Why do so many mission driven companies have bad cultures?

ALSO: we go deep on Psych Safety / workers who fall for corporate BS are worse at their jobs

First let’s go deep on psychological safety…

Last week’s post about psychological safety prompted reader Tom Geraghty to get in touch. Tom is something of an psychological safety enthusiast, running a company called Psychological Safety and a newsletter of the same name. The guy is crazy for the stuff.

Tom is such a Psych Safe nut that when he offered a fascinating potted history of the phenomenon I asked him if I could share it with a wider audience:

“What’s really interesting is that through the 1970s and 80s, the world of aviation was grappling with the causes of disasters, and found that practically all of them could have been prevented had someone felt safer to speak up and question or challenge the decisions of the captain. This was termed “attenuated speech” or “safety silence”, and the primary cause of this lack of voice was the steep “power gradient” in the cockpit (also called authority gradient or cockpit gradient).

“This finding catalysed the creation of CRM (Cockpit, then Crew, Resource Management), which has at its core creating the conditions in which people can speak up to someone with greater authority or status. One way of helping to do this is by introducing ourselves by what we’re doing, not our rank or grade, which has since been adopted by many healthcare teams and others (i.e. “Hi, I’m Jane, and I’m looking after the patient’s anaesthesia today” rather than “I’m Dr Smith and I’m the chief anaesthetic consultant”).

“One useful way to think about psychological safety is as increasing “interpersonal predictability” - the better we can predict how people in a group will respond to us, the more likely we are to take that risk. Hence, group size is a key factor, because predicting how people might respond to you becomes naturally more difficult as the size increases.

By going deep on this stuff, I found myself thinking again about Nathan Fielder’s remarkable second season of The Rehearsal.

Fielder, whose monotonal awkwardness is at the heart of his comedy, spent a whole series of his show exploring his own obsession with aviation safety. While Fielder repeatedly bemoans that his show is constrained by the contractual limitation that HBO paid him to make a comedy, it is both very funny and hugely instructive on how psychological safety is really formed.

While reviewing transcripts of Bangla Airlines flight 211 (which crashed in Kathmandu in 2018) he was alarmed to see that despite taking place two decades after the mandated psychological safety system used in global aviation (the CRM mentioned by Tom above) the log of the flight shows terrible conflict in the cockpit.

The captain Abid Sultan, 52, smokes throughout the ill-fated flight and uses abusive language towards co-pilot, Prithula Rashid, 25, the airline’s first female pilot, calling her an idiot as they first prepare to land.

Fielder spends time following aviation professional and is alarmed with the realities of the job. He observes that for all the aviation industry talk of safety standards the realities of cockpit safety protocols are half-hearted checkbox exercises. Most pilots he meets rarely fly with the same crew and he notes that ‘currently the only FAA required training for assertiveness in the cockpit is a short PowerPoint presentation’. The pilots he tracks rarely speak to each other before they take control of planes meaning they’re totally unprepared to challenge each other if something goes wrong.

‘Throughout my time talking with hundreds of pilots,’ Fielder says, ‘I’d become convinced that this cockpit communication issue isn’t just an occasional occurrence. I believe its happening in some form on every single airline flight.’

‘Wherever I travel now, I can’t help but notice pilots everywhere, not talking to each other,’ he says. ‘Standing in complete silence, just moments before flying hundreds of people through the sky.’

John Goglia, a former aviation industry leader, told CNN, ‘what Nathan has uncovered was a little sliver that has fallen through the cracks, a communications disconnect between pilots. When he first came to me and mentioned that to me, it immediately caught fire with me because I've seen it. I've flown in many, many, many cockpits… I plan on taking that show to my students to show them’.

You can watch the show on Sky or Now TV.

Here’s when I first discussed the programme

Why do so many mission driven organisations have stinking cultures?

On the subject of psychological safety, this week there was wide coverage of a toxic culture at the top of UK retailer The Co-op saying that there was a climate of fear where ‘you learn to look at your shoes'. One senior leader told the BBC, ‘Nobody can speak their mind in this business’.

It’s interesting this, I’ve worked with so many purpose-led organisations that have toxic cultures. I worked with one mission driven consultancy that had one of the lowest levels of engagement scores I’ve ever seen. It was hiring some of the most talented recruits out of elite universities but was seeing them quit in months. Accounts on the job review site Glassdoor referred to a culture beset with bullying and aggression. In my own work with the organisation’s leadership team there were discussions acknowledging a track record of leaders shouting in the workplace.

Another business was a mission driven investment fund, focussing on green investments. In a finding that was surprising to no one an employee survey reported that there was low psychological safety. Background discussions revealed that this lack of trust was down to the behaviour of leaders. Those working with them experienced they were aggressive, domineering and unaccommodating of other colleagues’ views.

So why does this keep happening? Two things seem to be at work.

The first is what psychologists call moral licensing. When people believe they are doing good, they feel entitled to overlook moments of their own bad behaviour. They give themselves the pass on the rudeness, the snappiness. They don’t ever think they are the problem, they genuinely believe that the importance of their cause earns them latitude to be authentically themselves. They were ‘working to make the world a better place’ - and other people needed to acknowledge that wasn’t easy. It’s also a powerful excuse to silence their own conscience.

The second is that mission erodes the normal checks on bad behaviour. In a commercial business, a toxic culture eventually shows up somewhere measurable, employee quit rates, or revenue. Leaders are held to account because the evidence is hard to ignore. In a mission-driven organisation, the cause itself becomes the alibi. Leaders can always point to the work as proof that they are succeeding, regardless of how they treat the people doing it. Behaviour that would be career-ending elsewhere is quietly tolerated, because nobody wants to be seen as the person who got in the way of something important.

The bitter irony is that this makes the mission harder to achieve, not easier. Psychological safety allows the candid dialogue that lets bad ideas get challenged, if nobody can speak their mind, the cause suffers. As the Co-op’s boss was fired yesterday morning, this is something the new CEO might want to consider

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