What Trees and Forest Mean for the Mountain
As trees and forests are critical to the mountain, people and culture are essential for the well-being of organizations.
In August 2022, I was getting ready to file for LLC and create my business officially. I needed a name for my business but couldn’t think of a good one.
Long before I thought about it as a business, I knew what I wanted to focus on after my time at Meta. It was going to be about people and the culture of organization, so I decided to call it simply “People+Culture,” without further consideration. The plus sign was intentional as I knew people and culture are always intertwined. I couldn’t think of one independent of another. Both were critical in the success of organizations. Hence, People+Culture was born.
I think of an organization as a mountain, people as trees and an organizational culture as the forest trees form together. Working in many organizations for 20 years from Apple (twice), Microsoft and Meta, this felt truer as time went on. Yet it was very odd to me that people, organization, and culture were often treated separately.
Many learning & development programs I went through at each company often just focused on individual people. They assumed that I’d be a good manage if I learn and develop various managerial capacities. It’s not entirely wrong but one healthy tree cannot survive if the entire mountain is infested with some vermin or burning with a fire. I couldn’t be an effective manager alone, if the team or organization I worked inside wasn’t effective.
The same was true for the organizational culture. Whenever there were cultural issues, they tried to implement it as a standalone project. The idea was that if they identify the root cause of the problem and take actions to address it, they could solve the cultural problems. But the culture is a living organism like a forest. There is no single factor to keep the forest thriving and healthy. Plus, it takes a long time to grow a forest, like it does for culture.
The biggest mystery to me was that companies didn’t connect the well-being of people and culture with organizational success. There were so many research work that proves the strong correlation between workplace culture and success of businesses. Companies I worked at always treated working on people and culture as a “good to have”, not a “must-have,” as if they didn’t believe in the research findings. It was like people attributing the healthy ecosystem of the mountain to the good weather only, without thinking about the exuberant trees that created a thick and beautiful forest.
Having suffered as one of the trees in those interdependent and intricate systems, what I hope to achieve with People+Culture is to help leaders and organizations be more thoughtful about their people and culture. I started with tech companies but recently focused my efforts on startups, since I experienced firsthand that reactive tendencies around people and culture were formed earlier when big tech firms were startups.
Here are three questions I’d like to invite all of us to ask in the organizations we lead or belong:
1. Are we developing people in isolation, or in context? Even the most capable person struggles in a dysfunctional team or organization. Are your investments in people also accounting for the system they operate within?
2. Is our organizational structure enabling or constraining the people within it? The mountain shapes what trees can grow and where. Are the design choices in your organization actively supporting the people and culture you’re trying to build?
3. Are we treating the well-being of people and culture as a “must-have” driver of success, or still a “good to have”? Is your leadership team making decisions — about budget, priorities, and strategy — as if the health of your people and culture directly determines organizational success?
What are your answers?
The message of this text is life-affirming, and the text itself is good, but a lot here depends on the concept of an “organization” and on the type of organization. If it's some kind of company with a culture like the Japanese “Shūshin koyō,” where employees can remain in the same positions for decades until their retirement, then the system and the culture of the working environment in which these employees work have time to develop, stabilize, and take root for the next generations. At the same time, a complex high-context ecosystem of the company begins to form, and here people and culture become essentially inseparable.
But the problem is that today many companies, plants, and factories, in our age of increasingly aggressive capitalism, replace their workers with great frequency. Employees are hired and fired constantly, and the workforce is renewed again and again. Because of this, a unified system of established rules, traditions, and workplace culture often never has the chance to develop. Systemic thinking doesn't have time to emerge, and the personal qualities of employees don't have time to fully unfold. As a result, the system and the culture of the organization cannot take root like a healthy tree, as you wrote in your essay. That’s why.