Dolly Parton Has An Opinion on How to Improve Your Culture
How to define and reinforce what’s uniquely great about your team
The Dolly Parton School of Management
The best business advice I’ve ever heard didn’t come from an MBA professor or a famous CEO or a billionaire investor. It came from Dolly Parton.
Yes, that Dolly Parton.
Dolly’s take is short but powerful:
“Find out who you are and then do it on purpose.”
First of all, if you’re looking for a one-line recipe for an authentic life, that’s it.
But that single sentence might also be the best guideline ever for how to build a strong business - and a strong culture.
Working on your culture comes with a high risk of overcomplicating things. Anyone who has worked in, around, or with HR professionals or consultants will recognize some of the listening techniques that go into culture work: measuring your employees’ perceptions of the organization with surveys, comparing that data to benchmarks, and teasing out the relevant “so what’s. Companies will often assemble “culture committees” - delegates of the employee base who discuss the company’s culture and attempt to put words to what working inside the business feels like.
But in my opinion, starting with measurement or discussion is the wrong way to start a conversation about culture.
If you start there, you’re skipping a step. A critical one.
How to Define Your Culture
To build a strong culture, you need to start by examining what’s already great about your team. Using Dolly’s words, you need to start by taking stock of “who you are” today. More specifically, you need to take inventory of your best people, how they behave, and how that behavior positive impacts the business.
When we work with our portfolio’s leadership teams, we do this using an exercise our partners at The Table Group call “Rockstars and Misfits.” [1]
We start by asking the team to make a list of the best people in the organization. The high-performers. The culture carriers. The people that, if they could, they would happily clone. Then we break down what makes those people so great. We talk about why they stand out, how they approach their work, and how they treat their customers and teammates. We get specific about how they show up. And we write all of it down.
Then, we ask for the Misfits. Misfits aren’t necessarily defined by their performance. We’ve put plenty of people on the Misfit list who hit their quota, know their product, and meet their deadlines. But the folks who end up on the Misfit list have something in common: they hold the team back. They create conflict. They frustrate. They are (to borrow a phrase from one of our portfolio CEOs) “complicators, not simplifiers.”
Unsurprisingly, creating the Misfit list is the most interesting part of this work. Like writing a “working with me” guide, it’s a trust-building exercise in disguise. The key here is asking people to open up. We don’t just ask leaders for people from their own teams. In fact, we encourage them to include names from other parts of the organization on their misfit lists. This provides a small opportunity for the team to demonstrate vulnerability and accountability by accepting feedback on their teams (and indirectly, about their leadership) in a safe, structured, mutually supportive setting. It also provides a foil to the list of “rockstar” qualities we just created. Most importantly, the misfit list gives you a cultural dark side to consider. It creates some honest clarity about what our team can look like when we’re “at our worst.”
As a final step, we synthesize the two lists, Rockstars and Misfits, into the team’s core values: The unique qualities and behaviors that are true of your top people, most of the time. Those are your core values. Using Dolly’s words again, they’re “who you are” when you’re at your best.
Once the team has identified their core values, we immediately start to weave them into how the company makes its people decisions. A quick and easy starter checklist for how to do this well comes from Elad Gil’s fantastic High Growth Handbook:
1. “Have strong hiring filters in place. Explicitly filter for people with common values. You need to be careful that this does not act as a mechanism to inadvertently filter out diverse populations. You can have both a common sense of purpose and a diverse employee base at the same time.
2. Constantly emphasize values day-to-day. Repeat them until you are blue in the face. The second you are really sick of saying the same thing over and over, you will find people have started repeating it back to you.
3. Reward people based on performance as well as culture. People should be rewarded (with promotions, financially, etc.) for both productivity and for living the company’s values.
4. Get rid of bad culture fits quickly. Fire bad culture fits even faster than you fire low performers.” [2]
That’s how you work on culture the right way.
Figure out what your best people are like, and then recruit, remind, develop, and reward everybody else with those “rockstar” qualities in mind. And do it repeatedly and intentionally. It’s only when you’ve built process and discipline around the four steps above that you can say that you’ve not only found out who you are, but also that you’re “doing it on purpose.”
Final Thoughts
Working on your culture?
Good. Make Dolly proud and follow her simple, two-step advice.
Find out who you are.
Then do it on purpose.
After that, then you can start measuring things like employee NPS and all that other stuff. But don’t start measuring before you define what your team already looks like when they’re at their best.
That’s the first step to building a culture worth working in — and a company worth working for.
[1] For more on Rockstars and Misfits (and a start-to-finish summary of the leadership alignment approach we use in our portfolio), pick up The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni. It’s probably my most-gifted book.
[2] High Growth Handbook also has an outstanding example of a more detailed executive-level Scouting Report from Claire Hughes Johnson, COO at Stripe.