BeF5” and ensures leaders are doing the same with others. This includes embedding BeF5 into systems and processes, such as performance management reviews, employee recognition programs, and employee learning and development programs.
“What’s made our culture renovation successful is leaders leading from the top,” observed White. “When we rolled out the new behaviors, we spent a lot of time discussing it as a leadership team. We all agreed that the new behaviors needed to be much more than words on a slide. It’s actually the behaviors of the leaders at the top that’s really made it work super well.”
Locoh-Donou agrees. “The leadership team first and foremost had to model the behaviors . . . and that starts with me. It starts with humility. It starts with being generous . . . it starts by having each other’s back. Even though several were previously operating in silos, the team started truly operating as a team and working with each other. Setting the desired behaviors is critical to renovating your culture, as is walking the walk at the very top. But when the leadership team is obviously truly operating as a team, that’s very, very contagious throughout the organization.”
While it’s important to be clear on behaviors, it’s also important to constantly reinforce them. “We can all use a nudge occasionally,” Locoh-Donou advises, “especially at critical points in day-to-day activities. I tell our leaders to stop and consider the behaviors when making decisions, allocating resources, determining rewards and recognition, making hiring decisions, and communicating. I have learned from Ana and many members of her HR team that it is ideal to pull both small and big levers to reflect the new culture. From training programs, to the way employees are rewarded and recognized, to how new talent is recruited.”
Locoh-Donou paused for a second, reflecting on what lies ahead.
“There is still a lot to learn.”