The Culture Code (15 page)

In several other cultures, one’s work is not nearly the passion and preoccupation it is in ours. Stendhal’s classic novel
The Red and the Black
defined a French culture in which one’s life had value only if one served the country (as part of the military—the red) or God (as one of the clergy—the black). All other occupations were vulgar, best left to peasants. This attitude still pervades French culture and leads to a system in which the unemployed receive more money than many service employees receive. A major best-seller in France is
Bonjour Paresse,
whose title translates as “Hello Laziness.”

Most of my European friends are baffled that I continue to work so hard long after I’ve made enough money to keep me comfortable the rest of my life. To them, the concept of continuing at one’s job because one loves one’s work is unfathomable. Europeans usually take six weeks of vacation every year. Here, two weeks is the norm, and many people take their work on vacation with them, or even go years without a vacation while they are building their careers.

This has been the American approach to work from the very beginning of our culture. When our forefathers came to America and discovered a huge undeveloped land, their first thought wasn’t “Let’s have some tea.” It was “Let’s get to work.” There was a New World to create, and it wasn’t going to create itself. Towns needed building. The West needed opening. The rudiments of a bold political experiment needed to be put in place. There wasn’t time for leisure then, and in a very real way, we still believe there isn’t time for it now. Americans work longer hours than the people of any other culture.

Americans celebrate work and turn successful businesspeople into celebrities. Donald Trump and Bill Gates are pop stars. Stephen R. Covey, Jack Welch, and Lee Iacocca are mega-selling authors. Instead of
Bonjour Paresse,
our best-sellers include
The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
and
Good to Great.
Billionaire owners of sports teams, like George Steinbrenner and Mark Cuban, make the headlines as often as the athletes they employ.

Why does work mean so much to us?

Why do we need to love our jobs?

Why is it so important to us to have a strong work ethic?

When I set out to discover the Code for work in America, I was able to play my role of “visitor from another planet” with unusual credibility. While I myself had an extremely positive attitude toward work and a huge amount of passion for what I did, I grew up surrounded by those who embraced the French attitude. I already knew that Americans took a very different approach to work, but I was curious about how they imprinted this and what it meant to them at an unconscious level.

The “bad focus group” conversations of the first hour of the discovery sessions varied widely. While some participants spoke with excitement and optimism about their jobs, others complained about long hours, low pay, and difficult employers. And while all seemed to agree that work was something you “had to do,” their attitudes about this obligation ranged. When we got to the third hour, however, and I asked participants to recall their first imprint of work, a very clear pattern emerged.

I had a paper route when I was a teenager. There were days when I dreaded it—snow was the worst—but for the most part, I had fun with it. I liked collection days, and not only because I got tips. I liked talking to the customers and getting to know them.

—a forty-five-year-old man

My most powerful memory was just a couple of weeks ago. I’m a camp counselor and I ran into one of my kids at the video store. She saw me and ran into my arms and brought me over to meet her father. When she said, “Dad, this is my counselor,” she said it like I was a queen or something.

—an eighteen-year-old woman

I work three jobs to keep my family going. It seems that the only thing I do is work all the time.

—a forty-seven-year-old man

I remember my first grown-up job. I worked during the summer in high school and college, but this was totally different. This was a career. I liked having colleagues and taking on assignments and planning out my future. I got a promotion after only six months and I felt like I was on the map.

—a thirty-two-year-old woman

I worked for the same company for twenty-three years. One day, a bigger company bought them and suddenly I was out on the street. For six months, I kept trying to find a new job and kept getting nowhere. When I wasn’t looking for a job, I felt like I had nothing to do. My wife and kids had their lives, but I had nothing. I finally got a new job for much less than I used to make. It doesn’t feel the same, and I don’t feel the same.

—a forty-seven-year-old man

My first paying gig changed my life. This was it. I had arrived. I was a professional musician!

—a twenty-nine-year-old man

My first memory of work was watching my mother break her back lugging boxes of fruit for her fruit stand. It seemed to me that she was struggling all the time, but she never complained about it. I know she didn’t like the long hours and the hard labor, but she liked talking to customers. Everyone knew who she was—she was the fruit stand lady.

—a sixty-nine-year-old woman

The tone of the stories ran the gamut—people were happy with their work, they hated it, they felt invigorated, disappointed, or overwhelmed—but the energy of the stories moved in a very specific direction. Work put you in a position to get to know people, excite children, keep your family going, or plan your future. Work could make you feel that you were like a queen, that you were on the map, or that you had arrived; work could make you feel that it was all you did; if you lost your work, you could feel that you had nothing.

Though participants might have suggested otherwise in the first hour of our sessions, their third-hour stories gave them away. For Americans, work wasn’t simply something you did to make a living or because you had to do it. Even if you didn’t like your work, it had a much more powerful dimension, a life-defining dimension.

The American Culture Code for work is
WHO
YOU
ARE
.

When we are wearing the new glasses provided by the Culture Code, the question “What do you do?” takes on added meaning. In essence, when we ask someone what she does for a living, we ask her who she is. Americans very strongly believe that they are what they do in their jobs. Why are unemployed people often depressed by the loss of their jobs? Because they are unsure of how they will pay the bills? Certainly. At a deeper level, though, it is because they believe that if they are “doing” nothing, then they are nobodies.

If work means “who we are,” then it is perfectly understandable that we seek so much meaning in our jobs. If our jobs feel meaningless, then “who we are” is meaningless as well. If we feel inspired, if we believe that our jobs have genuine value to the company we work for (even if that “company” is ourselves) and that we are doing something worthwhile in our work, that belief bolsters our sense of identity. This is perhaps the most fundamental reason why it is important for employers to keep their employees content and motivated. A company operated by people with a negative sense of identity can’t possibly run well.

Ritz-Carlton does an excellent job of giving its staff a positive sense of who they are. The company calls its employees “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” Their goal is to give their guests the best hotel experience of their lives, and their employees’ job is to provide that experience. Ritz-Carlton understands that if they want to create a culture of sophistication for their guests, they need to do the same for those who work there. They treat their staff like adults and give them a strong sense of empowerment. If a cleaning person encounters a guest with a problem and the guest complains to her, that cleaning person has the power to improve his experience by giving him a free meal or even a free night in a room. This gives the cleaning person a strong sense of motivation, the belief that she is part of the corporate mission.

Another component of the Ritz-Carlton management approach is that they refuse to burden their staff with the motto that “The customer is always right.” Understanding how humiliating it can be to live by that precept, the president of Ritz-Carlton tells his employees that if someone gets out of hand, to let him or someone else in management know and they will take care of it. Again, this approach fortifies the employees’ sense of who they are. It is much easier to treat the guests like “ladies and gentlemen” when you are treated like a lady or a gentleman yourself. Ritz-Carlton employees tend to be very loyal and very proud of what they do.

Effective employee relations in other cultures reflect that culture’s attitude about work. In France, work takes a backseat to the pursuit of pleasure. If a job isn’t entertaining, most French workers would prefer unemployment. Gerard Blitz adopted this French approach to staff management when he founded Club Med. One of the first things he did was change job titles—for instance, the manager of a Club Med is the
chef du village
(chief of the village). Then he instituted nightly shows at which employees entertained guests. Any member of the staff could go up on stage if he or she had the guts. In addition, when Club Med opened its doors, it positioned itself as a welcome place for willing and adventurous singles. In such a sexually charged environment, the personnel had an excellent chance of sharing in the fun. This camplike atmosphere in a resort setting made work pleasurable for the staff—so much so that Club Med regularly gets away with paying their employees less than the competition.

ALWAYS
ON
THE
JOB

Americans rarely accept a dead end in their jobs without a fight, and they strongly believe that you are only as good as your last deal. A billionaire still works sixty hours a week because he needs constant affirmation of who he is. A recently promoted middle manager ratchets up her work energy because she already has the next promotion in her sights. Our work ethic is so strong because at the unconscious level, we equate work with who we are and we believe that if we work hard and improve our professional standing, we become better people. Remember, the American Code for health is movement; this extends to professional health as well. It is possible to be happy doing the same job for thirty years, but only if that job provides consistent new challenges. Otherwise, we think of ourselves as “stuck in a rut” or “going nowhere.” How many people do you know who are thrilled to do the same job on an assembly line or as an office functionary indefinitely?

We’re always seeking the next promotion, the next opportunity, the next chance for something big. If you talk to a cabdriver in Manhattan, you’re more likely to find that he’s going to school to get a better job than that he plans to drive a cab the rest of his life. If you meet a waitress in Southern California, she’s likely to tell you that she has an audition for a movie next week. The cabdriver might never get out of his cab and the waitress might be performing a recitation of daily specials for the next twenty years, but the sense that they’re moving toward something more glamorous is very much on Code. On the other hand, those who fail to act, who accept the limitations of their work with barely a grumble, are likely to feel miserable about their lives. The hopelessness of their jobs has done critical damage to their identities.

Our new glasses also help explain why we celebrate hugely successful businesspeople. We love the story of Bill Gates laboring away in his garage, coming up with a great idea, and becoming the richest person in the world. Why? Because it reinforces the notion that “who we are” has endless room for growth. The self-made millionaire (or, in Gates’s case, “fifty-billionaire”) is an inspirational symbol for us because it proves that all of us can work hard, find the thing that we do superbly, and forge an extraordinary identity. Similarly, stories like those of Tom Clancy (a middle-aged insurance salesman who became an enormously popular novelist) and Grandma Moses (a woman who started painting when she was in her seventies and became a legendary folk artist) show us that we always have the opportunity for greatness.

Deep down, we believe that you never have to be stuck in what you do. Self-reinvention is definitely on Code. If your work no longer provides you with the sense of who you are that you desire, it is not only acceptable but also preferable to seek something new. Americans champion entrepreneurs because they are our most aggressive identity-seekers. They don’t wait for someone to tell them what to be, but rather take significant risks to become what they believe they should be.

Entrepreneurs are inspirational to us because they set their own course for identity evolution. We all want to believe that we are headed somewhere in our work, that we aren’t going to stay in the same place for the rest of our lives. Most of us have an ideal job in mind, and it usually involves movement of some sort from our current place (bigger office, bigger staff, being the boss, being able to quit that second job). Since work suggests who we are to us, we put significant stock into this progression. None of us want to feel that we are “done,” that who we are will remain stagnant for the remainder of our lives. Retirees, after decades of work, seek new jobs in retirement, even when money isn’t an object. We saw earlier that they do so in part because they dread immobility, which is equivalent to death. It is significant, though, that the activity they choose is work. They don’t work because they need the income; they work because they so strongly connect their identities with the work they do that they feel the need to keep working in order to feel that they still exist.

So what does one do with knowledge of the Code? From an employer’s perspective, the Code offers a path to making the most of employee relations, as Ritz-Carlton has. The understanding that employees connect their jobs with who they are makes it clear that employers should put a premium on keeping staff inspired. Calling regular staff meetings to solicit input on how to improve a company is on Code. Involving staff in the direction of the company gives them an elevated sense of identity, the feeling that they are integral to the company’s success.