Episode Summary

Nothing is more important to the success of a district than organizational culture: it determines the performance and satisfaction of your staff, aids your marketing and communication efforts and ultimately defines the experience of your students.

Organizational culture is not a short-term initiative, nor is it office perks or a mission statement. It is how your staff experiences working for you, the beliefs they form about those experiences and how those beliefs motivate their actions. Employees who have a positive attitude about their workplace work better and smarter. And employee satisfaction is the greatest indicator of customer satisfaction.

In this episode, we’ll discuss how to determine the health of your organizational culture, steps you can take today and every day to improve it and why it’s so important that you do.

Episode Notes

Organizational culture has become a buzzword like AI, NFT or Bitcoin—everyone is talking about it but very few people know how it actually works. In this episode, we explain what organizational culture really is, and how it shapes the success of individual employees and your company as a whole. 

We’ll take a look at real world examples of excellent organizational culture at work, hear expert opinions on the science of employee motivation, how to shape a strong company culture and actionable steps you can take to start transforming yours. 

Featured in this episode are Neel Doshi, Margaret Heffernan, Dr. Curtis Jones and Karen Borchert. 

Visit SchoolCEO’s website for more information about our research What Do Millennial Teachers Want and 2023 Teacher Satisfaction Survey.

To read more of Neel Doshi’s research on the science of motivation, visit  https://www.factor.ai/about and read his book, “Primed to Perform: How to Build the Highest Performing Cultures Through the Science of Total Motivation.” You can also find Neel Doshi's podcast interview with SchoolCEO here and his article interview in SchoolCEO magazine here.

Read Margaret Heffernan’s book, “Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes” or listen to her full podcast interview with SchoolCEO here.

To learn about Alpaca’s work to recognize and appreciate teachers and measure how teachers and staff experience culture, check out https://www.alpacapacks.com/.

Toyota/NUUMI story excerpts taken from This American Life episode 561. 

Follow SchoolCEO on LinkedIn or X/Twitter @school_ceo. 

Subscribe to SchoolCEO at SchoolCEO.com for research, stories, and strategies for leading your schools. And if you have a story you’d like to share, email us at editor@schoolceo.com.

Learn more about SchoolCEO and all of our resources on our About page. SchoolCEO is powered by Apptegy, the maker of the leading K-12 communications and brand management platform.

Episode Transcript

Tyler Vawser (Host): In Season 3 of SchoolCEO Podcast, we're offering a comprehensive guide to school marketing. So far, we've covered brand, marketing, and communications. In this episode, we're exploring something that may seem beyond the scope of marketing, organizational culture. 

In schools, we sometimes refer to culture as the school environment or the student culture. For this episode, we'll explore different aspects of culture with a specific focus on employee or organizational culture. 

Here's why: Nothing is more important to the success of a district than organizational culture. It shapes who works for you, what drives your marketing, your messaging, your communications, and ultimately, the experience of students. 

The aim of school marketing is to change how people think and feel about your district and schools. Changing how your employees feel, directly and indirectly, changes how students, their families, and even people outside your organization feel about it too.

We turn to a true story that shows the power that culture has to transform an organization, even when the work, the location, and the people stay the same. 

Back in the 1960s and 70s, GM, or General Motors, dominated the automobile industry. In America, 50% of the entire market belonged to GM. It was the 500 pound gorilla of global car manufacturing. Toyota and other brands owned next to 0% of the US market at the time. 

Then, in the early 1980s, Toyota approached GM with a simple proposition. Toyota would show GM how they made small, low cost, high quality cars. In exchange, GM would help Toyota set up a factory in the US. 

Surprisingly, GM said yes. They saw an opportunity to learn Toyota's trade secrets and also make Toyota give up on ever wanting to build cars in America again. How? By giving Toyota the worst performing factory in America. 

The factory GM wanted to give Toyota was in Fresno, California. It was described as a “total wasteland.” Absenteeism hovered between 20 and 30% every day. That meant they had to overstaff the factory just to keep it running. The local bar was packed before shifts, and employees regularly arrived at work loaded. Crime rings and drug deals regularly happened in the factory. 

Factory Worker #1: “It was considered the worst workforce in the automobile industry in the United States and it was a reputation that was well earned.”

Factory Worker #2: “One of the expressions was you can buy anything you want in the GM plant in Fremont. If you want sex, if you want drugs, if you want alcohol – it’s there. During breaks; during lunchtimes. If you want to gamble illegally. Any illegal activity was available for the asking.”

Before Toyota and GM launched this joint venture, not only were cars slow to be produced, the quality was suspect. Employees regularly sabotaged cars and would throw old cans in between the door panels. 

In 2010, NPR's Ira Glass shared interviews with those who worked in the factory decades earlier. These clips come from the NPR show This American Life. 

This American Life Narrator: “They’d intentionally screw up the vehicle. Put Coke bottles or loose bolts inside the door panels so they’d rattle and annoy the customers. They’d scratch cars. Richard Aguilar inspected vehicles at the plant, he saw one guy do something even worse.”

Richard Aguilar (GM Plant Inspector): “...he left some lose bolts on the front suspension. That was dangerous. I went and told the assistant manager right away. They went out there and checked it, 400 cars he had done that to. He was mad because they had suspended him for drinking.

Leading up to Toyota's and GM's joint venture, the factory hadn't seen a car produced in nearly 2 years, but it was kept open by the labor unions. 

Factory Worker #3: “When I was mounting tires, we’d drink. You know, I’d bring a thermos of screwdrivers with me.”

Factory Worker #4: “A lot of booze on the line, I mean it was just amazing– and as long as you did your job, they really didn’t care.

Now, what's important about this story is the different approaches that Toyota and GM took to their work and their employees, and ultimately to culture. GM believed that this factory and its workers were so irredeemable that Toyota would give up on producing cars in America, and it would be forced to continue building cars in Japan despite the high tariffs.

Toyota, however, understood the importance of culture and that's where the story gets really interesting and why this has become a well known tale in business schools. 

To its credit, Toyota hired the same leadership and the same people as when the factory was failing. Toyota believed its system and way of working could change how these same individuals approach their work and by extension, the culture. 

Toyota began to fly these American car workers to Japan to show them how they made cars. What they learned was not just mechanical; it was the foundation of building a truly great organizational culture. 

Now, in a GM plant, managers saw the work as basic and tactical. Just do your job and move on. Each worker should do their part and nothing more. Toyota saw every worker as an important part of a team. That team was responsible to continually improve, suggest ideas, and experiment each and every day in their work. 

In a typical GM plant, only 5% of the force work cross functionally. At Toyota, it was over 70% cross functional teams. 

At the time, in a GM assembly line, you didn't need to think. You didn't need to experiment. You didn't need to collaborate. All those things were seen as detractors. And management thought that anyone can do the job. Ideas slow things down and that you're just expected to check the boxes. 

However, as a Toyota team member, you were expected to find improvements, experiment and try ideas, work closely with others, and management saw this as professional work. Managers ate lunch with regular workers. And ideas were seen as more valuable than short term profit. 

By the time the American workers' trip to Japan was over and they came back to America, something had changed…in them. They were treated as professionals who were expected to constantly improve themselves, the process, and to help team members who worked ahead of them and behind them. 

Factory Worker #5: “They were pretty proud because they were building cars back in the United States and they wanted to show they could do it within the time allotted and they’d usually get behind and they would struggle and try to catch up and at some point somebody would come over and say ‘Do you want me to help?’ and that was a revelation. Because nobody in the GM Plant would ever ask to help. They’d come and yell at you because you got behind.”

Toyota Factory Manager: “Really we wanted to give them a chance to see and experience a different way of doing things. We wanted them to see the culture there, the way people work together to solve problems.”

Factory Worker #5: “Then the biggest surprise was if–when they had those problems, afterwards someone would come up to them and say ‘What are your ideas for improvements so we don’t have that problem again?’”  

At the heart of Toyota's philosophy was a yellow cord, called the Andon cord. Any line worker could pull the cord to offer an idea or a suggestion. Others would help that person try out their idea, and if it worked, implement the idea throughout the entire factory. 

Managers listened. They wanted ideas. And then they showed the workers that they took that feedback seriously. In short, workers were there to help each other solve problems and to make suggestions. 

The results of this change are well documented. The factory which previously took 43 hours to produce one car before it was shut down for two years was now able to produce a car in 21 hours. They could produce two cars in the same time it previously took to build 1. And, on top of building cars faster, the quality and the reliability of the cars would improve significantly as well. 

The joint venture was a huge success…for Toyota. 

First, Japan learned how to operate in America. But what's most interesting about this story is that GM couldn't quite believe it and they never quite adopted the concepts and understood the cultural levers and dials that were foundational to the Toyota way. 

As the Toyota story shows, culture is important to all types of organizations and companies. If you're a district leader, you know that schools are complex. There are many more voices involved and an extremely wide range of participants in your organizational culture. You're also not building cars, you're shaping the lives of students. Still, that makes a Toyota story all the more important. From teachers and staff to parents and community members, a district that prioritizes culture and defines it clearly has a distinct advantage over those who do not. 

Culture influences every company's employees, and by extension, the experience of those who interact with those employees. Your district's culture has a direct impact on your ability to recruit the best teachers and staff to your schools. Everyone wants a positive working environment and it's often the deciding factor in a teacher's decision to work or not to work in your schools. 

In 2019, in the largest study of its kind, SchoolCEO Magazine reached out to 30,000 randomly selected K-12 millennial teachers born between the years of 1981 and 1996 to gauge what they want.

Then in 2023, we did it again. This time with teachers of all ages and generations.

You might expect pay and benefits to be the most important factor in any career decision, but what we found was surprising. In both studies, one thing was clear, culture matters more. In 2019, 40% of millennials said that salary and benefits were not the most important factor in deciding where to work. And in 2023, that number increased. 60% of teachers across generations said it was not the most important factor. Teachers of all ages ranked the most important factors as location, school culture, and school leadership. 

The open responses are even more insightful. When we ask teachers what advice they'd give to school leaders about marketing a district and its open positions to prospective teachers, after words like teacher, school, and district, culture was the number one most frequently used word in their responses.

“Play up your culture,” one responder advised. “If you honestly believe there's a positive school culture and colleagues have strong relationships, talk about it. It's a huge pull. Teaching is a profession that is extremely dependent on working relationships between adults.” 

Some teachers even offer advice for how to build that kind of relational culture. “Highlight what you have to offer teachers in terms of social support and opportunities,” and then they continued, “in my experience, a teacher should feel like they fit in easily and get to know their colleagues. The better they fit into the school's social puzzle, the more likely they are to find common ground and be invested in staying for more than the pay and the benefits. We need to have connections with others for the best teamwork and communication.” 

You can find all of this research and more on SchoolCEO.com. And hopefully, by now, you're seeing the connection between the culture at a car factory and the culture of a school district. No matter the industry, the best way to improve customer satisfaction is to increase employee satisfaction and motivation. 

In a district, that means if you want to increase student achievement and parent involvement, you first need to look at the culture and experiences you are defining and creating for teachers, staff, and administrators. 

You instinctively know this already. In fact, the last time you went to the airport and boarded a flight, you likely felt organizational culture at every turn. What's incredible about airlines is that they share the same airports, offer the same service, delivering you from Point A to Point B, largely use the same planes, and even offer the same beverages, and yet the experience can vary wildly. 

While the general public doesn't read the quarterly reports of Global Airlines, they could tell you how to rank the biggest US airlines based purely on their own experience. When I've asked audiences of school leaders and communicators how they would rank United, American, Delta, and Southwest on customer satisfaction and employee motivation, they get it right. Every. Single. Time. Even when they have status on a different airline, they still pick Southwest first.

Southwest is at the top right where customer satisfaction and employee motivation peak, followed by Delta, and down towards the bottom are United and American, where neither customers nor employees are very satisfied. So how can the general public know something so accurately without much more than gut feel? The answer, the influence and power of organizational culture. 

Here's the late Herb Kelleher, co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines.

Herb Kelleher: “Describe what you're looking for in new hires. It's amazing how many people don't do that. They're just kinda filling slots as they come open. And frequently refresh your recruiters and your interviewers as to those criteria. For instance, at Southwest Airlines, only by way of exemplar, we're seeking new hires with a warrior spirit, a servant's heart, and a fun loving attitude. Hire for attitude, train for skills, and look for leadership capability in every potential employee.”

This episode isn't just about marketing your culture to prospective hires. Instead, it's about how developing an intentional culture is on its own a driving force for changing hearts and minds. One that can stand alone without a marketing campaign. 

In other words, a strong culture will outperform any marketing campaign when it comes to recruitment and enrollment. 

How do you create a great culture? That's where we'll dig in. 

Culture is a buzzword. It's like AI, NFTs, or Bitcoin. Everyone is talking about it, but only a select few know how it actually works. They know the levers and the dials to pull and to turn. And yet, like the airline industry, we can spot a fake culture or an authentic culture from a mile away. 

So before we define culture, we need to define what culture is not. 

First, culture is not benefits, salary, or office perks. While Google and Facebook have popularized culture as a perk with slides, beer on tap, and laundry services, there's something much deeper and more meaningful about culture than novelty items. There's a reason small groups of people can outperform an industry's 500 pound gorilla with a fraction of the resources. How does a small team at Instagram beat out Facebook in the early days? 

Second, culture isn't merely a mission statement or values painted on the wall. They may reinforce the culture, but it's not the culture itself. After all, Enron's values were communication, respect, and integrity. Culture too often is merely a buzzword or it's misunderstood as perks or words on a wall, but what is it really? 

Superintendent Doctor Curtis Jones defined school culture for us a few years back, and it has been the definitive definition for SchoolCEO since then.

Dr. Curtis Jones: “Culture is the experiences that people have and then the beliefs that they get from those experiences, which influences the actions that they take that then determines the results that you get.”

How does an organization or school district build a culture that outperforms, that allows its employees to do their best work, to feel belonging, and be motivated to help students thrive?

For the answer, we turn to Neel Doshi, co author of the book Primed to Perform.

[Excerpt from SchoolCEO Conversations Season 2 episode - Neel Doshi: Culture & Motivation in Education]

Neel Doshi: Like if you're a leader listening to this or if you're a CEO or a school administrator, it's not—The way you should think about motivation is not it's on me to motivate everybody. The way you should think about this is how do I create the conditions where everyone understands collectively that we're trying to create a motivating environment and it's up to everybody to participate in creating that. That's the better way to get this done. And so usually I recommend two starting points. One, it helps to get your organization to learn about motivation and how it works and how it drives performance, especially for schools and school systems. That knowledge will help in just about every aspect of their work, not just their own environments. But then the second thing I'd recommend is measure it. 

Neel Doshi: You measure motivation, especially you measure it the right way at the team level, not at the org level. You measure it the right way. The thing you have to get back down to is the science of it. And the science of it at its simplest level is you gotta motivate your people the right way. You motivate people the right way. If you just start with that basic kernel of truth and just build around that basic kernel of truth, you'll get this right.

What Neel Doshi is sharing is really quite insightful and rarely discussed when culture comes up in conversation. Culture is ultimately about how well a group of people perform together. Great cultures get more done and their people thrive along the way to their success. In his book with coauthor Lindsay McGregor, Neel Doshi explains that why someone works determines how well they work. This is true at an individual level, and it is magnified and multiplied at the team, department, and organizational level.

When a school district is crystal clear about its why, its performance skyrockets. 

So who is responsible? 

Often leaders imagine that culture is their responsibility, and it is, but only theirs. Or they might think it's something that can be outsourced to HR. Too often, culture can be treated like a short term initiative, a campaign of sorts, that puts it as a priority this year, only for a new theme to emerge soon after. 

Culture needs to be something that changes how we do things, Not for a year or two, but ongoing. It changes the fabric, the feel, and the fate of an organization. It's omnipresent and it can't be nicely packaged into a one time theme. Here's Neel Doshi again with a message that's worth repeating.

Neel Doshi: Like if you're a leader listening to this or if you're a CEO or a school administrator, it's not– The way you should think about motivation is not it's on me to motivate everybody. The way you should think about this is how do I create the conditions where everyone understands collectively that we're trying to create a motivating environment and it's up to everybody to participate in creating that.

Margaret Heffernan is a serial CEO and one of the most gifted speakers about culture. When she spoke with me on SchoolCEO's podcast last season, she offered this insightful response to a simple question. 

[Excerpt from SchoolCEO Conversations Season 2 episode - Margaret Heffernan: The Big Impact of Small Changes]

Tyler Vaswer (Season 2 Episode): “You have an incredible number of books and TED Talks, and one of the quotes from your book says, what truly changes organizations are small choices made by everyone. Do you mind explaining that a bit more?”

Margaret Heffernan: “Yeah. I think it came out of a period in which a lot of organizations were going through, what they rather grandiosely called transformation programs, where they were kind of trying to change everything soup to nuts. And what that tended to reveal was that those programs were very expensive, they were quite lugubrious, and they mostly didn't work. And they were kind of too heavy, too complex, too confusing. And they also kind of made people feel that a lot of stuff was being done to them. So that didn't necessarily, inspire a huge enthusiasm. It was just in a busy day, one more thing to do or 15 more things to do. And in the face of that evidence, I thought, well, maybe we should look at things differently and think about the day to day things, which actually, if I did them differently, might make me feel different, might make the people I work with feel different, might kind of change the atmosphere. So it was this—I think in my head, it was a kind of antidote to these monster, let's just change everything at once programs.”

So far, we've looked at a number of stories from other industries. But how does all of this work in education? For that, we turn to Alpaca, a K-12 start up that is focused on changing internal cultures and measuring how teachers and staff are experiencing a school's culture.

Karen Borchert: “At Alpaca, the way that we think about organizational culture and the way we think about creating positive school culture is all about kind of stacking little wins. So from the perspective of and everything we do, whether it's our surveys, our packs, our newsletter, our resources, all of these little things that we do, they're all actually pretty small.”

That's Karen Borchert, the CEO and founder of Alpaca.

Karen Borchert: “But what we believe and what we think is that culture is really really a series of decisions and choices that stack up. Right? So culture is made of choices repeated and what we see is that when we can provide really simple, really easy things for school leaders to put in place that don't require a whole initiative. They don't require a committee or approval or a bunch of different things. They just require saying, oh, I could try that little tiny activity and ask my team what's one thing we wanna start, stop, or continue this semester. Or I could walk down the hall and say hello to 5 people today. Or I could try this icebreaker at my staff meeting, or I could ask my team how they're doing in this one minute survey. Though each of those little things creates a moment of listening, a moment of gratitude, a moment of celebration. And suddenly, your teachers and your staff and your school looks back and says, oh, we have this culture that has all this gratitude or I have this– my principal knows me that she gave me a high five in the hallway yesterday. They're not going to remember the great big huge initiative as being the thing that shaped their culture. They know that their culture and their school culture is shaped by the little things, and so that's where we focus on the little things.”

Let's recap. The Toyota story proves that organizations can change in real, measurable ways that improve outcomes for individuals and the company as a whole. But that's only possible when they treat their employees like experts in their field, not cogs in a machine. 

And Neel Doshi showed us the importance of understanding motivation because your people's WHY determines how WELL they work. 

Margaret Heffernan and Karen Borchard taught us that shaping a strong company culture cannot be done with a single action or a temporary initiative. Rather, great culture is built over time. It is the accumulation of day to day interactions, the quote, “small” moments in conversations between you and your staff and teachers. It is not asking them for feedback once, but continually asking them for their perspective so that you can review and act on that feedback quickly. 

Now comes the really big question. How can you apply these lessons to help improve your organizational culture? Where do you even start? 

The first step is taking an honest look at your organizational culture as it stands today. Are your schools performing as well as you want them to be? If not, can you pinpoint their shortcomings? 

While test scores might be part of this assessment, performance here is more about teachers, staff, and administration engagement and satisfaction. Ask yourself what success looks like and why. If necessary, will your team be able to adapt to change? 

The next step is to define what you want your culture to be. Similar to brand, we have to be very intentional about what our culture is and can be before we can change it. Consider, what are your core values? Can those values help your decisions? Do your decisions align with those values? 

Often, the hardest thing to do is create something simple. Strong cultures are defined by simple values because they are memorable, and therefore, can help shape decision making. Those values also need to be reinforced with everyday actions and interactions because as we've discussed, the little things are what really shape your culture. 

Third, what is your yellow Andon cord or feedback loop? Do you really know how people feel about what it is like to work within your schools? Is it something a teacher might say to another teacher, but would never say to you? Without direct feedback from teachers and staff, it is almost impossible to address their needs and questions. If your aim is to support the mental health of your teachers, encourage engagement, and ultimately excel at teacher retention, you need to give your staff a yellow cord. To know what teachers want, need, and to listen to their ideas and suggestions. Remember, the best way to improve customer satisfaction, or in your case, family satisfaction, is to improve employee satisfaction. 

All of these steps require action. You need to answer the hard questions about how well your teams are performing. You need to define the who and why of your culture. Armed with this information, you need to act in a way that is consistent with your brand and culture, and you have to respond every time a member of your staff pulls a yellow cord. If you wait to address their questions, comments, or suggestions, you just might be too late. 

Nothing is more important to the success of a district and organizational culture. It shapes who works for you, how hard they work, it drives your marketing, your messaging, your communications, and ultimately, it defines the student experience. Culture can be difficult to define and slow to change, but that's why you need to begin right now — It's that important.