Identify and communicate values
While Perkins+Will didn’t know what it was culturally, there was no denying it had a strong brand. Employees took pride in their design abilities, and the firm consistently won design awards.
“We sort of thought we knew who we were, and the market sort of thought they knew who we were, but we hadn’t been very explicit in listing, one, two, three, four, five — these are the five things that are most important to this company,” Harrison says. “That’s one of the lessons learned is just the importance of things that seem obvious are often not if you don’t state them.”
First, come to agreement on what your company represents. Harrison and the team engaged people in different ways to find out what people thought they were. Some of that happened in all-firm leadership retreats with opening a dialogue.
“You have to step back and look at fundamental human values — in particular now — and by that, I don’t mean business values, but I mean deeper sort of ethics or social factors — something that’s actually going to mean something on a broad social context,” he says.
For example, Harrison looks at Ray Anderson of Interface Inc. as an example. Years ago, he went through an epiphany about the environment and completely redesigned his carpet company around sustainability — long before being green was in vogue. It redefined the company and made it very successful.
“Companies need to be able to articulate their position in more sort of human and socially relevant terms,” he says. “You need to strip away the business jargon and really get down to what makes a difference to people in the world, and if you can get to that, then a lot of other stuff is easier to make decisions about.”
When identifying values, it’s important to be realistic, yet balanced with looking toward the future.
“Be honest with yourself so you don’t try to be someone you’re not, but on the other hand, you have to have aspirations,” Harrison says. “It’s a combination of being realistic and pragmatic with being a little bit of a dreamer, but you can’t be such a dreamer that you’re switching from being, say, a Ford to a BMW overnight.”
In addition to having conversations internally, Perkins+Will also hired a firm to do research.
“They did an external audit on our brand where they spoke with our clients, both existing clients, and they spoke with clients who we would like to work for but aren’t working for,” Harrison says.
The research firm also spoke with the Perkins+Will’s competitors and with the press to get an idea of where the company stood in the marketplace. Then the company had to reconcile between what the outside thought and how the company internally saw itself.
One of the biggest values Harrison saw that employees weren’t buying in to was business performance. They saw it as something conflicting with design as opposed to something supporting it.
“We had to go through a ridiculously lengthy process to create a language whereby people could accept that high business performance could actually lead to a more thriving design company, …” Harrison says. “It’s simplistic, but it was an important turning point — it was a ‘both and’ as opposed to an ‘either or’ mindset.”
That language and communicating it is crucial to getting buy-in for a cultural alignment.
“You just have to talk a lot and talk and talk and talk, and you have to repeat yourself,” he says. “That’s one of the most important roles of leadership. I’m not an extrovert, and I thought you just say it once, and everyone would understand it. Or put it in an e-mail, and they would understand it that way. Or have an annual address, and they would get it that way. I’ve learned that you have to communicate the same message in a lot of ways — forums, large groups, small groups, etc.
“Things that I said three months ago to everyone, I feel like I have to go back and repeat it. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s the process of repeating it, articulating some very fundamental aspects of the vision of the company or the values the company has or the business objectives of the company — basic things that could be easily communicated in a short period of time.”
And he’s not talking a three-day retreat. It’s shorter things, like 30 minutes of talk.
“You can get into quite a bit of depth in that period of time, …” Harrison says. “It’s the importance of overcommunicating the things that seem like they should be obvious but maybe aren’t if you’re not overcommunicating.”
The more you do this, the more the people below you will communicate, as well.
“That sort of builds,” Harrison says. “If the executive leadership is doing that, then other people in the company begin to sort of take it on. What you really want is multiple layers of the company doing the same thing but in a parallel way so they’re reinforcing each other.”
