“Strategy Gets You Into Battle, Culture Gets You Home”: Joshua Pearson on The Science of Culture

Joshua Pearson was an account executive and channel manager at the software company Gimmal when Maestro came in to train his team in sales strategies. Today, as a managing partner of the Precision Quality Group, he works to guide other companies toward success by tackling company culture. The services Joshua and his partner Daniel sell in this capacity are operational efficiency and cultural transformation. Joshua’s specialty is the latter, which can come across as a minor ingredient of the corporate recipe. On the contrary, says Joshua, “Strategy gets you into battle, but culture gets you home.”

It’s not that strategy isn’t vital. It’s just that it often dominates executives’ priorities to the neglect of culture. This is entirely understandable, says Joshua. Strategy is measurable, “But culture is much harder to build quantitative data around. Also, strategy doesn’t typically involve us making any real change in ourselves.”

JOSHUA PEARSON’S CORPORATE CULTURE TENETS

Over the past year, Joshua has taken the time to immerse himself in as much relevant research as he could with the goal of defining “what good culture looks like and how to deploy it.” He identified several common denominators that he says are non-negotiable. The first principal values here center around curiosity, creativity, and communication.

1. Psychological safety: “We need to be comfortable taking risks and being vulnerable without fear of embarrassment or ridicule.” Psychological safety in a work setting, according to Joshua, comprises inclusion safety (“we need to connect and belong”); learner safety (“we need to learn and celebrate mistakes”); contributor safety (“we need autonomy, guidance, and encouragement”); and challenger safety (“we need to speak up and challenge the status quo”).
2. Dependability: “We reliably complete quality work on time.” 
3. Structure and clarity: “We have clear roles, plans, and goals.” 
4. Meaning: “We find a sense of purpose in our work.”
5. Impact: “We believe that the work we do matters.”
6. Identity: “We align our identity to create outsized outcomes at work.” This last element was inspired by Todd Herman’s The Alter Ego Effect.

WHAT’S GETTING IN THE WAY OF A FOCUS ON CULTURE?

According to Joshua, pitching a cultural transformation to a company can be challenging for several reasons. One is ego: “Nobody in a leadership position wants to be thought of as a bad leader.” Then there’s the fact that culture is not a product you can see. Nor is it something on which a lot of managers receive training.

It also bears noting that it can be intimidating to fix something that feels abstract to begin with. At first glance, culture is an intangible element. It’s a lot easier to identify problems and solutions in areas that have well-defined parts and can be broken down into neat, mechanistic pieces. But Joshua believes that culture can be itemized, as well. In fact, culture and operational strategy are less binary than some people think. He cites a 22-year study of over 300 companies that made operational efficiency changes to their organizations and found that these initiatives only yielded measurable results if they were accompanied by several particular components of cultural change.

THE CULTURE BRAIN

One reason, Joshua feels, that some business leaders struggle with the culture component is that, though smart, “they’re very ‘left brain.’” And so, the human-dynamic side of the business they typically really struggle with, and operational efficiency engagements tend to fail.” Joshua understands this on a personal level. “I was very left brain, like very mechanically oriented as a kid, and I’ve moved around a lot most of my life, and I was not a magnetic person in a room. I had to learn how to do that. So that wasn’t natural to me. But that’s just proof that you can learn it.”

He’s not the same professional he was at the beginning of his career. The main difference, he feels, is confidence. “People say that people buy from people they like. I don’t agree with that. I don’t think at the end of the day anybody really cares if they like you or not. I mean, you don’t want to be hated in your call. But at the end of the day, we’re professionals, working professionals. I don’t know your kids. I don’t know your family. I’m not gonna hang out with you. But I can solve a problem. So people buy from people they trust. And they don’t trust people who are not confident in delivering real change.”

One can even reason that good company culture tends to inspire a sense of corporate confidence. It can also impact virtually every aspect of a company, rendering it vital to the organization’s health. For example, bad culture, notes Joshua, yields more employee turnover. This lack of longevity can result in a loss of corporate expertise, which can yield lower efficiency, a surplus of training cost and time, and worst, irreversible errors.

Joshua Pearson would tell you that the road from bad corporate culture to irreversible errors is not long and winding. He and his partner have an imposing example to tout. Just recently, they were working with an organization in the pharmaceutical space that experienced bacterial contamination in its lab. “We conducted a deep internal audit of the quality control processes in place. There were gaps in their processes as well as training and communication flow deficiencies. We traced the contamination source through our testing and analysis, which allowed us to rectify the issue before it reached a recall status. This not only avoided [an] FDA warning letter but also preserved the company’s reputation and financial health. They did have to reject the batch, and the costs were substantial, but pale in comparison to a recall or corrective action.” Had the batch left the laboratory, Joshua estimates, this could have meant a year-long shutdown with a cost of one to two billion dollars.

The situation isn’t always this extreme, although the life sciences world, which is one sector the Precision Quality Group focuses on, is full of high stakes. But culture, according to Joshua, is important in every corporate setting. His goal for clients: a “functional working system that allows them to curtail problems before they actually arise.”

Joshua is currently Managing Partner at Precision Quality Group, a biotechnology consultancy. You can learn more about Joshua here. Be sure to congratulate him while you’re there!