Greg Urban, anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, used to study indigenous tribes in Brazil. Now he hangs out in break rooms and boardrooms analyzing how people interact — and create and change culture — in organizations. He shares lessons and tips for managers to better understand and motivate their teams. Urban is the coauthor of the book The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces that Drive Your Organization’s Success.
ALISON BEARD: Welcome to the HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.
There was a time when the study of anthropology meant traveling to remote areas of the world to observe and report on cultures that people in Western society knew very little about. And I’d bet that a lot of people in the corporate world probably still think this is what anthropologists do. But today’s guest works in the growing field of business anthropology. He studies culture in modern workplaces. He studies how people interact and move and change in organizations. He studies leaders and workers just like you.
And in an era when companies seem to be rightly obsessed with creating the kind of positive work culture that leads to better engagement, productivity, and performance, we thought it would be a good time to dive into what anthropologists have learned most recently about how to do it.
I’m joined today by Greg Urban, professor of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the co-author along with Mario Moussa and Derek Newberry of the book, The Culture Puzzle: Harnessing the Forces That Drive Your Organization’s Success.
Greg, thanks so much for coming on the show.
GREG URBAN: Thank you, Alison. Pleasure to be here.
ALISON BEARD: So how did you go from studying cultures in far off places to looking closer to home?
GREG URBAN: The short version of it is that I did spend two and a half decades working with indigenous people in Brazil, living with them, learning their languages, cultures, social organizations. And I was particularly interested all along in questions about the nature of, the movement of culture through time. In addition to being about the past, that culture is also about the future. And I’d gotten really interested at that point on the fact that corporations were trying to produce new things all the time. And I wanted to know what that meant, and that led me gradually in the direction of business anthropology.
ALISON BEARD: That must have been a huge culture shock for you, coming from studying tribes in Brazil to corporate offices and business-suited executives?
GREG URBAN: Well, I was out of my comfort zone when I went into the interior of Brazil, but I have to say I was also out of my comfort zone when I went into the top floor of a building in Manhattan where I was meeting the chairman of the board. And I realized going up that the building was organized hierarchically.
I realized as I was going up the elevator that people were looking at me because I was just dressed like a typical academic with an open collar shirt and nothing special to go up. I probably should have put on a tie and so forth at that time but we were going up and up and people would be getting off and they’re wondering, what’s this guy doing, he doesn’t look right here. That’s at least my feeling on it. Feeling being out of place in this organization. And then eventually I ended up being the last person on the elevator as it opened up on that top floor.
But actually once I got to talking to the chairman of the board, it all kind of melted away. And he in some ways was a kind of natural and is a kind of natural anthropologist who gets people. And that’s what we ended up talking about, lots of stories about people.
People are people, whether they’re living in a jungle village in Brazil or whether they’re people who live this life of the executives in Manhattan, and they’re motivated by different things, but we can actually package those different things into a kind of common understanding which we’ve tried to do in this book by talking about these four forces that motivate people and that guide people in their organizations and indeed guide people in their lives.
ALISON BEARD: Leaders have been looking at this for a very long time, but I get the sense that we don’t still totally understand how to define culture, how to create it, how to measure if we’ve succeeded. So, what are some of the challenges that businesses have in getting to the point of this positive work culture that we strive for?
GREG URBAN: Let’s think of one of the key challenges as being the fact that culture is puzzling. Everyone knows it’s important and it seems to be everywhere, but it is really hard to pin down, to put your finger on what is it. And why is it so hard to pin down? Well, one of the reasons it’s really hard to pin down is because culture is forms of habit, that’s part of it.
I found this actually working even with indigenous communities when you ask people, why do you do what you do in this ritual for example? And they would say, “Well, that’s our custom. That’s the way we do things.” And I found that when I go into a corporation and I talk to somebody about why are you doing it this particular way and they’ll say, “Well, that’s the way we do things around here.” And we typically don’t actually get a handle on the fact that the way they do things around here is cultural until we move maybe to a different organization where they have a different way of doing things. And then sometimes it can be quite jarring.
ALISON BEARD: If I’m looking to sort of understand the habits and sort of artifact of culture in my organization, but then also move it in a new direction, what’s the best way to start?
GREG URBAN: The idea that we present in the book is that you do have to have a vision to be able to change an organization, to move it into a different place than where it’s been.
ALISON BEARD: That is a collective vision, right?
GREG URBAN: Yes. In fact that’s one of the key lessons that we’ve learned over the years, that a vision that is created simply out of an individual’s brain without regard to what’s happening in the broader surrounding community is probably going to fail.
We use an archeological historical example of an Egyptian Pharaoh named Akhenaten who was really quite a remarkable figure actually back in more than 3000 years ago instated what may have been the first form of monotheism in the world, created a new art style, indeed created a new city to be the center of the Egyptian empire in the middle of the desert.
And so he accomplished it because he was the Pharaoh and he could tell people what to do, but what happened is that actually when he died, it turned out that the things he wanted to accomplish, they disappeared and people went back to doing things the way they had done it before. Where he erred we believe is that he failed to take account of how the vision he had was related to what was already ongoing in the culture. So building on what’s there is key.
ALISON BEARD: So in crafting this vision, you need to understand the habits that already exist, and also people’s interests, which is another driver of culture that you talk about.
GREG URBAN: Correct. We build our case for understanding culture around the idea that culture moves through time and it moves through space at the behest of forces. And we refer to those forces, the four of them, four key forces that we need to understand for business as vision, interest, habit and innovation. Each of those is really important in its own way to grasp. And so, yes, you have to build on interest because interest is highly motivating. People have purposes in the world and to create a vision, in some ways you need to create a story that brings the purposes that the people have who are part of the community into that larger vision that you have. Indeed, you can think of vision as a kind of story itself. It’s a big story, a master story, a master narrative that is able to link up with lots of little different narratives.
ALISON BEARD: Right. So we have this vision taking people’s interests into account. And then how do we start to form new habits and then move on from there to that innovation that you talk about?
GREG URBAN: Right. So once you tap into people’s interest, you’ll find out that they actually have their own ideas about where things can be going and you can then come up with a plan for nudging it in the particular direction you want. A good visionary leader in our view is mindful. They’re listening. They go out there, pay attention to what their organization is all about. Too often leaders think about the people that are part of their organization in terms of, well, maybe names and numbers on a spreadsheet, or maybe nodes in a flow chart. And they don’t tend to think of them as actual living human beings who have their own goals and aspirations. So in our view, you have to tap into by listening and understanding the people that work for you in an organization, you have to tap into what’s motivating them.
ALISON BEARD: The prevailing business narrative right now I think is that there’s a good type of workplace culture and then there’s a very bad type of workplace culture where it’s hierarchical and there’s not a lot of psychological safety, et cetera. Is it right to view it in those sort of black and white terms or would you say that some organizations are well-suited for sort of a very different type of culture than one might imagine that you want to have at Zappos like delivering happiness type place?
GREG URBAN: Yeah. That is a really good question, Alison, and the answer to it is that as an anthropologist, you have to appreciate that there are lots of different cultures in the world. You mentioned in the introduction what anthropologists have historically done. Well, they’ve gone around the world to try to understand all the varieties of culture. And when I came into looking at businesses and other anthropologists came into looking at businesses, we realized that each organization has developed a kind of unique culture of its own. One of the mistakes I think that is so often made within the business world, we’ve seen this – is that people imagine that all you have to do is do it the way another company is doing it and it will work for you, but that isn’t always true. And why isn’t it true? It’s not true because cultures are very local from that point of view. As I said, they spring up right away when people start interacting with each other.
ALISON BEARD: And certainly in a large organization or even a large group, you might have different cultures. So, how do you account for that but also make sure they mesh well to create a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts?
GREG URBAN: Local cultures tend to form around teams. And we found this, and actually Derek and Mario worked on a book on teams at the University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton School where all of us have done some teaching in executive education programs. One of the programs actually breaks people down into small teams of six or seven or eight people, and the teams compete with each other. And Derek actually did work on this and Mario also on what is it that made some of the teams successful, and it turned out that they would develop their own culture that was distinctive to that little group.
It could be even things like secret handshake, putting a poster up in their room or something of that sort, but they developed a culture around their little organization. And so you have to appreciate that even small work teams are going to develop a culture and certainly segments of a large corporation are going to develop cultures relatively independently. And so one of the things we stress in the book is that culture really has to do several things. It has to do three kind of key things. It has to, first of all, help people to get things done. So, how do you make the products that the company makes? That’s cultural knowledge.
But secondly, in order to do that, if the products that you make require cooperation of a larger group as all major corporations really do, then you have to work on the problem of how can you help people to get along. And the beginning of trying to help people get along is to understand the fact that they do break up into little tribes and that if you’re going to be the leader of a large organization, you’re going to have to be the leader of a tribe of tribes. And that means paying attention to the tribes that develop within your organization.
The third component, by the way, is that you need to pay attention to getting ahead. People have an interest in getting ahead. Even if they’re in a small-scale society, that’s really egalitarian like the ones down in Brazil. They want to be recognized as the person who makes a contribution to sharing within the group, for example. Being the best hunter or the best gatherer or something of this sort. Similarly in organizations, people are aspiring to get ahead however that gets defined inside their organization. And that does produce competition within the organization and that’s something that leaders need to pay attention to and be aware of.
ALISON BEARD: You do make the point in the book that organizational culture is created by people at all levels, from the CEO to the janitor. But how does an individual person, especially a lower level employee really affect culture or try to make a difference when it’s this organic amorphous thing that’s created by groups of people interacting and very much led from the top?
GREG URBAN: Well, it is led from the top, that’s true, but it’s remarkable when you actually dig into organizations and what they’re all about how much the rest of the organization really matters for better and for worse. And we give examples of that. One of our examples is about the way in which, and here I’m going to bring in this other force, innovation and creativity. So individuals have a way of figuring out how to do things and they try to read what it is that the person in charge wants them to do. So on an assembly line, for example, if the idea is never have that assembly line stop, it’s one of our examples from the anthropologist Elizabeth Briody who worked with General Motors Corporation, then people are going to figure out how to not make that line stop and they actually develop these really creative patterns of secreting, putting away parts that they knew were going to be breaking down and that they would need and that no one would have and that would stop the assembly line.
And so that they developed a little exchange system on the floor that the upper management wasn’t really aware of at all. And so when they wanted to turn the attention to quality, found that it was kind of difficult to do that because people were so embedded in these habits and they created innovative ways of doing things on the ground floor. So that’s an example of where management isn’t aware of the kind of innovation that’s happening with people at the lower levels, but it can affect what’s going on at the higher levels. And in some cases, if people at the lower levels feel that they are part of an organization, one of the organizations I had the privilege to study was a hospital organization in which they worked on developing the relationship between doctors, nurses, and even the staff that cleans the rooms and so forth.
In hospital systems, as you can probably well imagine, it’s been the case that there’s a kind of hierarchical ordering of people in there. But this hospital system took the bold move of saying, well, let’s treat the people who actually care for our patient as a kind of team. And they found remarkable things. For example, they found that somebody who was in cleaning the room might’ve noticed that one of the electronic monitoring devices had gone off. And so rather than just doing their job, they went out and they actually told somebody at the desk, they came and so forth, and eventually ended up saving the person’s life. Could have been a life or death issue. So that’s where people at every level in an organization they can be contributors to developing a positive culture that accomplishes what the organization is designed to do.
ALISON BEARD: So what are some steps that that healthcare organization took to get from sort of the traditional hierarchy to this more team-based approach where everyone felt like they were working together for the patient’s health?
GREG URBAN: Well, they instated what anthropologists think of as rituals. But Alison, you might not think of it that way because we’re so used to thinking of meetings as business, what you do at a meeting as business. Well, you do that, true, but you also do something else, which is you create a team out of a set of disparate individuals. And so that’s one of the things they focused on right away was having team meetings that would bring together the staff that was caring for the space with the nursing staff together with the doctors, and they would do that on a regular basis. So it became a ritual.
And we talk in the book a lot about if you’re a manager, using rituals to create the culture you want to bring about in your organization.
ALISON BEARD: And you talked about the idea that culture comes from many people interacting over periods of time and it’s not at all static. It’s constantly changing, so you could have that kind of improvement, but then people could revert. You can imagine a startup that has a great culture when it’s five people, but then it needs to scale. So what advice do you have for leaders of organizations that are changing in that way? How do you make sure that you retain the good and keep people away from the bad?
GREG URBAN: This is a really important point and it’s a key to our book really the idea that culture is dynamic. Historically people tended to think when they thought about culture as a legacy or an inheritance, they thought about it as a kind of static thing. But the reality is that culture is always changing and always morphing and the first thing you have to do is recognize that fact. The difficult part of it is that things will go along fine for a period of time before you will notice that something happens. It could be something that’s external to the organization as we’ve experienced recently with COVID where all of a sudden people couldn’t interact the way that they were used to interacting with, but something comes along or it could be personalities, it could be go off in a different direction, people’s needs not getting met and so forth.
So what you have to realize is that culture is dynamic and you don’t put it in place at one point in time and expect that it’s going to go on forever. It’s something where you have to be tending to it like a garden as we point out. The weeds will grow up and you do have to tend to those weeds. And so managing it starts with appreciating that culture is not a static thing. It is a dynamic living thing and you have to really appreciate that in order to be able to direct it in particular ways.
ALISON BEARD: So we’ve talked about rituals, we’ve talked about stories, we’ve talked about listening, any other specific tools or strategies that you would recommend specifically for I think team leaders who are looking to create a better team culture.
GREG URBAN: What I would say is that the leader needs to pay attention to people as people. In our book there are cartoons here and they are New Yorker style cartoons done by Kendra Allenby who has an undergraduate degree in anthropology. And one of them I love is a cartoon that shows a woman looking at an organization chart. And on the organization chart, you have people in their hierarchical positions like the CEO of the company and the people that work and so forth for that CEO and for the company. But then she does all the things like realizing what real people who work in real organizations look at. She says, “Well, these are jogging buddies. These two have a crush on each other. This person is afraid they’re going to be fired. This person is hoping they’re going to be fired and so forth.” You go down the list and you have a world of real people.
And so, again, I want to bring us back to the fact that anthropology, anthro, from people, human beings, the study of human beings. That’s what we want to try to communicate to business leaders that when they start to pay attention to people as human beings, a new world opens up for them about how to deal with their culture and how to produce a strong culture and change a culture that is problematic. So we in some ways in this book are trying to create a vision of how leaders can create their own vision.
ALISON BEARD: Terrific. Greg, thanks so much for talking with me today.
GREG URBAN: Thanks for having me, Alison.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Greg Urban, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and coauthor of the book, The Culture Puzzle. This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast, I’m Alison Beard.