Episode 10: Company Health Beyond Profit

Luke Gaydon, CEO of youdo talks to Anant, CEO of Matter of Form - a UK based brand strategy and design consultancy - about the importance of culture.

Executive Summary:

• C Suite positioning can be lost on employees - which means that they aren’t engaged and don’t provide the needed energy/activism. Tight briefs, gravitas and middle management buy-in is needed to ensure culture works across a whole organisation. 

• It’s important to remember that any business change results in personal change for employees - so the process must be handled delicately and consistently 

• The key to good culture is people individually understanding a company’s values and believing in them. 

• The best culture change comes in the shape of a Trojan Horse, with employees feeling that they have co-created a developed direction based around the original values.

Luke - it’s my great pleasure to welcome Anant Sharma as our next youdo Discussion Series guest. Anant, thank you for joining and please intro yourself.

Anant - Hi there, I’m Anant and I'm the CEO and Founder of Matter Of Form. We're a Brand Strategy and Design Consultancy based in Shoreditch. We do three things; we reposition organisations to help them find their whitespace and how to express their positioning in a competitive market. We do innovation consulting, asking what new products or services might an organisation conceptualise, and then lastly, we develop digital experiences. We design and build web, mobile & e-commerce experiences that are delightful and seamless.

Typically we work with timeless brands. There are three attributes of a timeless brand: they have a strong founding spirit, they think long term and they see design as a point of competitive advantage. That, naturally, tends to mean craft-led businesses, engineering-led businesses — people who really invest in R&D with a premium proposition. They're not necessarily market leading by commercial scale, but they are market leading by brand equity. Things like values and culture tend to be very important to those types of businesses; how they conduct business, what's their plot, how their supply chain operates, how the supply chain actually becomes a part of the brand's story — and it's brought to the fore of how they express themselves. 

We have this notion of metric form — the branding has become something that exists on the inside, not on the outside. It’s no longer a logo or an emblem that signifies status. It's a story that's almost a form of social currency. And those stories are bountiful in the types of companies we work for.

Luke - How much have you looked to the brands that you work with - and the way that they've approached their culture - and borrowed from it for Matter Of Form? Has there been a sort of exchange between you and your clients in the way that you've approached culture?

Anant - I think our clients look to us for culture. Not because we're so great, but because agencies naturally tend to connect the C-suite with what's next in culture more broadly. And they tend to be quite an interesting bridge between what there is and what's next. 

Within a large organisation, you hire people within teams to maintain the status quo and progressively improve the company. When you hire a consultancy or an agency you know, typically, that partnership is meant to result in some kind of significant change within the business. And so you have to be at the fore of culture, you will tend to work in quite a fast moving environment. 

You also tend to have a combination of senior leadership with younger team members so how you incentivise individuals is by remaining current, by giving them innovative projects to work on. And by having a great culture where they feel that they can express their best ideas and do great work. 

So naturally, you're set up in a position that allows you to do things that generate good spirits and create good culture. We've had enjoyable conversations with clients about what it means to create a good culture, which is a privileged position to be in for anyone.

However, one thing I would say is what culture means to me has changed significantly over the last 14 years. It's simpler to run a great culture when you're a very young business. You can be the challenger, and not just in terms of positioning but in terms of culture. And you see a lot of this on LinkedIn at the moment. You see a lot of — in my opinion — quite polarising commentary about what good culture is, said almost as if everything that came before was terrible culture. I think this is incredibly unhealthy.

For me the coming of age experience was almost the same as becoming a parent. Suddenly there's actually a generation between you and the youngest people in the company and you realise that you really need to get into the mindset of the other people in the company to understand culture more broadly. That’s really exciting but it also takes work and process and it's not just something that comes naturally. If you get complacent enough to assume it does, it might guide you to become antiquated quickly. But that's been a really interesting personal journey.

Luke - One of our previous guests made the comment that a company is now expected to have a position on a very broad range of issues in a way that they simply weren't before.

Anant - You've got to have a position on everything — and you can't do right by everyone. But you've still got to position on that. I think the most important thing is that the position is consistent. 

I think the armour that we've all developed in the world we live in, which is characterised by a bombardment of messaging (often quite polarised messaging), is that we detect inconsistency and we see that as vulnerability, and we pick up on it and we become quite hostile towards it. Whereas we respect a consistent message which isn’t always a good thing!

We obviously come up against this issue the whole time. Our view has always been: ‘Are we moving things in the right direction?’ 

For instance, I would rather work with the government of Saudi Arabia, positioning the country at large as one that is liberating, opening up, welcoming a global audience into its borders, which will force a point of cultural liberation. As opposed to selling McDonald's to kids in America. So we just take that position. But you could equally argue that it's not great working with a government that doesn't have the best reputation. So you’ve just got to make calls like that, and then just stick to your belief around them. I think that's really important.

Luke - Taking that point about positioning forward, we see a lot of C-suite focus and prioritisation around ESG. And that’s matched by passion and enthusiasm coming from the employees. What should happen - or what you would hope would happen - is that C-suite focus and employee passion would meet in the middle and create amazing energy and momentum which would be transformative. But what seems to be happening is that they're just missing each other, and they're not meeting in the middle. Does this resonate at all with you?

Anant - I think it's an astute observation. With any change in any organisation, the difference between success and failure is how you engage people and how you make their voices heard. We go through brand programmes, brand transformation programmes, and we will go through stakeholder interview processes sometimes with people whose voice has no relevance to the future of the brand but we need their buy-in. No change in a company is ever about business change. It's about personal change. People really do care about how they change as an individual so it's important not to forget that human truth when engaging any company in change.

To go back to your point, you have to manage that process to make sure all those things do meet in the middle because, often, things are really top down and from the bottom up they feel like they're a bit headline driven. And they often are. 

When you're at the top, your job is to make very simple statements about how things change and then people in middle management create the tactics that connect the bottom with the top. People at the top infuse those headlines with a bit of vim and vigour, which can often be lost in middle management, who perhaps don’t possess the personal capabilities to relate the message with the charm and the gravitas with which it was set at the top even though they are more in the detail. 

My point being is that middle management sometimes over prioritises the vision and erodes the charm in doing so. The other point I would make is that people expect a tight brief. I'm a great subscriber to the fact that there is no greater freedom than a tight brief. I've seen a lot of companies go really wrong, because they get one or two activists who don't have parameters to work within. And they bring the whole culture down.

Luke - If you have set out from the beginning to build a company in a certain way — to have a certain culture, feel a certain responsibility for things and commitment to things — is there any sense of frustration that there is now a kind of framework that you're required to operate within when, ultimately, it's something that you feel you've been doing all along?

Anant - The short answer to that is, yes. You start as quite a soulful business and there's this spirit within the company that makes it great. I've always considered that to be the success of the place more than the profit or anything else. Our recipe for good culture has always come from our values, which we've enforced rigorously. And we've marked every initiative we've done and every bit of decision making against those. One of them is good hearted business. We really consider that when we consider the compromises you have to make and the healthy tensions that exist in everyday life business life, because this stuff's not binary. There's a lot of cultural challenge at the moment. It's quite contrived. And I feel that there's a lot of quantification to try and make companies be more culturally hygienic on paper.

Luke - What advice or guidance would you give to a company that’s trying to affect transformation along the lines that we've been speaking to?

Anant - Change happens through a Trojan horse. We need to be really realistic about how change happens. You need to give people a sense that they've been heard one-on-one, and not in large group environments. You need to work out how you can create a level of higher up virality for that message from key linchpins and culture, make them feel heard and make them feel like they co-created the output based off of your values and principles. You've got to be a bit clever and a bit scheming about how change happens. What I love to do is not to give an answer, but rather ask how do you try and get a change through linchpins and culture that matter? How do you make people's voices heard so that they feel they've co-created the outcomes that matter?

I think one of the biggest challenges in culture today is that people feel disempowered. People need singular leadership, they need a singular voice. The greatest death in business is diluting a strong voice because you've crowdsourced or you've created too many opinions in the mix, which remove the essence and charm of what makes a business unique. Culture needs leadership and a strong voice that inspires people to move in that direction. As a leader I think you've got to have a strong voice. 

Today might make you believe that that's not important, but it's more important than ever before. There's a lot of noise in the world. People feel a bit lost at times and you need to give people something to really believe in.