
“Great” Company Culture: A Navy SEAL’s Take
When you’re searching for a new job, a common question is “What kind of culture does the company have?”
Everyone wants to work at a company with a great culture. Or at least what they think a great culture is.
That’s the problem: they don’t know what a “great” culture is.
The same problem goes for founders starting a new company, or executives looking to change their existing culture. Many don’t know what great culture is, so they end up trying to build something, without knowing what that something is.
So, what is a great culture?
Success
To me, great culture is a culture of success. So before we can define what culture is, we have to understand what success is.
Many think success is attaining a certain height or level of accomplishment: a certain number of employees, a certain job title, or dollar amount of sales. We think these measurements represent success because they seem to say we’ve “made it.”
I believe this thinking is flawed because it assumes the work is done. To me, success is a state of motion that must be maintained. Similar to a plane in flight, the moment it stops moving forward, it loses lift and falls out of the sky.
Success is the action of winning against an opponent in a competition, increasing your company’s share price, being better than who you were yesterday, being happier, or making progress towards achieving your goals.
Notice, however, that I said achieving, not achievement. Achieving is a verb and achievement is a noun (actually a present participle of the verb achieve — I have to keep them straight, so my English teacher of a sister doesn’t scold me). We find the same distinction between winning and won. Achievement and won are both static states while achieving and winning are in motion. The difference may seem trivial, but if you’re in a plane at 30,000 ft, it’s not.
My point is that winning, and therefore success, is an action that we must strive for constantly. It’s requires constant work. The minute you move from winning to won, you’ve lost.
A culture of success is a culture of action. Without action, there is no success.
Culture
Now that we have defined success, what does culture look like? How does it facilitate success?
To understand culture, we need to start with what it is not. Culture is not something you can see or hear. Culture is an abstract. It doesn’t have a physical or concrete form. So no, it is not free snacks and an open workspace. Generally, it has nothing to do with the physical environment you are in. Unfortunately, you can’t buy culture on Amazon.
Now that we know what it is not, we can talk about what it is.
Culture is the fabric which connects your team and affects everything you do. It’s the interpersonal dynamics at play in a team or an organization. Culture is like gravity, you can’t see or feel it, but it’s there. It affects everything. It pulls on every team member; it grounds them, it connects them, and draws them closer into the center. It is also a force we can use to convert energy into motion. When used correctly, it can propel you to great heights.
When NASA wanted to send a spacecraft to the outer reaches of the solar system, it used the slingshot technique around a planet to add an additional 8,500 mph to the spacecraft. It used the Earth’s gravity to send a spacecraft hurtling into space without firing the engines. In business, a company’s culture is like Earth’s gravity. It has the power to propel its people (or spacecraft) to great heights. This is the power a great culture can have.

If you don’t have a great culture, or not enough gravity, team members will float out into space and will be attracted to another company that does. If you have a toxic culture, or too much gravity, team members will be stuck to the ground and unable to move. A toxic culture makes ten pounds feel like 100.

A great culture strikes a balance between those ends of the spectrum. A balance where culture, or gravity, not only grounds but empowers a team and its members. That balance creates a healthy dependence; members are dependent on the culture and the culture on them. This symbiotic relationship is what gives culture its power and influence over an organization’s success.
The Culture of Success
In the short run, any organization can find success with a bit of luck. To reproduce success in the long run, leaders must cultivate an environment, or culture, that allows the focus of its members to be on taking action.
Leaders must ensure that their organization’s members feel empowered and fulfilled so that they can take ownership. Once this environment takes hold within an organization, it starts to take on a life of its own. It grows and evolves as the individual members contribute to it and ultimately the success of the organization.
In my next post, I will highlight an organization which provides a great example of what a culture of success can do. From the start, the founders have built an organization whose members are empowered and driven. As their CEO states: “Our team is our barrier to entry.” The founders understand that if they achieve a successful culture by empowering their people, the success of their organization will follow.
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