The Culture of Work

I was in a committee meeting at my daughter's school yesterday. We were talking about the progress of several technology initiatives, and what more could be done to move them along and report status to the school's board of trustees. Four people in the room were business executives; one was a former schoolteacher -- now the IT director for the school.

The IT director had made remarkable progress in implementing the recommendations of the committee, despite being set back by a personal injury. With a small team, many of the initiatives had been completed. Those initiatives had to do with getting infrastructure in place. The only initiative that had fallen behind somewhat was the rollout and training of staff and faculty. So, the group was focused on how to communicate the progress made to date to the board.

An interesting dynamic followed. All of the business-trained committee members were thinking similarly about what needed to be communicated: progress vs. plan, expenditures vs. plan, places where the plan needs to change, indicators of effectiveness of the technology investment. The schoolteacher-turned-IT director seemed to be thinking along different lines. On the one hand, he did a great job of showing what had been done -- what labs had been updated, what new laptops had been purchased, pictures of the new digital music studio, and so forth. But when the discussion got to, "where do we go from here?" things seemed to stall out.

It was clear after a moment that the business executives shared a language and culture of work, despite the fact that none had worked together, as far as I know, and I was new to the group. It was also clear that there was a communication gap between us and the school's IT director regarding how to move things forward.

His thoughts seemed to get stuck in several ways. He had just lost an important staff member (1 of 4), and he wasn't sure how to replace him. He seemed to be overwhelmed by the prospect of training the faculty on all of this technology (the only initiative that was behind schedule). And he seemed not to take hold of the thrice-repeated recommendation about how to summarize his progress to the board (he may have understood, but he was not giving feedback in the meeting confirming his understanding or seeking clarity).

We tabled the discussion for later, when he could have some time to think about it. But the temporary disconnect was palpable. I started thinking about what that disconnect was, where it came from. But it seems like a good example of different cultures of work.

When I say "culture of work", I don't mean the culture of a particular place. I mean the assumptions, values and norms for successful activity in a particular field. The culture of work of the executives in that meeting was predictable: planned/actual, benchmarking, customer feedback. And everyone was thinking about similar techniques, artifacts, and strategies to move forward -- and even to help the IT director break through his feeling of overwhelm.

The temptation in the meeting was to "fix" the IT director -- to get him trained in real-time on the culture of work that the others shared. We all deferred that until a later meeting.

Maybe by then the IT Director will come in having processed the feedback he received and return with a game plan that is consistent with the business executive culture of work. Or maybe we'll find ourselves at the next meeting with an increasing desire to "fix" his thinking or approach.

We'll see.