Building culture like meerkats
As a science graduate, I’m always impressed by the beauty of the nature. Recent studies show us how bees and ants find their paths, there are already algorithms to simulate their actions. It means that we learn something from nature. Nature is just out there, and we look at every day. An apple inspires you, then gravity discovery happens. What we are waiting for? An inspiring influence. We will learn much more when we have a look at nature. Nature is already an agile environment. Modern people of 21st century give a name to these natural actions as agile and make it famous with certifications. Instead, there is nothing surprising. Just keep watching nature and apply it to your business.
I observe nature, interpret founding, and try to apply natural behaviors to business life. Recently, people started to simulate wings in wind turbines to use the wind effectively and generate more power. In this blog post, I’ll try to share how meerkats and their life is suitable to build a culture in our organizations.
Meerkats
Scientific name: Suricata suricatta
Family name: Herpestidae
Classification: Mammal
IUCN status: Least concern
Lifespan (in wild): 12–14 years
Weight: Less than one kilogram
Body length: Around 29cm (plus a 19cm tail)
Top speed: 32 km/h
Diet: Omnivore: beetles, caterpillars, spiders, and scorpions. They’ll also eat small reptiles, birds, eggs, fruit and plants.
Habitat: Desert
Meerkat is one of a few animals on Earth to work together. They live in group of different sizes from 5 to 50. People work together, and they are also in similar groups, 5 to 50 people from startup to a little grown teams. In today’s world, companies discover agile scrum and team terms that consist of 3–9 people. It’s just for technical team. When you consider involving departments, the number increases and average is around 25–30. This is the most common numbers in Meerkat groups. It’s acceptable to grow up to 50 people like Meerkats do for a specific work.
Leadership
Personality is related to the life conditions where you were born and grow up. If you are a manager, you can learn what leaders do, but it’s quite hard to do something like leaders do. It’s something natural for leaders, they know the difficulty of leading by examples in the past, they know the results of leading people by examples in the past. If you want to be a leader today, you need these missing experience, or you will face tough situations. As you are not familiar in leading, you will try to manage. There’s a slight difference in the terms.
On the first picture, when you lead your team, they will have their freedom, and they care about their work. They want their companies to grow. They influence others either in their team or in the organization and try to make them helpful as well.
On the second picture, when you manage your team, they will try to approach bureaucratically and expect you to tell whatever needed. This causes “give my money every at the end of the month”. It’s not much different than modern slavery. They are not interested in what others do or how others did something. They just focus on their task like a soldier. They don’t care anything anymore.
Different personalities bring different perspectives in companies. So we have a diverse environment. All people have a different solution to a question. This is what makes diverse environments stronger. If you are not able to hire people from abroad, try hiring people from different cities. Diversity isn’t just about different cities. Think about personality types, emotional and intelligence quotients…
Meerkats live in deserts, and they do things together to gather and store food, to protect each other from predators by communicating at outside etc. Each of them contributes to the team success. They are specialized in hunting scorpions while they grow up. The biggest gaining is when people start caring about your organization as much as you do while communicating. Communication is the key! They wake up in the morning and decide what to do next. Sounds like daily standings, right? Your teams are going to lead themselves, feel more responsible.
Collaboration
Another key factor of being successful of a Meerkat group, they do all the things together. If there is a need of food, they hunt together. During hunting, one of them becomes sentry and finds a high-point where it can watch the sky and desert to notice predators before they attack. That’s how we people work. A scrum master who teaches the rituals and team performs the activities. By the time, monitors the progress like sentry. If there is something wrong or dangerous for the team, sentry and scrum master warns the teams to remove obstacles. It’s simple. We do not want our teams to get hurt. We do not want to lose motivation. Building a team requires a lot of amount of time, time is money. It’s also about skills…
Skills
Building a team requires hard and soft skills. While developers mostly focus on their hard skills, product teams focus on hard and soft skills, marketing teams focus on soft skills. There are things that require both hard and soft skills. Each member is precious in the teams. While the marketing team gathers feedback from clients, they use their soft skills. It’s important to empathize and make sure that the client is going to be happy as soon as possible. Meanwhile, gathered feedback and made researches are collected in front of the product manager. Product Manager has hard and soft skills to decide what is really needed. Researches require hard skills and empathizing require soft skills. Product Manager has to build a user experience in mind and design a beautiful journey which makes clients happy. Meerkats learn new skills as well. They are afraid of other animals and show themselves larger while empathizing. Then focus on what’s needed, what are the next steps. Less is more. It’s important to train your team and give them a portion of the educational budget. Unfortunately, humans have to pay for some new skills, as they are not available on the nature to freely learn.
Creativity
Meerkats are curious animals and they love adventures. They learned how to hunt poisonous animals subtly. They dig safe places called boltholes throughout their foraging area. So they can hide in an emergency. If they caught in open area by a predator, it tries showing itself magnificent. Thus, predator may be afraid and go away. If a group is confronted, the meerkats will stand together. It may fool an attacker into thinking they are a single large, dangerous animal.
In similar, employees should be curious and keep asking questions, learn more. If they don’t love adventure, they are not going to discover more and move away from comfort zone. Then there’s a great risk of a failed organization. They should build trust among them and stand together when needed. A teammate should be a complement of another teammate whenever needed. This is the key to build trust in team and in the organization. Employees should always support each other and tries to achieve something higher than before. Meerkats do it, people can do it too. Unfortunately, creativity is about getting inspired. Most people come up different ideas while they take shower. Try to visit art museums, try to attend global conferences about your work, try to read scientific papers to know where the world is right now and what can be done for future when you catch the know.
Paradise is on Earth when you build a culture like Meerkats did, think…
