Open Minded

Company Culture: The Messy Kitchen Fallacy

Many offices have a messy kitchen. And whenever there’s a messy kitchen, there are people complaining about it. In chat rooms, during lunch, at company meetings, on signs in the kitchen… you name it. “Your mom doesn’t work here!” they yell. And while we are bothered with how difficult it seems for others to keep the kitchen clean, we ignore the real reason behind all this: The company culture.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

A Lack of Ownership. About Pyramids and Teams

The team has to take ownership! That’s what they all say. And they don’t understand, why the team doesn’t. They take ownership themselves. And they told the team to do the same. Yet, it’s not happening. We probably need a new team, this one is useless…

I personally witnessed a gazillion cases like this. People are concerned that software developers don’t deliver high quality or employees don’t keep the kitchen clean. And everything in between. When you think about it, you can probably come up with similar examples from your reality.

But what to do? The underlying concern regarding other people’s behavior is very reasonable. More often than not we judge behavior without thinking about the motives behind them. We forget to look into the underlying reasons for behavior. That’s what humans tend to do, see the ‘what’ and not the ‘why’.

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By Karsten Jahn, ago

Cross-Cultural Competence

We live in a globalized world. Interacting with different cultures all the time. And it is becoming more and more important to be able to deal with this. Cross-cultural competence is what HR calls it in employment ads. What they mean is, you should be able to successfully collaborate with others from different cultures. And no, telling them what you want, is certainly not the right way. It’s way more complicated than that…  (more…)

By Karsten Jahn, ago