Showing Your Ass To A Wider Audience (or: How to scale open culture)

In many ways company culture, no matter how evolved, is like a stripper’s ass - pretty and exciting if shown in the right light and framed by sexy or desirable objects. Of course, there are asses of seemingly impeccable quality. But if you are an owner of such an ass, only you will know how many hours of tirelessly doing squats and lunges were invested into creating it. Most of us regular bread eaters though have either hairier butt cheeks than we might like, a wee bit of cellulite or flatter asses than are considered desirable in the age of the Kardashians. One of any stripper’s dilemmas that’s at the top of their priority list is ensuring your ass remains attractive as it gets bigger (and some asses, believe it or not, do!). Many strippers use ass makeup to cover up blemishes or uneven skin (just foundation, eye shadows or lipstick don’t quite work in this context). Well cut underwear is essential as it can do your ass a big favour (quite literally saving your ass!) or highlight its shortcomings. Many strippers wear a G-string with straps of sequins (or satin, or lace) hanging around the buttocks and down the side of the upper thigh for the final reveal to highlight all the right curves. Some strippers wear barely-there nude fishnet tights which don’t come off underneath stockings or other garments which do. There are quite a few tricks one can use and this chapter outlines how a company with a good culture, just like a good ass, can remain attractive as it gets bigger.

I’ve lost count of all the coffees and lunches I’ve had with people who challenged me on various aspects of open culture companies. This probably happens even more than I get asked about my stripping adventures these days! There are two things that come up most often. Challenge No 1: your company has 40 people in it, wait until it’s 200 and more, and most of what you practise will have to go out of the window. Challenge No 2: most people don’t want to know their colleague’s salary, let alone set their own one in the knowledge of the fact everyone else will know what it is and likely have an opinion. How the hell do you find people that are prepared to go through this? 

The answer that comes up in response to the first challenge is very succinct, possibly because I’ve come against it so many times. If you think companies must always lose their focus on values and let go of belief that profitability can be as important as well-being as they grow, you are right. That’s the only thing that likely happens in your reality, or the only thing you pay attention to, which is why you believe what you believe, it’s very straightforward. If you’d like to take a sneaky peak into my reality and what I not just wish but know is possible, pick up a book such as Maverick by Ricardo Semler, grandfather of open culture companies (in my humble opinion), Reinventing Organisations by Laloux or An Everyone Culture by Kegan and Lahey. All of them present research and facts about large companies (a thousand and more employees) who have implemented different, fascinating and incredibly radical at times, forms of open culture, and are commercially thriving. There is a variety of ways to structure a large company (dividing it into distributed, self-managing teams, for example) that allows it to maintain the dynamism and enthusiasm of an early stage company. Is it easy? Not particularly, since the collective consciousness generally maintains large companies are a necessary evil that slowly corrupts all in it, and around it. Is it doable? As demonstrated by many, without a doubt. 

In connection to the second point, I feel inspired to respond more at length. We find people who are able and willing to take charge of their career progress, and their pay, with care and attention to their world and their motivations for wanting to join us. The issue is, in theory anyone could - and should be able to, possibly at some point in the future - work for GrantTree. But GrantTree isn’t going to work, at its present state of organisational evolution, for everyone.  The way we find out if it’s likely to fulfil the expectations of an individual and provide a space to flourish, as opposed to an environment which is too overwhelming to be enjoyed, is by learning about people’s way of cultivating relationships and making meaning in the world as a key part of our recruitment process. There is a particular framework we use, derived from the work of a Harvard scientist Robert Kegan (and described in A Guide to the Subject-Object Interview: Its Administration and Interpretation) which helps us understand how much complexity a given individual is able to navigate. It’s a fascinating way of looking at evolution of consciousness post childhood, which was the domain of Piaget’s research. According to Kegan, most adults are somewhere in between a stage of development he refers to as socialised, and the following one, branded as self-authoring. The first one translates to, broadly speaking, a stage in life when one’s core identity isn’t unshakeable in the face of conflicting feedback and/or challenges brought on by exposure to different environments, such as home, work life, social circuit. The behaviour or beliefs of a socialised person may differ depending on circumstances they are faced with. A self-authored individual, on the other hand, has a clear internal framework designed to make meaning of the challenges they face, and to navigate conflicting external feedback. The inner standards are strong enough to provide a thread guiding them through a labyrinth of complexity that modern life entails. This is, out of necessity, a simplification of Kegan’s theory. On top of this, in many cases an individual is in one of four intermediary phases that come in between the two stages described. 

In any case, our task, when interviewing candidates as part of the open culture interview stage, is to find out whether their self-authoring system is robust enough to withstand the demands of our workplace. These include managing one’s time and resources, setting one’s own standards for what constitutes good work and reviewing one’s performance, curating one’s career in the organisation and navigating pressures which inevitably arise in working relationships with others. All things considered, setting and reviewing one’s pay probably no longer seems like such a big deal in the context of other challenges of self management. To conduct an interview well – and I’ve learnt this the hard way – is to be deeply attuned to the candidate’s world and meaning-making mechanisms without identifying with them or even looking for a bridge between their world and yours, which is what many of us naturally do in social interactions with unknown people. In other words, it’s an art, which I’m definitely still perfecting. I realise this especially in the context of having been masterfully interviewed by a scientist within Kegan’s organisation Minds at Work to help provide more research data. To this day, meeting candidates and gaining an insight into their world through our take on Subject Object Interview remains one of my favourite things to do.