I’m not sure how we did it, folks. We got in touch with Steve Garguilo’s people and locked in thirty minutes to ask him anything we wanted.

Steve Garguilo is the Founder of Cultivate. He works with people from all walks of life from all over the world to help them make their ideas happen. He led the revolution to transform the 5th largest company's culture by instigating and shaping a grassroots movement at Johnson & Johnson that engaged 23,000 employees and led to countless stories of product and people development.

What inspired you to start Cultivate?

I never anticipated I’d be working in empowerment, community building, or organizational change. My focus in school was in humanitarian engineering and social entrepreneurship, so I was working on projects focused on design for the developing world, and I worked on a few ventures in sub-Saharan Africa. This ended up led me to work for a massive healthcare company, Johnson & Johnson.

Going in, I was super pumped about helping make new ideas happen in that environment, but found it to be challenging. Even when people say they want new ideas to happen, there can be a lot of obstacles. So this led me to start looking around the company for people who’d been successful at doing this, and I started building a community of these changemakers, or what I would now call Cultivators. I got to build out a department for five years focused on development programs and immersions and leadership experiences and all kinds of things that were focused on empowering that community, and we saw amazing results in terms of new products, people development, and measurable culture change.

Based on doing that, I knew that is the kind of work I wanted to do, and I thought there would be a lot of companies that could benefit from having similar types of initiatives that empower people to make ideas happen. That’s how the idea for Cultivate was born.

What was the most challenging aspect of getting Cultivate off the ground?

I think anytime you have an idea, it can be a little bit lonely at first until you start building a squad of others around you who are equally passionate about the idea and also want to work to make that idea happen. At first, it was assembling the right core group to be able to launch. Then, for me one of the challenging/exciting things has been learning about just how different cultures can be across different companies. Actually getting inside and hearing from people was and continues to be so illuminating.

For example, in some companies, “leadership development” is a dirty word, while in some it’s incredibly valued. In some companies, people are really comfortable working virtually, while in others it’s a steep learning curve. In some companies, they’re tremendously collaborative by default. In some, it’s much more competitive. Some have good meeting cultures. Some waste tons of time. And so getting to see how different people deal with different issues has been a great way to get services off the ground that can be beneficial in many contexts.

Sounds like you were exposed to a wide range of companies, cultures, and leadership styles. How did you develop yours?

Leadership style is an always-evolving thing that probably starts with a lot of emulation and whatever the opposite of emulation is: essentially trying to copy things you like and actively avoid doing things you don’t like. For me as I’ve tried to mature as a leader, it’s then also being able to go beyond what I like and don’t like, and then realizing what’s going to work for the person or people I’m working with.

Part of being an effective leader is knowing that you need to be a different leader with everyone in some respects. I guess that stuff is mostly as it relates to people leadership, which is probably the most important part of leading. The other definition of leadership that I like is that leadership is making something happen that wouldn’t happen anyway. And so I always feel compelled to not just lead something just to lead something, but to lead something somewhere. We’re trying to make x thing happen that doesn’t exist, and we’re uniquely positioned to do it, so now my job is to just try to hold that bar really high and help everyone work to get there.

What is the most recent success story you have of someone pitching an idea?

It might sound silly or cliche, but really the most important person you need to pitch an idea to is yourself, the second most important people are just to pitch it to people who you want to help you, and then way down on the list would be “pitching” it to people who are going to give you some kind of extra special green light or money.

I often say money is step 5,000 for an idea, and so you have to think about steps 1 - 4,999 that you can take. I know that it can be really hard, especially in a big company, to feel like there’s support out there, and so we make “pitches” these really big things in our head. But I think the most important thing is starting a movement around the idea. Go do all the things you can do without money. Talk to customers/stakeholders. Prototype the concept. Launch it in a small way. Collect feedback. Make progress in such a way that it’s now undeniable to be able to move it forward.

A good example of this comes from a woman named Uma who works inside one of our client organizations. She had kind of a crazy idea for a new framework for privacy that could lead to giving people more agency over how certain data are used. For example, it’s really hard for a family member to get access to a loved one’s healthcare data after they pass away. But easy for a government to get the same data. So there are some real inequities in how all of that works. She recognized this, devised a new system, and launched it out into the world without really talking to her superiors. At first, she had to answer a lot of questions and reign some people in, but ultimately it led to some new patents and new business opportunities for the company. So, that said, I think the best kind of pitch is really just doing it and then the pitch kind of finds you.

As someone familiar with corporate culture, which cultural shifts have you observed over the years that feel most promising? Which aspects have been or continue to be the most challenging to overcome?

Let’s start by unpacking “culture” because it’s such a suitcase word. (This term was coined by Marvin Minsky when talking about these buzzwords that pack a lot of different meanings for different people.) Ultimately, I think it’s important to have some caveats when talking about culture: e.g. in large organizations, there exist tons of sub-cultures where each leader sets a different culture around them; there’s a huge difference between stated culture (aspirational culture) and lived culture (actual culture) so it’s important to differentiate between them; culture does change (of course) but only in small pockets and slowly, not by broad decree.

Another thing we know to be true about change is that it’s really a misconception to say, “people don’t like change.” The better way to say it is, “people don’t like LOUDLY COMMUNICATED change that they weren’t a part of.” So there’s a big difference there. The best culture change really does come from the bottoms-up when people push for it. If we look outside of the corporate world, just look at movements like the Arab Spring, LGBTQ+ rights, BLM — these are driven by grassroots organizers who get fed up and work to make change happen. While it seems like that’s very different than how companies work, it’s not.

This is how change happens in big companies, too. It’s when people start acting the way they want to see the company act, and others start to follow. It’s how Apple abolished styrofoam in their cafeterias, or how GE adopted a new design thinking practice, or how Takeda has built a community for anyone to participate in innovation. It’s people advocating for and making the change. I think “trend-wise” what I’m excited about is that more people are waking up to this, more people are starting communities, and that affords more opportunities for everyone working inside big companies to have their voices heard. Unquestionably it’s still a challenge, but it all starts when someone chooses to start.

What have you found to be the most successful way to get clients to believe in Cultivate’s work?

I think it’s less about them believing in our work and more about them believing in what they’re trying to accomplish. Our best clients are groups inside big companies that are trying to drive some specific kind of change. In some cases it’s a “culture of innovation” or in some cases it’s rolling out new leadership competencies or in some cases it’s trying to get people to embrace a philosophy like agile.

Whatever it is, they’re successful if they’re committed to it and they’ve thought out what they want that target state to be. Because then we can help them really scale and democratize what they’re trying to do. No longer is it enough to just say, “hey, we put up some new posters and sent out some emails, so voila, our culture is changed.” The real way to make that happen is by connecting dots, finding those Cultivators, empowering them, and starting a movement. So the ones who are onboard for that are the ones who realize the most success.

How do you advise someone who’s trying to navigate corporate bureaucracy?

First, anything that’s daunting is often daunting because it’s ambiguous. “Bureaucracy” is a perfect example of an ambiguous monster. Break it down. Who in particular are you concerned about? What groups? What relationships? Make a stakeholder map and think about key people and your relationship with those key people and what their motivations are.

Once you have something down in paper in front of you, it’s a lot less daunting to navigate than would be a big ambiguous, amorphous thing. At the end of the day, everyone has some selfish motivations, yes, but the vast majority (hopefully everyone) has the best interests of the company as their primary motivator. So it’s mostly about how are you positioning something in their language, or positioning it in a way they care about, or in a way that will make them look and feel good?

Read everything they write. Look at all their slides. Listen to them. Yes, it takes time. But it’s worth investing that time to get the buy-in you need instead of fighting battles that will ultimately take way more time and aren’t good for anyone.

What is Cultivate’s differentiator?

I think there are a few things: one is definitely the community-orientation. I like the chart with action vs. authority and thinking about unnamed leaders making an impact vs. named leaders.

I think another is what our development experiences look and feel like. We’ve all been to so many bad training programs, both in person and online, that are like, ughhh, when will this end. We really aim to bring a level of intentional experience design to thinks that is very different. Our expertise comes from a lot of different domains and we aim to touch different senses, so I really appreciate that as a differentiator.

And then for me action is such an important one. A lot of times people will try to roll out some kind of culture change. Or will try to get people through a development experience. And it’s fun, and people enjoyed it. But where’s the output? Where’s the follow through? What’s the measurable change? Action is so important to me that I studied it for about 4 years and wrote a book about it. 

What is the biggest challenge your client has when it comes to change-making and how do you advise they resolve it?

“So, I agree with your idea that we should empower these people who are out there throughout the organization, but who are they and how do I find them?” This is the most common.

I find that while typically people approach change through making fancy slides and not really engaging people, it’s not actually hard to get them to embrace a new approach. They want to find their Cultivators. But they don’t know how. Isn’t that interesting? Because if you’re a Cultivator here reading this, you’re probably thinking that you’re knocking down their doors trying to get them to listen to you and let you participate. But they’re still kind of dumbfounded about where to find people to help.

We have a few different ways we go about this, really focused on making sure we’re looking for people beyond the usual suspects. Usually we set aside the “top talent” lists and the normal HR rosters, and instead look at who are the people who are organizing the random tech Tuesday lunches? or the Catan nights? These are some conveners that it might make sense to engage. Who are the creative people you always invite to the meeting because you want their ideas? These might be people who other people who are less vocal about their ideas confide in, and so they might know some good places to look. And then also, why not just ask? We don’t need to be so “man behind the curtain” about these things, we can put nominations out there to try to surface names.

There are other ways and even some tools we work with on this, but yes I think that’s the most common challenge.

What do you admire most about the team you’ve created at Cultivate?

There are a lot of specific things that I admire about each person on our team. I’m a big believer in the old mantra of you don’t hire people to tell them what to do, you hire people to tell you what to do. So I’m in awe of the expertise each team member brings in their domain area, and I like learning from them as we continue to build the organization.

Across the board I admire that the team is all committed to a vision of the future that doesn’t quite exist yet, but it’s one we want to create together. It’s one where voices that don’t normally get heard instead get to be out in front making their ideas happen. It’s one where people who show up to work don’t have to do so with a sense of dread, but with a sense of excitement about what they get to create. It’s one where people get to experience a real sense of belonging in the workplace. In lots of organizations, there’s a way to go to make that happen, and I think the Cultivate team is uniquely positioned to bust through those problems, so I love the skills and attitude everyone brings as we work to do that.

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