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Chapter Seven

ACTION 3
Acting on the
“Smell of the Place”

People who Glow are astute at acting on the “smell of the place.”They know the signs of the Big Freeze and how to avoid them and take action to ensure that they move to teams and communities where cooperation flourishes.

Sometimes you have no choice: if you want to Glow, you may have to be prepared to move, to put yourself in a different place with different people. To do that you have to become skilled at understanding and acting on the “smell of the place.” The “smell of the place” consists of all those subtle clues that tell you intuitively and rationally what a place is like before you join. Being aware of the “smell of the place” will help you find teams, communities, and companies that will help you Glow and avoid those that won’t.

Remember that Glowing is a lot about you, but it is also about the company you keep. That’s what Gareth found in his work experience. Recall that Gareth is a young man who from an early age has been trained to adopt the habits of cooperation. When he left college, he was lucky enough to join a company that supported and cherished his cooperative attitude and reinforced and built his cooperative skills. I do believe that luck was involved because my guess is that Gareth had little idea of what he was letting himself in for at the time. So when he switched companies, he was in for a big shock. Not only did his colleagues fail to behave cooperatively with him, they even went so far as to exploit his goodwill. Gareth had joined a place that was playing to a complete different set of rules than those he was used to—and he was coming out as the loser. Gareth had failed to pick up on the “smell of the place,” which was distinctly competitive, before he took the job.

Gareth was experiencing one of the worst forms of cooperative misalignment: a cooperative person surrounded by others who are motivated solely by self-interest. Under such circumstances, he was doomed to be treated unfairly. Of course, you could say that the moral of the story is that it is smart to be self-interested when you are with others who are also self-interested. The problem is that being self-interested will significantly reduce your capacity to Glow and, in the longer run, your innovation and success.

What is clear from Gareth’s story is that the alignment of the three resources of your work life really matters. If you develop cooperative attitudes, habits, and skills, you will not flourish in a self-interested, highly competitive business. So you need to become sensitized to highly competitive teams and businesses—and avoid them.

How are you going to do that? Obviously, you don’t want to end up like Gareth, surrounded by self-interested people without realizing what he was getting himself into. What you need is a strategy for choosing a team and a business to work with.

Here is a strategy to help you to understand and act on the “smell of the place.” The point is to ask a set of questions before you decide to join. By asking these questions, you are gathering sufficient information to get a handle on the culture of the place and the attitudes toward cooperation—the “smell of the place.” By asking these questions, you put yourself on a more equal footing with prospective employers and can gain an understanding of what you might be in for.

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The Three Questions That Identify
the “Smell of the Place”

These are the questions you should answer before you decide to join a team, a community, or a company.

First Question: Is the Language of the Place
Cooperative or Competitive?

The language of the place is an important aspect of the “smell of the place” and in this case the “sound of the place.” So listen very carefully to the words that are used to describe the company and the language executives and employees use.

Begin by engaging in an Internet search on how the executives of the business describe themselves and how the media and analysts describe the company. If Gareth had done this before joining the second company, he would have found the following excerpts from the business press:

Every word used to describe this company suggests the opposite of cooperation. Aggressive, ruthless, no mercy—all are words that would have alerted Gareth to the “smell of the place.” By looking closely at what analysts and commentators said about the company, Gareth would have concluded that this is a place where cooperation is unlikely to flourish.

Furthermore, if he had read the CEO’s statement in the annual report, he would have seen this statement: “I believe this is a war we have to win; we are in the midst of a furious battle.” Again, the place sounds competitive, describing its business with words like war, win, and battle. If you want to find a company where cooperation flourishes, look for a CEO who uses words like partnership, fairness, and community when describing the company and who uses we far more oft en than I.

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Actions to take now to analyze the
language of the place

Action 3.1 Analyzing the language of the place. Next time you are thinking about changing companies or finding a new job, search for what analysts say about the company and what the CEO or other executives say in press releases and annual reports.

• Count how many times they use competitive words (war, battles, losers, winners) and how many times they use cooperative words (partnership, cooperation, team).
• Use your sense of the “smell of the place” to avoid highly competitive places and find cooperative places.

Second Question: How Well Does the
Executive Team Work Together?

Next, you can get a sense of the “smell of the place” before you join by observing how the executive team works together. The executives’ day-to-day interactions will give you some important clues as to what you can expect with regard to cooperation. Cooperative companies and communities have teams who work cooperatively with each other; the Big Freeze often comes with teams who are at war with each other.

So what Gareth should have done to get the “smell of the place” was to read any reports he could get his hands on indicating how the senior executives work with one another. This would have given him an important insight into whether a culture of cooperation prevailed. It would also have given him an idea as to whether there would be cooperative coaches and mentors available to support him after he joined. Had he done this, he would have found comments in the press like these:

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With this sort of information, Gareth would have realized that this was not a cooperative place to work, and was a place where he was unlikely to gain access to a mentor.

Actions to take now to analyze how
executives work together

Action 3.2 Analyzing the press. Take a look at press coverage of the company over the past year, and see if you can find three or four articles about the senior executives and how they work as a team.

• First, assess the extent to which commentators and analysts describe the company as internally competitive. For example, do they describe the executives as “warriors” or write about “boardroom battles”?
• Next, consider the length of time senior executives stay in their positions before they are fired or move on. If executive turnover is high, this gives you a clue about the “smell of the place.”
• If commentators use competitive language to describe the company and executive turnover is high, you can assume it is a competitive place and not one that will enable you to Glow.

Third Question: Will I Be Treated in a
Way That Fosters Cooperation?

Finally, you will need to take a close look at the way in which people in the company are treated—before you take the job. For example, you will want to consider how pay awards are determined, how selection takes place (reflect on the process they have so far used with you), how people are promoted and trained. Here are four specific questions you can legitimately ask:

How will my pay be determined? Companies where there is little emphasis on supporting cooperative behavior tend to place a great deal of emphasis on paying individual “stars.” On the face of it, this may sound attractive. The danger is that an overemphasis on individual performance rather than group performance works strongly against people cooperating with one another. In cooperative companies there will be a greater balance between paying for the performance of the individual and the performance of the team.

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On what basis will I be promoted? The choices around how promotion takes place are a crucial signal to the “smell of the place.” Cooperative cultures tend to focus on gathering information from a wide range of colleagues and peers before making promotion decisions. At the bank Goldman Sachs, renowned for its internal culture of cooperation, the views of at least twenty peers and colleagues are systematically heard before a promotion to a senior position is made. In soliciting the views of peers and colleagues, the emphasis is on discovering to what extent the candidate for promotion is able and skilled at working both with colleagues on his or her team and with colleagues in other functions and company businesses.

Will I be mentored? I have discovered that one of the most important signs of a cooperative company is that senior executives are prepared to give their time to mentor others. At the communications and data company Reuters, for example, mentoring is a two-way process. Senior executives mentor younger members of the firm on business strategy and market conditions. At the same time, younger members mentor senior executives (even CEO Tom Glaser) in the latest trends in technology. These networks for mentoring relationships signal to potential new joiners that Reuters is likely to be a place where they will experience a cooperative culture.

Will I have an opportunity to engage with the wider community? Companies that emphasize working with the outside community are more likely to be cooperative inside. An example of this would be eBay employees, who for many years have worked closely with villages in South America. Members of the company provide the skills and resources to help these villages have access to the computing skills that will give them access to global marketplaces for their goods. By working cooperatively outside the company, executives are learning the habits of cooperation that they can take back with them into the company.

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Actions to take now to analyze whether the
company supports cooperation

Action 3.3 Asking questions before joining. Before you take your next job, ask four questions about the company:

• How will I be paid? Is there some team or community aspect of the way in which pay is determined?
• How will I be promoted? Are people promoted on the basis of their competence as team members, coaches, and mentors?
• What are the opportunities for me to be mentored?
• Will I get the chance to support the community?

Armed with insights from these three broad questions about language, senior executive behavior, and people practices, you will be in a much stronger position to determine before you join a company whether it is a place where cooperation flourishes. Of course, you may decide that despite having determined that this is a place where cooperation does not flourish, you still wish to join. That’s your prerogative. Just be aware that you will have to work especially hard if you want to Glow.

Key Points in Chapter Seven
ACTION 3
Acting on the “Smell of the Place”

Sometimes you have no choice—if you want to Glow, you may have to be prepared to move your job to a different place with different people. To make sure you join a place that will encourage you to Glow, you have to become skilled at understanding and acting on the “smell of the place”—those subtle clues that tell you intuitively and rationally what this place is like before you join. That will help you find teams, communities, and companies that will encourage you to Glow and avoid those that won’t.

Before you join a new business, community, or company, get answers to these three questions:

First Question: Is the Language of the Place
Cooperative or Competitive?

Action 3.1 Analyzing the language of the place

Second Question: How Well Does the Senior Team Work Together?

Action 3.2 Analyzing the press

Third Question: Will I Be Treated in a Way That Fosters Cooperation?

Action 3.3 Asking questions before joining

Armed with insights from these three broad questions, you will be in a much stronger position to determine before you join a company whether it is a place where cooperation flourishes.