Outside the recent Life@Work Company Culture Conference in Brooklyn, a young hipster walking by eyed an event banner near the door, and said to his companion, “They’re making culture in there.” His friend snickered.
I understood the cynicism. How can you engineer a corporate culture, as Live Grey, the consulting company behind Life@Work, and so many coaching companies like it, promise?
But the more I listened to the many conversations about culture at the unusually immersive conference, the more I realized that the skeptic’s view may be the wrong way to look at the issue. On the whole, letting company culture develop organically, hoping that firms will get diversity or gender equity or humane work conditions right, hasn’t been much of a successful experiment. Maybe we should welcome the movement to make work more just and human, even if it means looking past the kumbayas of the movement’s vernacular.
Brad Lande-Shannon, Live Grey’s CEO, believes that one of most fundamental ways to build a work culture is to foster trust and connection among colleagues. These are not empty words for him. In one of the most memorable moments at the conference, he spoke about a major event in his life—the experience of adopting a baby boy with his husband—and why he contacted his team, in tears of joy and anxiety, in the middle of the intense day his son was born.
On behalf of skeptics everywhere, Quartz caught up with Lande-Shannon after the conference and asked him to further explain his thoughts on showing emotions and sharing personal issues in the workplace. The Q&A has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Why did you share the most euphoric, but terrifying moment of your life with your work colleagues?
First, I think it’s important to say that at Live Grey, we have the usual tactical meetings, but we also dedicate about 45 minutes every week to a meeting that is just a connection practice. We ask people to check in, typically on Mondays. Each person says, “If you really knew me, you’d know that….,” and you get two or three minutes to share something as simple as “This is what I did this weekend,” or more. As a leader, I often go first. Most people are not going to go there until people are modeling it.