WHICH CAME FIRST: THE CULTURE OR THE GROWTH?
Startups that grow into big corporations share many of the same characteristics: innovation, resilience, agility, and passion. However, startups can’t successfully build on these crucial traits without the foundation of a strong company culture. In essence, each of these qualities is a product of culture.
Where Does Culture Come From?
If culture makes the business, you’d think most people would agree on what drives it. But a 2016survey from the Workforce Institute at Kronos tells a different tale: A third of human resources professionals claim to take the lead on culture, while 26 percent of managers believe the executive team defines it.
Throw employees into the mix, and opinions diverge further. One-third of them feel they drive culture, and another 28 percent maintain that no one is accountable for creating or destroying it.
Disagreement about who drives, creates, or is capable of damaging culture indicates that an organization’s culture isn’t aligned with its business objectives. If those are two different talking points, it’s hard to unite everyone through culture.
Consider this: assume you’ve just hired a bunch of employees. Afterward, you read about a cool office that meets regularly for happy hours. Trying to adopt this strategy out of nowhere will feel backward. If happy hours weren’t mentioned at onboarding, your team won’t see them as an authentic expression of your culture. When leaders try to retrofit something on top of an existing framework, it’s often met with resentment. Culture is fundamental throughout the process; you can’t focus on it after the fact.
For instance, take the acquisition of Virgin America by Alaska Air. Both organizations come to the table with very different cultures. The challenge will be blending them together into a new entity that represents what it plans to become in the future.
How do you start everyone at your company on the same culture page?
Define Yourself as an Individual
An entrepreneur’s company culture mirrors who they are on a personal level. Our company culture has three main components: get sh*t done, learn quickly, and be cool (in other words, “don’t be a jerk”). These maxims flow directly from the traits that helped my partner and me find success in our own lives.
I’ve tried before to instill a culture that wasn’t true to me, but I felt like I was faking it. Now, I’m the same guy at work as I am in the rest of my life. To get to the heart of your culture, go beyond the surface and ask yourself hard questions about who you are as a person: are you strong, weak, confident, or effective? Find your core values and beliefs, and align them with your business objectives to create a thriving culture.
Start with Your Very First Hire
Culture should be the first thing a new hire observes. Our culture statement can be seen in every position we advertise, offer letter, and employee handbook. Everywhere new hires look, they see our three core values.
Zappos also takes orientation very seriously, devoting four weeks to the process. From day one, new hires hear about its “holocratic” approach to running the business. There are no real job titles, no managers, and no hierarchy. If that approach doesn’t suit a new employee, the company even offers a buyout of one month’s salary.
Define culture when you have fewer employees, as it’s easier for one person to change the mood in a room of four than it is in a crowd of 100. The members of that small team will eventually serve as cultural ambassadors for new hires. As the company grows, the core values from your early days will flourish.
Align Business Decisions with Culture
For more than 80 percent of employers, cultural fit is a top priority in hiring decisions—including the hiring and firing of clients. Everyone you work with and every decision you make should align with your culture. If they don’t, friction, conflict, and confusion are bound to arise. We’ve certainly let go of clients who didn’t exemplify our core value regarding partnerships (be cool).
For example, we once developed a game plan for two clients that was on-point with what they wanted from the start. But, for whatever reason, they were consistently disrespectful, rude, and insulting—despite positive results. So, we fired them. Exposing employees to that sort of negativity isn’t good for morale.
Yammer, a social network owned by Microsoft, takes a similarly forthright approach to evaluating new hires. It eliminated nearly 30 percent of its engineers within the first four years because they lacked the skills needed to drive success, dragging other employees down with them.
Make Corrections Public
People might discuss culture in closed-door meetings at other companies, but we address issues that support and bolster or go against our culture publicly. We do the same when correcting them.
Recently, someone at the company said I was being negative every morning in stand-up, so I made a note to myself that said, “Praise in public; criticize individually in private.” If I start seeing a theme, however, I’ll take it public.
As former L.A. Lakers coach Phil Jackson said, “I’ve found that anger is the enemy of instruction.” So I’m not going to berate people publicly for making mistakes they probably already feel bad about.
There Is No Magic Wand
You can’t wave a magic wand and expect people to accept a culture without some sort of precedence and grounding. You set the example for your first hires, they set the example for the second round, and so on.
The truth is that you need to set the example—and set it early—for every employee at your company. Align your culture with your core beliefs and your business objectives, and don’t be afraid to correct missteps. Regardless of what people think about who sets the culture in other companies, it’s up to you to set the tone for yours.