On Toxic Culture and Grace

To attract top tech talent, create a culture of trust, integrity, and grace.

I recently had the opportunity to be a guest on “The Innovation Meets Leadership Podcast,” hosted by Natalie Born, VP of Innovation at Territory Global. I’ve known Natalie for a long time, and I always find her questions compelling. In this interview, she asked me about the “art and science” of hiring the right technical talent. The conversation that followed has been on my mind ever since.

Hiring the right tech talent is not about code tests or GitHub contributions. Yes, software is just code, but it’s code that’s written by people, and it’s not enough to look at the code those people produce.

The art of attracting the right talent is about culture, and it’s something you have to live every day, not just during recruiting or hiring. It’s about creating a culture that attracts the right people — the people who will live that culture with you — then sets them up for sustainable success. For my company and me, that’s not a toxic culture of hustle and grind. It’s a culture of trust, integrity, and grace.

Toxic Culture

While there is a genuine shortage of qualified technical talent, there are plenty of excellent engineers out there. Many of them get overlooked because of hiring prejudices. (Failing to recognize talent because of demographic differences is not evidence of a talent shortage. It’s a lost opportunity for growth and an advantage ceded to your clearer-eyed competitors.)

Beyond those distorting filters of bias, let’s face it: the disruptive ideology and exponential economies of the tech sector often lead to toxic excesses, and many great engineers decide they don’t want to be a part of that. (They’ll probably never tell you this. They’ll either not apply, or, if offered a position, say they’ve “been offered a better opportunity.”)

Toxic culture attracts toxic people, and it hurts the wellbeing and work quality of even the good people on your team.

Toxic culture presents itself in many ways that are common in technology companies.

Drinking the Toxic Kool-Aid

Toxic culture is loyal to a brand logo or a charismatic leader. It sells people on a shallow vision, then expects them to follow merrily along. “Drinking the Kool-Aid” is frequently as grim as the event it references: brainwashed people mindlessly obeying the rules or rulers because they appeal to an emotional response.

Such a culture has no room for healthy skepticism or mutual accountability. It’s a culture hostile to independent thought — no matter what they may claim about “valuing diversity” or “welcoming all ideas” — and so it’s a culture that squashes innovation.

The 10x’er Myth

Toxic culture advances the myth of computer engineering as a solitary sport and promotes individuals who care only about themselves. It rewards megalomaniac developers and egocentric leaders.

The mythical 10x’er thrives in a toxic culture because it feeds their arrogance and props up their fragile sense of self-worth. They’re mythical not because these people don’t exist — they certainly do — but because they don’t actually deliver 10x the value; they instead hurt the performance of the rest of the team while making it harder for you to attract other talent.

A culture of individual achievement and self-aggrandizement is antithetical to collaboration, and it treats growth and career advancement as a competition with coworkers. It shuts down the sharing of knowledge, perspectives, and skills. Toxic culture tells people to lean into themselves instead of into each other.

Hustle and Grind

Toxic culture mutes emotional intelligence in favor of 80-hour weeks in the monomaniacal pursuit of material success. It focuses on deadlines, revenue numbers, OKRs, and sale multipliers. It holds its people hostage with paychecks and perks, and it asks them to trade life balance for free snacks. Not working through the weekend? Guess you don’t care enough about this company.

Yes, leadership must provide direction and clear goals for a company culture to aim toward, but toxic culture makes business growth goals and fat 401(k)s the only reason to show up for work every day.

I’ve been there, done that, earlier in my career. When you hire someone based on their willingness and ability to sit in front of a computer and write code for 80 hours per week, I guarantee you that some of that code is going to be bad.

When you’re tired and strung out on Red Bulls or Monster Energy, you end up cutting corners because your brain is too tired to do it right. You don’t think through all the edge cases, and you don’t test and QA your work. You push to production and pray that it works. Sometimes your prayers aren’t answered.

A Culture of Grace

Skilled software engineers have options, and, if they’re not themselves toxic people, they’ll tend not to choose employers with toxic cultures. They’ll choose to work with people who treat them with respect and kindness. They’ll choose colleagues who will help them grow and succeed, and employers who support them in living full, healthy, well-balanced lives.

Want to attract the best technical talent then set them up for sustainable success? You need to create a culture of grace.

Trust

Writing software is a social art. I know some people will fight me on that, but I stand by it. It’s simply not true that I can write code in a vacuum when that software is written to serve humans. Maybe you can bang out a single-purpose utility on your own, but for anything more ambitious, you must rely on the support of the people to your right and your left. Software development teams live and die by the success of the entire organization, not the performance of even the hottest hotshot coder in the room. That’s why I built my company as a team-centric organization.

To succeed together, we have to trust one another. I have to believe that helping you grow and succeed won’t come at the expense of my growth and success. I have to believe that I can ask about what I don’t understand or acknowledge my mistakes without being torn apart for my vulnerability.

As my company’s leader, I have to trust that the people I hire will do their work well, with me holding them accountable but never micromanaging. (Frequent micromanaging is a sure sign that you either hired the wrong person or need to work on your leadership skills.) This is not the trust of “do what I tell you to do.” That’s toxic culture loyalty. Instead, I want to trust that you care about your work, that you’ll be kind to your colleagues and our clients, and that you’ll work well with the other people already on my team.

Integrity

A culture of grace demands personal integrity: honesty, morality, and steadfastness in the face of corrupting pressures. It means being willing to stand up to clients making unreasonable and misguided demands. It means standing up to me or anyone on the team when we’re wrong. Stand up for your values, then do what you say you will do.

At my company, we believe in healthy skepticism and constant accountability across all leaders and members of our teams. We don’t want blind followers but thinking, breathing, innovating humans.

Some of the worst software I’ve seen was produced by vendors who valued obedience over integrity. Many of them employed skilled tech talent, but then squandered it by discouraging smart people from speaking up. They demanded their employees sacrifice their integrity to do whatever they were told.

I’ve hired away some of their engineers, sometimes when one of my teams is brought in to fix the mess left by their former hustle-and-grind employer. They do great work for us and help us all succeed, but only because we value their integrity and listen to what they have to say.

Grace

People are going to make mistakes. (Computers and robots do too, but that’s another topic for another time.) If a job candidate’s response to someone making a mistake is, “Wow, what an idiot,” I’m not going to hire them. I look for people who share our culture of grace.

With a culture of grace, we recognize that maybe Alex forgot to write a unit test because their kid was sick that day. Maybe Chris messed up the UI because their building had a false alarm fire drill last night.

The people to the left and the right of you are not stones for you to step on as you climb to the next level of your career. They’re opportunities for you to demonstrate leadership by helping guide them to a solution that you know to be correct. Grace is how you gain the trust of the people who work with you. People who show that type of leadership are the people I want on my team.

We’re Not a Pirate Ship

We have a saying at my company that I shamelessly stole from a great friend of mine. “We are a fellowship, not a pirate ship.” We’re sailing somewhere together, and we’ll all end up in Davy Jones’ locker if we’re only in it for ourselves. (I’ve read recently that even pirate ships weren’t as toxic as the movies portray them, so I guess that makes some tech companies even worse than pirates.)

I think every facet of that metaphor rings true when you’re trying to build a generative culture of innovative, intentional humans working toward a higher goal. A culture of grace brings people together in a genuine common cause. It attracts talented people who want to do good work together for mutual success. Together, they can sail to distant shores.

Let the pirate ships have their pirates. Let the toxic alpha dogs have their 10xers. I’d much rather work with people of trust, integrity, and grace. It’s working out pretty well for us so far.