It starts with Culture
You are the builder and preserver of company culture. The engineering team is likely to be amongst the largest teams in the company. If the culture is broken in your team, it is broken for the company.
So what is culture? Culture is not the words that a company uses to describe iteself. The best definition I have heard are
‘The way things are done here’
‘What happens when the boss is not in the room’
It is the ‘what we do’ not the ‘what we say’. There are lots of pretty words that represent the ‘what we say’. But do you really do what you say?
Culture has an outsized impact on a company. It even results in silly phrases like ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast” which is enthusiastically repeated in Silicon Valley tech circles. What the heck does that mean? That it is really import to have culture, but you can make do without strategy? Of course not. You need both.
Each organization has a culture. If you do not have a defined culture, a company will mimic the proclivities of the founder. Facebook has a hacker culture: Google is more academic: Intuit is customer obsessed. All this can be traced to the founder.
Statements on culture start with a Vision for the company: The values of the company that support the vision: the customer benefits that we always keep in mind: The metrics we track: How we think about contributions to the larger community. I am proud to be a part of Inflection, where all this is written down and shared with employees — as examples, Values and community impact. Values reflect baseline expectations. Integrity is one and it is a base expectation.
How you role model these values is important. the team will mimic not the words they read, but the actions that are taken. You have to take values to heart and act on them. What you do will make a lasting impression on the team
At one place I worked at, a team defined its own set of values that were different from what the company had written down. There are few things you can do that will wreak more havoc than this. There has to be only one set of company values. Everyone in the company must be measured by them. And you set the tone for living up to them.
You are being scrutinized closely by your team. Every word, every action should be reflective of the values and respect to individuals. Even when you have to make decisions to let people go, you have to be respectful of the company’s values.
