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I just got the old pipe from a place called Neuroleadership Institute where I was doing some work, and they’re famous for this model called “SCARF,” which ironically they don’t even own the top Google hit for. SCARF stands for Status, Certainty, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness — ostensibly the things people want out of work and, well, life. Neuro does a bunch of consulting and training for larger-sized brands — I think it was 54 of the Fortune 100 at the time of my pipe job — and they regularly infuse SCARF-y stuff into these trainings. So that’s their external culture, i.e. what they sell, i.e. what people pay them for. They want to believe it’s also their internal culture, i.e. how they deal with employees and contractors. Sadly, it’s not even remotely that. And the thing is, that’s pretty common.
I don’t think I’ve literally ever worked at a place where anyone in senior leadership practiced what they preached on culture; all the fluffy stuff said in all-hands meetings, or the ways in which we’re supposed to treat each other, were out the window in 3.7 seconds if something else urgent and shiny came down the pike. I used to work at this hellhole called Virtuoso, and based on some culture speaker that the CEO saw once, we created a policy whereby, on emails, you had to put a line in italics at the top about the urgency of the email, i.e. “This…
