The Importance of Cultural Gardening

We regularly hear founders talk about how important the first N employees are to a company, especially with regards to how they shape culture. This is because it’s crucial for organizations to hear the truth—from the market, from customers, and from employees. Yet, in the interest of moving fast, these very same orgs have a tendency to ignore, deny, or suppress the truth from within. Leaders that know how important hearing the truth is will double down on fostering an environment where divergent perspectives can be expressed and interrogated safely. Leaders that ignore this tend to be among the last to arrive at the slow-moving train wreck. While this is easy to intuitively understand, it’s also empirically supported by a social phenomena known as “middle-status conformity.”

I’ll use the rest of this essay to talk about what middle-status conformity is, why it matters to organizations, and what you can do about it in your organization. (If you want the Twitter thread version, click here.)

Middle-status what?

In any group, you can imagine that people can occupy three different places along a status spectrum — high status, middle status, and low status. Depending on the group you’re talking about, these positions have different names, but perhaps the most common example in Western culture is the cool kids (high status), the average kids (middle status), and the kids who get picked on (low status).

In their paper, “Middle-Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets,” Damon Phillips and Ezra Zuckerman argue that someone’s likelihood to conform to cultural and/or social norms takes on an inverse U-shaped curve, with middle-status individuals most likely to conform and high and low-status individuals most likely to deviate in situations where conformity reinforces group membership and status (illustrated in Figure 1). In fewer words, this means that people who have something to lose tend to behave as expected in a group, unless they’re “untouchable” or “outsiders.”

Note: This paper is long and dense, with a number of important theoretical and empirical contributions. I am focused on the one that I found most compelling and relevant to the conversations about organizations that I’m having today. If any of this is interesting to you, I’d encourage you to dive into the piece itself because I’m sure you’ll find a number of important ideas.

I’m going to pause here and encourage you to think about someone you’ve worked with or are in a group with that deviated significantly from the group norms at some potential expense to themselves. To what degree did that individual have high or low status? Or, in a better case, were you in a healthy group that had normalized disagreement and free expression?

Let’s imagine that you are a part of a group where the conforming behavior is agreeing with the group leader. In those cases, you’re rewarding for being a yes-person, and the individuals who are most likely to speak up are those who are so high in status they are beyond reproach or those who have so little to lose they are willing to speak their minds. This is not a sustainable or healthy dynamic, but it is one that many of us have experienced in our organizations.

Why should I care?

As I mentioned in the beginning, it’s critical for organizations to hear the truth, and many suppress it. The situation I described above is illustrative of one of the key points I want to make: If group membership drives conformity, the healthiest groups will do their best to normalize the broadest range of perspectives and behaviors in service of their goals, so that “deviation” in small (but meaningful) ways is not only embraced, but celebrated, as it helps the group grow and evolve. This also means that organizations have an increased burden to cultivate the right set of cultural artifacts and rituals both at inception and as their organizations grow, because bad behaviors will become reinforced and normalized as conditions of group membership if they are not pruned appropriately.

Phillips and Zuckerman point out that new members (who are low status) overperform compared to their middle-status counterparts in hopes of being accepted into the group. In a fast-growing organization, this is something to be mindful of as new members will soon outnumber the original members who set the previous norms. This highlights the importance of individuals in groups who play the role of “cultural gardener” (I use “culture” here as it’s used by Stewart Brand with regard to pace layers).

“Cultural gardeners” are the individuals responsible for planting seeds of good practices and weeding out bad ones, which are occasionally formalized into roles/titles like “community manager” (though we don’t tend to have these titles in traditional organizations). These individuals have always been important with groups, but are of even greater importance in a distributed team or a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). The lack of visibility that remote work has afforded us puts a greater burden on these individuals to regularly tend to and prune the organization.

What are the implications for my organization?

Now that you know what middle-status conformity is, what should you do about it?

• Identify who currently plays the role of “cultural gardener” in your organization (if anyone), and support them in cultivating and reinforcing good behaviors, as well as pruning unwanated ones. You’re probably thinking “culture is everyone’s job.” Yes, everyone at your organization contributes to the culture — positive or negatively — but I bet very few people (if anyone) in your organization are regularly tending to it. When you see deviations in behaviors, determine whether they came from a place of safety and trust or a simply a high/low status individual and act accordingly.

• Invest in onboarding. Then double your investment. Then add a little bit more. Seriously. You can’t (and I’d argue shouldn’t) manage or oversee every single thing people are doing in an organization, so you need to find a way to help people move in the right direction. Here you can learn a lot from game design. Use your onboarding to articulate the “laws of physics” that govern your organizational behavior and decision-making (assuming they are followed and reinforced). We know from prior research that empowered individuals and teams are not only the happiest, but most resilient, so set people up to successfully navigate the challenges ahead by giving them not only a map of the world, but helping them learn how to navigate it.

Healthy organizations are dynamic, living things, and — like gardens — they will become overgrown and unruly without people providing the right care and attention.

A big thank you to Nicole Zeng for sharing this paper with me and providing feedback on my thinking, and a thank you to Lena Blackstock for her feedback on drafts of this piece.