Foosball ≠ Culture
“Culture” is a word that gets thrown around a lot in the startup world. It’s kind of like a secret weapon that every startup professes to have. Even big companies try to get a little halo effect going by saying that even though they’re big, they have a startup culture!
This is something close to my heart. Building a company for 5 years makes you think pretty deeply about a lot of this stuff. So couple of days back I got a few tweets out about culture. Thought I’d expand on those a little here.
Culture in a startup is quite like parenting. You might say all the right things but It’s what you do that matters 10X more.
As a founder, you speak to your team a lot. You have one-on-ones, you do all-hands meetings, you participate in the daily scrum, you might even hang out at the water cooler. But that is still a small percentage of what you DO in office. Your team hears you but they observe you a lot more. Got to walk the talk. Your team is super smart. That’s why you recruited them in the first place, remember?
All contradictions are revealed & magnified in your team. Need to be hyper-aware and open to personal change, to lead the team in same.
You say that customers matter but haven’t talked to the single customer. They’re watching. You say you are a data-driven company but then overrule a team mate who makes a data based point. They will realize that its status that drives the org and they will fight for status instead of whats right. As a founder, you live in the limelight. Kind of like Jay-Z except you’re not that cool. Fix internal conflicts that you’re aware of. Yet, know that there are new conflicts you’ll discover along the path. Be open to change.
Culture is not a foosball table, or 30 of them. It’s a shared world view, shared value system, shared decision-making process.
A while back, I came across this fantastic word — umwelt. It’s actually a biological term, around the idea that different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different elements of their environment and thus live in different micro-realities based on the subset of the world they’re able to detect. This is very true of humans as well and so also with your team. Culture is an exercise in merging the individual umwelts of your team, at least the parts that relate to work.
A founder might feel that the big decisions you make drive success. Instead it’s the thousand micro-decisions your team makes every day.
Sure the big decisions matter. As a founder you choose whether you’re in the taxi market or the real time logistics market. But the thousands of decisions that your team makes in pursuit of their goals are the ones that have huge impact. You can’t and should not be micro-managing each of these small decisions, makes for a super-slow org. Slow = dead in startup world. Realise that small decisions matter and empower teams to make the right ones.
Originally published at www.linkedin.com.
