Robert Richman

As a culture architect and someone who’s really focused on culture, that whole universe of topics, where do you think your expertise is strongest?

Culture’s really interesting because it’s everything. It’s recruiting. It’s training. It’s innovation. It’s leadership. It’s management. It’s all the communication arts. I think my edge is in helping understand it from a systems perspective—of what’s really going on with human communication to a certain degree and understanding what’s behind it, the games, the systems. And then the culture hacking approach, which is my approach of how you can do specific little things within the culture that makes a big impact.

…I empower people who don’t feel like they’re empowered people, who are frontline employees, managers, even CEOs because, surprisingly enough, CEOs still say to me, “You know, I can’t control or change the culture,” and then teaching them how to culture hack is my angle.

Do you have any strategies for helping make sure that the ideas take root?

What I like to do is to tell them to run an experiment. Rather than let it fizz out, plan for it fizzing out, and put a time cap on it like a story. You say, “There’s going to be a beginning, middle, and an end.”

For example, one of the practices I recommend is to be on time for everything. Some companies are really not, and that’s really harmful to culture because it means if people are running late to meetings, running their meetings late, and not meeting deadlines, they’re putting their own individual agenda in front of the culture.

They need to really start being on time before we can do the deeper work on the culture, but that can scare organizations. Rather than creating the new program of being on time, I say, “Just run an experiment. Run an experiment for two weeks where everyone’s on time, and then inspect the results and see. Do we like that better? Do we get more done? Are we less stressed?”