Welcome to The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer, a podcast created by the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation.

In this inaugural episode, hosts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava—two Berkeley Haas professors who have dedicated their careers to studying and advancing workplace culture—answer a question from WD-40 CEO Steve Brass about how to create and maintain a strong workplace culture.

What does it mean to have a strong culture? According to Jenny:

“A strong organizational culture is one where people both agree about what's important and care. And so if you think about in your head a two-by-two box here, which is what academics love to think in terms of, you have one with agreement, low-high, one with intensity, low-high. If you're high on both, you have a strong culture. If you're low on both, you have a weak culture. But if you're high on agreement but low on intensity, you have what we call a vacuous culture. Everybody agrees, but nobody cares. And you could be high on intensity but low on agreement, and there you'll probably have a lot of conflict, or what we call warring factions. So those are the possibilities for how strong culture can array.”

Jenny and Sameer also discuss the dark side of strong culture. According to Sameer:

“I think it's also important to keep in mind that strong cultures can also have a dark side, and an organization with a culture that is too strong can quickly become stifling and fail to recognize the value and importance of non-conformists who are often really central to efforts to innovate and change the culture over time. In fact, if an organization's culture becomes too strong, it can actually take on the qualities of a cult. And so there's a risk of having a culture that may be just too strong.”

The two also discuss Jenny's take on Netflix and Genentech's cultures and how leaders even know how strong their culture is.

1. Define – understand what a strong culture is and its purpose
2. Assess – understand how to assess and track it over time so you know if there are gaps between what your current culture emphasizes and what you need to be emphasizing strategically
3. Reinforce – recognize that culture needs to be consistent and comprehensive so that people believe it’s real and are willing to support it

• Leading by Leveraging Culture
• Genentech Case Study A and B
• Company Culture Soars at Southwest Airlines [Forbes]
• New Analytics of Culture [Harvard Business Review]
• Language as a Window into Culture [California Management Review]
• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

Do you have a vexing question about work that you want Jenny and Sameer to answer? Submit your “Fixit Ticket!”

You can learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*