How to Build a Happy Sandpit

Published: 27 February 2014

In this week's newsletter we look at Colin Browne's book How to Build a Happy Sandpit. Colin draws an analogy between employees and children in a sandpit. If you have a group of children who play well together, they will build sandcastles. They may build very elaborate ones. One will run off to the tap and fetch a bucket of water and they will build a moat.

They will have such a good time doing it that they will want to do it again tomorrow. In the meantime, you can sit at the adults' table and have a cup of coffee with the other adults. You must supervise the sandpit, but you do not have to get involved yourself.

But you put one naughty child into that sandpit who will not share the bucket and spade, or who thinks it is okay to kick sand in someone else's face, and someone is going to start crying. When someone starts crying, you are off the adults' table and you are back to managing the sandpit.

Although employees should certainly not be treated like children, this comparison is used by Colin in How to Build a Happy Sandpit. The book is about how to recognise, enhance, maintain and protect the culture of your organisation through the most common business challenges.

Based on research within more than 60 great South African businesses, the concept reveals truths that every Manager should know.

Some key points from How to Build a Happy Sandpit:
Why it matters: The challenge of change

It is a rare occasion to have the opportunity of contradicting one of the greatest management thinkers of all time, but Colin feels confident in suggesting that when the great Peter Drucker said “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” he was overlooking something quite obvious. It is an imaginative idea and not entirely wrong, but suggests that culture does away with the need for strategy, which Colin feels simply cannot be true. Research for The Happy Sandpit points to a rather different idea, namely that a strong culture's purpose is to develop new strategies quickly, and possibly many times over, and that this could be the difference between survival and failure in the face of a crisis.

Many stories illustrate this point, but some of the extreme cases make the point most eloquently. For example, the 'successful failure' of both the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica in 1914, and of the week of 11-17 April 1970, when NASA engineers and astronauts worked through a series of rapid strategy changes to bring the Apollo 13 astronauts home.

It is significant that, in both cases, it was the cultural alignment of the people involved that enabled rapid and successful strategy changes. The same applies to many notable business scenarios. Herein lies one of the most significant value propositions for hiring for cultural fit.

Defining your Happy Sandpit

A combination of the important levels of culture, namely Values, Artifacts and Shared Underlying Assumptions, define your culture, so it is worth understanding what they are. We all understand the basic idea behind Values, but what happens when management does not fanatically uphold them or when they fall out of date? Artifacts are an organisation's visible aspects (often the verbal and written ones) that make the company unique. They may be deliberate or entirely accidental, but work as a very effective set of filters in helping employees to understand whether they belong in the first place, and if they do, which behaviours are expected and encouraged, and which ones are taboo. Shared Underlying Assumptions refer to those behaviours that are learned along the way, by observing the things that other people do. These behaviours can be enabling, or damaging. Yet, where groups of people develop workarounds, they could be exceptional innovations.

You deserve the people you have

With the exception of those people you may have inherited, those of your employees who are perfect cultural fits are to your credit because you are the ones who hired them. Those who are a terrible fit are your fault... because you are the ones who hired them. That is how it goes. A better understanding of your organisation and the sort of people who are going to add to the team is needed to help you create exceptional wins. This should be coupled with an evaluation of your hiring process - how you do it, and what questions you ask. The overall weighting in finding a cultural match is more important than being wowed by alleged skills and an over-abundance of interview charisma.

A notable section from the book focuses on the Hiring Questions and Hiring Methods that South African companies currently use to get better cultural fits. The very words 'Psychometric Testing' have been entirely banned at a leading South African financial services firm because as they put it, by their very nature they render the essential human-to-human radar as secondary when hiring.

The role of leadership is only to create Happy Sandpits

Though many leaders may balk at such a suggestion, there is ample evidence from research to suggest that leadership's key focus should be on the management of culture. This is a key finding and forms a major theme in the Happy Sandpit research. Unless you can embrace this point, the rest would be almost impossible to achieve. Leadership is about changing the contexts of the way people relate to the work they do, the place where it occurs, and the people with whom they do it.

Achieving performance, loyalty and engagement cannot be achieved while work vs. life balance is still a key goal. The only reason why this concept exists is because work does not feel like life. Resolving this would be leadership's most important job.

Happy Sandpits thrive on (moderate) democracy

Buy-in is essential in getting people behind your cultural message, your values and your strategies. Nonetheless, it is absolutely not essential to get buy-in in terms of what those strategies are. That is another one of leadership's responsibilities in managing culture. Quite frankly, you won't get anything done if you are trying to get consensus about what you should be doing rather than on whether people are going to get in line once the decision has been made.

Democracy is therefore essential, but only to a certain point. Though employees are of course not children (and while the central philosophy of Happy Sandpit, despite the preamble, is that they are very obviously adults), it is essential to recognise that they're looking to leadership to understand where the company needs to be going, how fast, and for what reasons. Proof of this leadership is the sine qua non of generating loyalty, performance and engagement.

Happy Sandpit sub cultures are inevitable

Very few things strike fear into the hearts of leaders quite like independent-thinkers. This quality is highly sought after. Yet evidence shows that there's really not much that can be done to prevent the slight transforming of even the deepest culture based on location, vocation, and specific pressures. We call these slight deviations from the umbrella culture 'sub cultures'. What we often do not recognise is how brilliant they can be for the performance of the entire operation. Sub cultures, far from being objects of fear, should be accepted as part of the helpful diversity of the organisation, but with one important overriding feature: The umbrella culture must be exceptionally strong.

To demonstrate this point, consider one of the giant American aircraft carriers with 5 000 men on board, all of whom tend to form little sub cultures of their own because of their tight working and living relationships. Each of those sub cultures are distinct and yet the aircraft carrier is operationally perfect. Even though these men may be members of the maintenance team on the USS John F Kennedy, or of the nuclear reactor team on the USS Enterprise, they first and foremost are members of the Navy. That umbrella culture enables the sub cultures to transform without changing the whole organisation in any damaging way.

We are all responsible for our own Happy Sandpits.

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Colin is a co-founder of SALESGURU, a sales publishing, training and live events company. He is now also the founder of Happy Sandpit, a company that assists commercial and other organisations in the area of organisational culture.
- Colin Browne I Regenesys