Part I — Why you’ve got “Culture” all wrong
Understanding your Organizational and Personal “Why” is key to culture fit
I’ve had a lot of conversations with people recently asking about the keys to the success of Payline. My answer always revolves around our team. That typically leads to a conversation about how we have managed to hire such amazing people. And that answer is always about culture. However, I feel like a lot of people don’t understand or appreciate what “culture” means or how you “build culture.” In fact, I think most people/companies get this wrong. Starting a business is about so many things going right. State of the economy, funding, technology mega-trends, cultural trends, people, etc. There are so many variations in the abysmal success rate of businesses, I won’t bother with a statistical number. But let’s all agree on one thing, it’s really freaking hard. But there is one thing you absolutely can control. Who you hire.
So if a major key to success is your team and your team is a function of culture (or visa versa), then what is culture and how do you build a good one?
Start with definitions: What is culture?
“Culture” is very trendy word these days. Maybe it’s a “millennial thing” but this word appears everywhere today, especially in the startup scene. However, my guess is that you have “culture” all wrong. It is not one thing, statement or employee perk that creates real culture.
As a noun it’s defined as: the manifestation of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively by the customs, arts, social institutions, and achievements of a particular group.
Our good friends at Mabbly put it best: “The story of your company begins with the behavior of your people, which is the foundation of its culture. A team’s expression of what it believes goes way beyond foosball and catered lunches (though I’m all for those perks too if you’ve covered the other stuff).”
The takeaway is that culture is NOT about giving great perks or having a cool looking office. Payline has had the same culture from when we were in a single large plain vanilla shared office to our most recent offices we moved into this year. We built the culture around our purpose, then hired for cultural fit. Then the perks came as the icing on the cake as a reward for our team’s success.
“Why we work determines how well we work.” Start with your Purpose to create your culture.
At Payline, our culture is a reflection of our purpose, and has been from day one. We realized in our own lives that, “Why we work determines how well we work”. There was a study that provided proof of this theory: Breaking Monotony with Meaning: Motivation in Crowdsourcing Markets by Dana Chandler and Adam Kapelner. (https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.0962) They conducted the first natural field experiment to explore the relationship between the “meaningfulness” of a task and worker effort. By employing about 2,500 workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk), they proved that reshaping the workers’ motive resulted in higher overall performance.
Culture can also be defined as a verb, often in the medical and research field, as: to maintain in conditions suitable for growth. (as in, Payline cultures our relationships with our customers as well as our employees to maximize their potential for growth.
I can’t think of a better way to describe what we have accomplished through starting with our purpose, our “Why”, and building our company around this. So let’s look at what we have accomplished at Payline.
We started Payline with Purpose by defining our Why.
Our CEO and co-founder, Jeff Shea, always talks about this idea of “What is our Why?” Even more importantly, he asks each interviewee and new employee to strongly consider, “What is your personal Why?”
We started Payline with this question to develop the blueprint for our company’s foundation. Jeff loves to use the example of Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle”. His TED talk, “How Great Leaders Inspire Action,” is a great place to start in discovering the answer for your own company. It rightfully has over 32M views on TED.
- With that, we established Payline’s WHY: Everything we do, we believe it must Create a Positive Impact.
- Our How: We make a Positive Impact by enabling innovative software and products to improve business, and share our proceeds with those in need.
- Our What: We just happen to be in the Payments industry.
With this in mind we established our Core Values:
- Passion: Be excellent at what you do. Invest the time, resources and abilities to achieve above average results.
- Purpose: Focus on creating exceptional customer experiences all the time! (This holds true at every contact point: sales, customer service, technical assistance, product development, etc.)
- Positive Impact: Volunteer our time, abilities and donate financially to those in need. (You can see many of our employees wearing shirts that say “Be the Positive Impact” on the back.)
These founding principles drive clear results which we can measure to ensure we are achieving the Positive Impact.
- Continually create opportunities for our employees to grow and our clients to achieve goals they could not otherwise achieve without our assistance.
- Donation of time, talents and proceeds to Give Back to those in need.
- Company Culture that breeds success. #208 on Inc. 500 | ETA Tech Innovation Award | 50 on Fire | Moxies Nomination
So, what is your personal Why?
Understanding your why is just as important to personal success as it is to the success of your company/career. When hiring, a personality and behavioral test isn’t something every CEO/Manager/Recruiter thinks about, but they should. Many times, the questions you are asked in an interview may be purposeful to gauge your cultural fit through personality and behavioral traits. I highly recommend you flip this on its head though.
Do you really want this job? Do you want to work for a company that you don’t fit with? Does the work align with your skills, talents, passion and values?
If you don’t understand your own “Why”, i.e. if you can’t give your personal why statement; then that is the first thing you need to do. Whether you are a founder looking to build a company with great culture or an employee looking for a great career opportunity; understanding your why (AND PURSUING IT) is a must. It will lead to a sense of fulfillment, and help achieve a balanced life. There are so many personality and behavioral tests, I’m not going to recommend any specific method. At Payline, we developed our own methods, which we believe is part of our competitive advantage. So if you want to know it, check out our career opportunities :).
Follow me on Medium or Twitter to get updates on parts II, III and IV which compliment this post as a guide to help with defining your personal why (Life Purpose), identify your core values and establish your company’s purpose.
