Culture is a Choice, not a Byproduct
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Times are changing. Organisations, especially growing startups, are actively driving the development of a healthy internal culture for the success of the organisation.
Yes, I know, organisations have been doing the vision-mission-values exercise for ever, so what’s new? Everything.
The old vision-mission-values exercise was just that, an exercise with a grand objective which consistently failed. The only real output were the nice posters hanging on the organisation’s walls, not much more. At times the exercise helped develop a contrary, cynical culture about how things in the company are decided top-down, even the values to live by.
The winning organisations of today are developing a view of corporate culture as the essential lifeblood of the organisation, and take positive action to nurture a cohesive culture for the organisation.
‘Nurture’ not ‘Force’
This article is the first of a series where I want to discuss how a healthy corporate culture develops from the very early days of a startup. There are 3 phases in the development of a healthy corporate culture, which happen approximately in the first 2 years of a startup growing into a large organisation. The 3 stages are the implicit phase of culture formation, the tacit phase of culture reinforcement and the explicit phase of culture acknowledgement. In this article we focus on the first phase.
implicit culture formation
In the implicit phase culture grows on its own from the habits and practices of the founding team. This is a very delicate phase because most often culture is not taken care of as such. Rather, it’s the product of the core beliefs of the founding team, what they focus on, what they consider most precious and desirable for the organisation being born, what are the actual practices and rituals in the day-to-day life of the organisation. This is the phase in which powerful seeds for the healthy further growth of the organisation are planted, even without realising. Yet these seeds will develop into the culture back bone of the organisation.
It’s also the phase in which many potentially great startups just screw it up and hinder the future growth of the organisation.
Some common traits can be recognised in this phase, which are essential to the validation and development of a simple idea into a product that fits its target market. These relate to the entrepreneurial spirit of the organisation, the ability to hack ways into finding a product-market fit with limited time and resources, without knowing in principle that the core value proposition is valid. But with the willingness to prove it is in real life rather than just trusting opinions about its potential success from any type of traditional market research.
Or even worse, by just hoping, or feeling that you ‘know’ that it’s a winning idea.
It will work!
Really?
This is the habit of keeping both feet on the ground and being realistic while launching the startup to fly. It looks counterintuitive, but here ‘being realistic’ doesn’t mean trusting in previous experience (which is what ‘realistic’ normally refers to). There’s no previous experience when you are doing something new.
Here ‘realistic’ means being ground in reality rather than in sheer fantasy. Any fantasised world that eventually happens, does so in reality. So fantasise, yes, but then check in real life that this fantasy has any chance to become true through the hard work of starting up a company.
common traits
This is the habit of experimenting and accepting the experiment’s failure as an opportunity to learn, rather than as a defeat. Running experiments as a white-coat scientist in the lab. Where the lab is reality out there.
The Lab is Reality Out There
It’s the common trait of many if not all successful startups, which test against reality any assumption they are making on which the success of their value proposition builds. It’s testing in reality and then being able to accept what reality tells. Should it say ‘no, this assumption doesn’t hold,’ successful entrepreneurs know how to go ahead letting go the original idea and reshaping it according to what they learned from the first contact with reality. The ability to reframe, rethink, reshape the idea or the market — pivot, in Lean Startup parlance — is a key tract of successful startup cultures.
Other common traits refer to the habit of using metrics to track experiments and validate assumptions, a profound resourcefulness in running experiments on a low budget, and a sense of urgency, to be able to get to product-market fit before running out of cash.
startup-specific traits
On top of these shared traits, every startup will develop their set of specific values, at the individual level, team level and management level. In the very early days these 3 are extremely connected and inextricable. A team of 4–5 people working 60–80 hours weekly, won’t be able yet to separate among the 3 levels. In such a team there’s no ‘me’ and there’s no ‘manager.’ Yet the seeds will be planted.
What’s the attitude of the founders to each other? Do they work as friends or they prefer to work as professional partners? Do they decide collectively or do they leave the last word to one of them? Are they secretive or do they share their work and idea with the external world? Are they focusing most on product? Or customers? Or funding? Or branding? Or what else? Are they dividing roles or sharing roles? Pointing fingers or taking personal responsibility? These and many others are the seeds that they are planting to define the future lookout of their culture.
There’s no right or wrong, good or bad way. It’s just different ways, that with time will prove their effectiveness to the success of the organisation when growing big. There’s likely to be an optimal combination between habits and the specific product and market the company is in. It might not be obvious a priori, yet getting the ‘right’ seeds planted is an essential ingredient of the startup success down the line.
Really great founders seem to have a headstart in defining the right culture from the outset, yet it’s very likely that they implicitly test assumptions about what can work culture-wise, and modify and model it on the go, while the culture is still in its seed phase, when they can deliberately modify their own habits, communication patterns, values in the interaction with their co-founders, the product, the market, the customers and funding.
In the next article we are going to explore what happens when the organisation grows beyond the founding team into a team of a few dozens of employees.
I would love to hear first-hand experiences of founders who lived this phase and successfully grew their startups!
I’m Leonardo Zangrando.
I’m passionate about unlocking potential and making it shine in people and organisations.
I help people fulfil their true potential and become what they really can be.
I help humanise organisations and create a culture for innovation and evolution.
Follow me on Twitter and meet me #IRL at Launch22 incubator in London.
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