What You Reward, You Multiply

Culture Creep happens in the space between what an organization says it values and what people learn by watching what happens next.

Organizations don't only communicate their priorities through strategies, values statements and town halls. They predominantly communicate their priorities through what happens next.

Ever live through a situation where a peer takes a shortcut yet gets celebrated because the outcome is good? How about when a teammate cleans up a broken process every month and is viewed as indispensable for doing it? Ever notice someone raise an uncomfortable issue and get labeled difficult? (Maybe that last one even happened to you.) Or how about a counterpart who ships a deliverable quickly and gets praised for execution, despite a downstream mess they create in their wake? All the while, another co-worker takes the time to resolve the underlying problem, appears slower, and as a result gets overlooked for assignments.

No announcement, “This is what we value.” No poster hanging in the lunchroom that says, “Work faster. Forsake quality.” No new year-end review metric to measure how well one: “Maintains peace over value.”

No need because everybody is already watching what happens next.

What gets rewarded becomes behavior. Repeated behavior becomes culture. And culture eventually shows up in your systems, processes and data - whether you are ready for it, want it to, or like what it shows you.

The provocative question isn't the reflexive, “Was that a good decision?” Rather, it is: What did everyone learn from what happened next?

We Know About Scope Creep. What About Culture Creep?

Many of us have worked in project management, whether formally leading projects, participating on the team, or even serving as sponsors. Because of that exposure, we're all too familiar with the concept of Scope Creep. We know the extras that come with it: the overruns on time, the overruns on budget, even the overpromises and perceived under-deliverables.

But what about Culture Creep?

That can happen faster than many leaders want to realize, let alone deal with.

I once saw what happens when an internal practice became a very public problem. Teams that did not need access to user statistics not only had access to the data and interpreted it, but they very publicly reported on the data.  For years prior, the access had felt innocuous yet was anything but. Customer backlash was as fierce as it was fast. The organization immediately changed policies – they disabled access privileges for those who never needed it to begin with and only retained it for those with a clear work-related need. Public apologies were issued, leadership addressed the debacle as an “inexcusable” practice, but the brand damage and broken trust were real.

Not every scenario you have or will encounter is going to make global headlines, but that doesn't mean the consequences can't bring operations to a screeching halt.

• Buy data as an individual user even though it's for enterprise use?

• Bypass procurement protocols and enter a subscription agreement via corporate card?

• Share credentials because it's faster than waiting for the right access to be established?

• Roll a project forward for another year, and then another, because nobody wants to be the person who calls out the massive sunk cost?
  

The immediate objective gets accomplished. The data gets purchased. The subscription works. The deadline is met. The client receives the deliverable. The project stays alive. The person who figured out how to “get it done” might even be celebrated for their resourcefulness.

And maybe, at that particular moment, that was exactly what the business needed. But what did everyone watching learn?

Did they learn that moving quickly matters more than understanding why the process exists? That procurement policy is optional when it's inconvenient? That being the person who says, “Wait, should we be doing this?” carries more career risk than being the person willing to just get it done? That continuing something is safer than being the person willing to say it no longer makes sense?

Clients chatter and if leadership isn't willing to teach, the customers certainly will. The reality is that organizations don't get the benefit of a headline announcing, “Culture Creep has arrived”. Instead, that lesson builds much more quietly until suddenly it can't be ignored.

That's why I find Culture Creep fascinating. The behavior being multiplied isn't always the behavior leadership thinks it's rewarding.

• A leader may believe they're rewarding initiative. While their staff learns that bypassing controls gets results and gets celebrated.

• A leader may believe they are rewarding speed or efficiency. However, the workforce learns that cleaning up the downstream consequences belongs to somebody else.

• A leader may think they are promoting perseverance.  Yet their rising leaders learn that stopping something that no longer makes sense is viewed as a failure.

• A leader may believe they're protecting collaboration by rewarding the person who keeps everyone happy. Instead, their team learns that raising an uncomfortable issue isn't worth the trouble.
  

And sometimes leaders are rewarding exactly what they intended to reward. The business has simply changed enough that the behavior is no longer producing the outcome it once did. That matters too.

Culture Creep isn't necessarily the result of bad leadership or bad people. Sometimes yesterday's perfectly reasonable behavior gets rewarded long enough that nobody notices the environment around it has changed.

Everyone Is Learning the Rules

We tend to think about accountability after something goes wrong. Who owned it? Who approved it? Who should have caught it?

However, accountability is taught long before anything goes wrong. People notice who gets the stretch assignment, who gets promoted, who gets praised in the meeting, who gets described as “strategic,” who gets called “difficult,” who gets rescued when something goes sideways, and who quietly gets handed the cleanup because everyone knows they'll get it done.

Those decisions may seem individual. Collectively, they're teaching the organization the rules.

And once enough people understand the rules, you don't need to tell them how to behave. They'll adapt.

That's where this starts showing up in your processes, your technology and eventually your data. If speed is consistently rewarded over sustainability, don't be surprised when documentation is thin and technical debt grows. When heroics are rewarded, don't be surprised when processes remain dependent on heroes. If avoiding conflict is rewarded, don't be surprised when competing definitions survive for years because nobody wants to force the conversation. When fixing the report is rewarded more visibly than fixing what keeps breaking the report, don't be surprised when you become extraordinarily efficient at reconciliation.

People aren't necessarily behaving badly. They may be behaving exactly as the organization has taught them to behave.

And every one of those adaptations has a cost. Sometimes it's obvious immediately. Other times it sits quietly on the organizational balance sheet for years: another workaround, another dependency, another unresolved decision, another process built around something nobody ever intended to become permanent.

Culture Creep is one of the ways organizational debt accumulates without anyone realizing they're borrowing.

The bill doesn't arrive with the decision. That's why it can accumulate for years.

Eventually something changes. A person leaves, volume grows, a client complains, regulation changes, technology reaches its limit, costs spike, the organization tries to scale, and suddenly all those seemingly independent accommodations become very expensive at once.

That's organizational debt coming due.

What Happens When the Right Answer Is Stop?

There's another side to this that I don't think we talk about enough. What happens when the behavior you want to encourage is someone being willing to tell you that something you've already invested in isn't working anymore?

I had one of those moments with a technology investment. We had invested in a data quality capability designed to identify issues so they could be acted upon. And it did. The technology was finding problems.

But finding a problem and doing something about it are two very different things.

The people who needed to act on the outputs weren't consistently doing so. At the same time, the vendor had changed its operating model so significantly that the economics of continuing no longer made sense for us. The return on our investment was heading in the wrong direction.

We could have kept going. In fact, continuing might have been the easier recommendation. We'd already invested the money. We'd implemented the capability. People had spent time building it. There was nothing particularly comfortable about being the person recommending that we stop.

Funny enough, I've always been comfortable in the uncomfortable zone. My advice was: Stop.

Not because data quality stopped mattering. Not because the technology couldn't identify problems. Because continuing to pay for a sophisticated way to identify issues people weren't acting on wasn't going to improve our data quality.

Saying stop has actual value. Every month you wait can mean another invoice, another renewal, another implementation expense or another team spending time supporting something you've already determined isn't producing enough value. Depending on the investment, making the uncomfortable call early can stop thousands (if not millions) of dollars from continuing to accumulate.

At some point, the responsible question was no longer, How do we get more out of this investment? It was, Why are we continuing to make it?

Stopping didn't mean the business no longer needed data quality reporting. Quite the opposite. When the people using those reports told us they still needed them, and promised they would act on what they found, we met in the middle.

We retired the technology and rebuilt the capability internally. But there was another part of the deal: the business had to put some skin in the game. The rules and tests couldn't simply be something technology produced and handed over. They needed to be audited, refined and owned with the people expected to act on the results.

And it worked.

Stopping something isn't the same as giving up on the outcome it was supposed to produce. Sometimes stopping the solution that no longer makes sense is exactly what creates the space to build one that does.

And this is where leadership's response matters. If the person willing to question an existing investment is treated as though they've failed, what does everyone else learn? Keep the project alive. Defend the business case. Find another use for the tool. Ask for another year. Whatever you do, don't be the person who says the thing we've already spent money on may no longer be worth spending money on.

That's a behavior an organization can multiply too.

But imagine the opposite lesson: We expect you to keep evaluating whether our investments are producing value. And when the facts change, we expect your recommendation to change with them. That's not failure. That's accountability.

Look at What Happens Next

Perhaps the better culture assessment isn't another employee survey or a new set of values on the wall. Perhaps it is simply time to get more proactive (if not a little provocative) and start observing what happens next, along with what gets rewarded.

• When someone finds a shortcut, what happens?

• When someone slows a project down because they see a legitimate risk, what happens?

• When someone admits that an investment isn't producing what everyone hoped it would, what happens?

• When two teams disagree and somebody finally surfaces the conflict instead of working around it, what happens?
  

And when somebody gets something wrong (but owns it, learns from it and makes the system better because of it), what happens to them?

If we're going to tell people that we value accountability, curiosity, quality, innovation, collaboration or thoughtful risk-taking, we'd better make sure those are actually the lessons we're teaching when one of those values becomes inconvenient.

Culture will form whether you design it or not. It happens in the space between what an organization says and what people observe. It grows through thousands of seemingly small decisions about what gets praised, what gets funded, what gets promoted, what gets ignored and what gets quietly cleaned up after everyone else has moved on.

Some of those behaviors are worth multiplying. Some probably made sense once and warrant another look. And some may be creating the very problems we're spending millions trying to solve somewhere downstream.

So before the next transformation, reorganization, platform investment or culture initiative, maybe there's a simpler place to start:

Look at what you're rewarding. Then look at what you are multiplying.

Because everybody else already is.