As CNN reported, “It is with regret that I share with you that Robert Winnett has withdrawn from the position of Editor at The Washington Post,” Will Lewis, The Post’s embattled publisher and chief executive, told staff in a Friday morning memo. Lewis and Jeff Bezos finally bowed to pressure from The Post’s staff to reverse the hiring decision.
This is a classic case of the perils of trying to change an organization’s culture too quickly. If, as Mark Field rephrased one of Peter Drucker’s core premises, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” it eats the wrong new hire as a snack between meals. There’s enough blame to go around on this hiring failure.
It starts with Jeff Bezos’ bringing in Lewis in January of this year to address the Post’s financial challenges. This is the job for a change agent. And most change agents don’t survive their own changes. Bezos was hoping Lewis could make operating changes while maintaining the Post’s journalistic standards and ethics. He missed the cultural mis-fit.
Then Lewis doubled down by bringing in his old mentor from the UK, Robert Winnet. Winnet missed the key, screaming critical insight about executive onboarding – the need to converge into the organization before trying to evolve it.
Lewis touted Winnett as a “world class” journalist. “He’s a brilliant investigative journalist,” Lewis said. “And he will restore an even greater degree of investigative rigor to our organization.” But Lewis and Winnett were used to a different set of ethical standards than is practiced at The Post.
As note in The Washington Post’s article on Winnett, “At The Post and other major American news organizations, the use of deceptive tactics in pursuit of news stories violates core ethics policies. In Britain, “blagging” — using misrepresentation to dupe others into revealing confidential information — has been a known feature of a certain brand of tabloid journalism”
Cultural Due Diligence
The heart of cultural due diligence is figuring out how closely a new hire’s personal preferences across behaviors, relationships, attitudes, values and environment match the organization’s culture. The closer the match, the easier it’s going to be for a new hire at any level to converge into the organization. At the same time, if you want the organization to evolve, you want new hires to move you forward on one or two dimensions.
The core issue with Lewis and Winnett is the unbridgeable chasm on values. This is why Lewis was always going to have an extraordinarily difficult time establishing what Yale Professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld described as his “legitimacy to lead.”
Here are some things to look for in cultural due diligence, starting outside in.
Environment
Start with the context. Look at where people were brought up, educated and where they’ve gotten their business experience. We learn from others. We’re influenced by others.
The most successful organizations’ cultures align with their core focus. Expect people coming from design-focused organizations to care about innovation, production – accountability, delivery/distribution – collaboration, service – customer-focus. And know that moving someone from one type of organization to another is going to be problematically culturally.
Values
As discussed in an earlier article, most organizations have some form of integrity and respect as two of their values with their third value flowing from their core focus. Know that different organizations and people have different views of what integrity and respect mean.
This is the issue with Lewis and Winnett at The Washington Post. Practices that fall within the bounds of journalistic integrity in the UK, are out of bounds at The Post.
Attitude
Attitude is hard to change. People with a preference for proactively building premium offerings that diverge from competitors are going to think differently than those used to reacting to market demands to undercut market leaders. Both approaches can work – just not in the same organization at the same time.
Relationships
People with a preference for informal, verbal, debate where the best ideas win are going to struggle with more formal, controlled places where the person with most stripes calls the shots. And visa-versa.
Behaviors
Seth Godin’s cultural headline is “People like us do things like this.” You learn a lot about people by what they actually do. Know that bringing in people who did different things or did them differently than your organization is a massive cultural risk.
John Hall
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