Why culture eats strategy for breakfast and experience for lunch
Perhaps you’ve been in a situation where you’ve been tasked with growing your team. How do you choose who to bring on?
Perhaps you look at the person’s past experience and current skillset. Ok, easy enough.
Now imagine you had to convince this person to work for free.
How the hell would you do that? Why would anyone work for free? That’s a challenge we regularly faced at Junction, but it allowed us to learn some very important things about building a strong culture.
The magic of culture
Drucker wasn’t wrong. Culture is a cornerstone of any organization. Without culture its hard to build anything meaningful, and without culture work and life in general just isn’t as much fun. But culture doesn’t just beat strategy, the impact of a solid culture is far wider reaching than that.
Although often overlooked, culture CAN make or break your venture, and in the best cases it can create a huge unfair competitive advantage for your organization. If your culture is right, people will not only want to come to work, they will work harder, get more things done, and they will be motivated by something other than their paycheck.
A vital lesson for every leader
Until you have experienced both ends of the spectrum culture is something that’s hard to appreciate, but it’s a lesson that all great leaders have to cover at some point in their careers. The sooner the better. As a leader you never know when your resources might run thin or unexpected bumps in the road may appear. If your team shows up just for a paycheck, how can you expect them to stick around when things get difficult or god forbid your runway starts closing in while securing that next deal? To be clear, if personal financial gain is a high priority of yours as a leader this prerogative will likley stick with the team as well!
Culture beats experience
Technology will continue to make the future of business even more unpredictable. The speed of technological innovation is steadily increasing and it’s increasingly difficult to keep up. In a matter of years incumbents can be upseated by brand new startups, something unprecedented when glancing at history before the Information Age.
In this modern business landscape the importance of a strong company culture cannot be overstated while the relevence of prior experience continues to diminish. Experience simply isn’t as relevant because it becomes outdated so quickly. Culture on the other hand is timeless and can be a vital glue for an organization during turbulent times.
Hard to build up but easy to fuck up
One person won’t be enough to create a good culture. Many individuals convening around a common vision are needed, and it can be a very long and arduous process to bring those right people to your team. The right people aren’t easily convinced, and they typically have many competing offers vying for their time and energy. Put bluntly; your offering needs to be exceptional, and your company culture is a big part of that.
Unfortunately the opposite is true for ruining a culture. It only takes one bad apple to spoil the bunch and people will not tolerate an individual with misaligned values for long. Unresolved cultural friction with bad apples will likely result in scaring the key players on your team off to greener pastures.
It isn’t created by words or white papers, its created through actions
Actions will have the biggest impact on your culture. As stated, culture isn’t created by writing down values or discussing the vision of your company. These things can set you in the right direction but in the end it’s the actions of your team and yourself that will define the culture of the organization.
Enough talk about culture, go out and make it happen in your team. From personal experience these are the values that breed a culture of excellence:
Freedom — Team members need to have freedom to act within their domain without fear of stepping on others toes.
Autonomy — Micromanagement is poison. It will sink all of your time and sink the motivation of your team.
Responsibility — Team members need to be given real, meaningful responsibility that contributes to the bottom line.
Support — Without proper support an employee will never flourish, instead they will be afraid to make bigger decisions for fear of making a mistake.
Growth — How does the team member wish to grow in the future? What personal goals does she have and how can the current venture help her get there?
In the end, culture isnt something that you really have much control over and the more you try to control it the worse it’s likely to get. It’s best to lead by example and cultivate for it through the above values rather than attempt to control it!
This is a 5 story series about my journey as Recruiting Team Member and later Head of Marketing for Junction, the world’s most exciting hackathon. Read the other stories:
