Creating Your Minimum Viable Company Culture

A few weeks ago I met with co-founders of a company I advised, which was recently acquired. They’re tasked with exponential growth — and as part of the deal have the resources to achieve that goal. It’s an exceptionally exciting time for them. While their excitement is tinged with nervousness — normal under the circumstances — it’s the energizing versus the paralyzing kind.

They asked me, “How do we keep our culture when we’re growing so fast?” Here’s the framework I outlined for them, and what I’ve told other founders when they’re growing their companies, regardless of the stage:

In many ways, developing company culture is no different than building other aspects of your business. Think of culture as the first internal tool your company desperately needs — and one that shouldn’t be ignored or delayed for shorter-term fire drills, or else you won’t be able to put much on top of it. Put technically, it’s really difficult to isolate and “debug” cultural issues once they’re established because too many people access the “cultural code base” on a regular basis. You can’t shut company culture down for maintenance while you attempt to do upgrades. The good news is that culture scales easily if you’ve got things properly in place and continue to give those things a reasonable amount of care and feeding.

To clarify, just because culture scales easily doesn’t mean it’s static as your company grows. It evolves as communication requirements change, as different people you need to hire come on board, and so on. But if you establish a good foundation and give it the ongoing attention, your culture will evolve so your company will still retain the feel you want as it grows.

So prioritize culture. Be thoughtful about the bare minimum — the minimum viable culture — you need to create at the outset, so you can evolve it with intent over time. Create it in the same way you should tackle everything else: with a deliberate mix of strategy, tactics, and execution. It will pay dividends, financially, professionally, and personally.

Strategy: What Culture Do You Want to Create and Why?

How do you want everyone to treat each other? What’s most important to you and for what reasons?

I can hear the eyes rolling at me on both sides of that previous statement right now. Startups tend to ricochet between rejecting written culture strategy altogether or burdening themselves with way too much detail. Those who reject it think they don’t need it (i.e., interesting work that changes the world is culture enough, or they think culture just grows well organically. Others honestly don’t know what they want and by not putting it in writing, they think they leave themselves the option to change their minds. But unfortunately, everything you do, whether intentional or not, becomes part of your culture.

On the other hand, some companies will drive themselves nuts trying to capture their cultures comprehensively. I don’t advocate that approach. It doesn’t work on a number of levels. I’m talking about “minimum viable culture.” What are some basic principles — no more than 10, and even that’s pushing it — that are important to you and that will make your company where you and others want to be?

So again, you don’t have to go all “Jerry Maguire Mission Statement” on everyone. Just take the time to think about the culture you want to create, and articulate in writing what you want and why it’s important strategically. Include both the “what” and the “why,” when you write it down. Sometimes the “what” doesn’t achieve the “why” as well as you think, if at all.

For example, here’s a pretty standard Silicon Valley culture principle:

At Company X, we want a culture of open communication [because that will make our workplace more effective].

Ok, terrific. There are lots of ways to make the workplace more effective. But in this example, you’ve chosen a strategy of open communication (among other things, likely) to accomplish this. Fair enough. A strategy of “open communication” means different things to different people. The “how” is just as critical to articulating culture as what and why.

Tactics: Putting Your Minimal Viable Culture Strategy Into Practice

Once you’ve articulated your strategy, you need to determine how to translate the principles you’ve outlined tactically. For example, here’s a possible list:

Since at Company X, we want a culture of open communication to make our workplace more effective, we will do the following:

• Have a weekly meeting where everyone shares updates on what we’re doing
• Send out meeting notes and action items. Even if it’s a small company, it is important to make sure everyone is clear on what was decided during that time
• Communicate important ad hoc events or changes when they occur, such as key wins and losses, employee starts and departures, or customer feedback

I put three points here as the upper bound. You’ll find as you compose your maximum of 10 tenets that your list of tactics likely will begin to overlap across them. That’s ok, and that’s a good thing. Again, we want this to be a manageable list, especially because you’ll need to execute on these (see next section below).

Execute: Mindfully Implement Your Tactics; Aim For And Reward Consistency

To create a culture, you need to live it. That doesn’t mean posting your strategy and tactics on the wall for all to see and calling it a day. It means being deliberate — every day — about executing on the tactics you outlined.

For example, if you had the bullet point, “Communicate important ad hoc events or changes when they occur, such as key wins and losses, employee starts and departures, and customer feedback,” you’d better be ready to follow through on that — and have the rest of the team do so — for good news or bad.

If you are committed, what might its implications be for you and your company culture? For example, you might, on a consistent basis:

• Reward people when they communicate openly and effectively
• Refrain from shooting messengers, effectively discouraging those who try to bring honest feedback to the team
• Make clear, negative consequences for people who don’t share information

Are you prepared to do this? If not, take a step back and think about the strategy and tactics to which you originally committed. Are you sure you that’s what you meant?

When you have clear, consistent execution on your tactics and strategy, it makes it that much easier for your teams to become stewards of company culture as you grow. That culture may not be for everyone. But it will be yours, deliberately created, with a solid foundation in place for it to evolve and grow successfully, hopefully just like your company.

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Originally published at karenroterdavis.com on April 16, 2015.