How to make CULTURE the beating heart of your company
We all know it. We all know how important culture is. We’ve all seen famous CEO’s and management experts wax poetic on how important culture is. How it eats strategy for breakfast (Peter Drucker), or how, if you get it right, most of the other stuff will just take care of itself (Tony Hsieh).
Great culture is the one thing all great companies have in common. Unfortunately, we cannot just copy a formula, because EACH of these cultures are quite unique.
In my work in HR — from being a line manager in charge of culture, to being a consultant exposed to hundreds of different types, and now, being an entrepreneur obsessed with building a great one — I’ve garnered a lot of insight on this oft-misunderstood and under-utilized company function.
First, let’s start with some of the problems I’ve observed:
Problems:
Culture is an accident
I think this is a biggie. For a lot of firms I’ve observed, culture just is the offhand result of whatever management style and systems the company decides to employ. More often than not, these chosen styles and systems only revolve around one thing: results.
This almost always becomes a problem somewhere down the line.
You can intuit that this is the sort of thing happening now in Uber, with their ongoing week-by-week-can’t-take-my-eyes-off-of-it train wreck (this week!), where it seems like they didn’t care what sort of culture they created in their desperate race for domination. (I’m an uber fan, I do think it’s not too late to turn things around for Kalanick and co.)
Culture is a priority, but not really
I think a lot of us are in this category.
How many of you see puzzling “Values” and “Vision & Mission” statements visible on company walls but invisible in between them?
So yes, some person cared enough to draft these carefully. You would see them on company documents like recruitment and evaluation forms in a valiant attempt to “align”
Oftentimes though, reality will be quite far from ideal. There just isn’t enough WILL for the values to matter.
The top guy doesn’t care
Notice how the culture of the firm relies so heavily on it’s founder or CEO in shaping its culture. Notice the how Amazon takes on Bezos’s fanatical worship of the long-term, or how Apple STILL is maniacal over design years after Jobs passed, how Satya Nadella has changed the culture at Microsoft. Those guys BAKED their traits onto their companies.
Guess what happens if the top guy doesn’t care?
Even if you have the best HR Head in the world trying to shape your culture, if the top guy doesn’t care — or doesnt get it — it ultimately won’t matter.
Culture doesn’t scale
For a number of companies, it isn’t that there was a lack of effort in creating a great culture form its leaders.
When companies rapidly grow from ten people to hundreds, and to eventually, thousands of employees, it just becomes an extremely difficult to retain the same sort of culture as it did when it was smaller and more manageable.
What works for 50 typically won’t work for 500, and that’s a problem.
So what can we do? How can we sidestep these pitfalls in helping our organizations create and nurture awesome cultures?
Let me share with you some of my own experiences and insights in my ongoing quest to build an awesome culture.
Culture for the Future
I’d like to think STORM has the makings of a great culture.
I usually insist on being the last interview for ALL of STORM’s applicants. I usually ask them at that point what they like and don’t like about the firm. A near-majority of them would cite culture. How unique it is. How they felt it in the days they went thru the recruitment process with us.
In the instances when employees leave STORM, a ton of them leave a long note thanking everyone in the company for their time, and once again, their experience of a unique culture.
When I experience this, I get all sorts of validation. Why?
Because I’ve been working on culture since day 1.
STORM’s culture is by intense design
In our Execom meetings every Monday morning, one agenda point we always talk about is “People and Culture”
We talk about how people are and how culture is. How incidents affect our culture. How decisions have to made a certain way because of our culture. How we can further improve and strengthen it.
Here’s a table of a few of the practices we do and the “culture-logic” behind it:
Don’t let your culture be an accident. Take the bull by the horns and SHAPE it. Design it. Never leave your culture to chance.
Think about your culture the way you’d think about your go-to-market strategy or product-market fit. Trust me, it will be worth it.
And there’s a time limit here, too. If you fail to design and cultivate a planned culture, there WILL be an alternative culture which will take hold (which will likely suck). It will be awfully hard to change this. (so startups! You have a great opportunity here while its early!)
Just how serious are the best companies now in designing their culture? They’ve added a new C-suite position to support it:
Company Values as ANCHOR to Culture
It’s funny, but towards my latter days in line HR Management, I had become almost completely jaded when it comes to treating company values. Most of the companies I’ve seen really just had these as wall art. None of the guys at the top in the companies I’ve worked with took it seriously.
Reading a single book changed everything for me: Discovering Happiness, by Zappos Founder and CEO Tony Hsieh.
I won’t spoil it for you, but this book showed me just how powerful values can be, when used the right way.
Immediately after reading the book I started to write what I thought would be a good set of values.
The values have been tweaked over the years but here is what they look like now:
Some notes:
First of all, it’s pretty obvious they weren’t made by a consultant, right? There isn’t a lot of jargon words like “strategic” or “shareholder value.” We wanted to be as simple as we were with the words, writing to avoid being misunderstood.
I hope you can sense that there is also some history folded in-between those words, a certain pathos. Christ-centeredness isn’t just there because I’m a religious fanatic who just wanted it there. It’s largely because of the company’s history and experience with faith. But look also how the value is written. The values came out of WHO the company was and is, its guts and soul.
Second, and this is very important — the values are BOTH descriptive and aspirational. They are descriptive because those values have ALWAYS described who we were. If you think about those 5 statements and think about what sort of amalgam culture that creates — it would be pretty close to the current company culture. I think this is important. What some companies do is that they put ALL aspirational statements as values. What ends up happening is that the statements will have little to do with who the firm is. The statements have to be BOTH descriptive and aspirational.
In choosing the values, do reflect: what set of values unmistakably got us to where we are now, and is ALSO the very set which will get us to where we want to be?
The values now form a much-needed anchor to our culture. It’s hard to just say “let’s build a culture.”
The values give it direction and life. When asked to describe our culture, any Stormer would mention the 5 values. We then try to instill them in everything we do: recruitment, performance management, decision-making, direction formulation, and so on.
Carrot and Stick
I always tell HR:
“I hate rules, drafting one should be the last resort.”
Why? Because I want culture to regulate behavior. I don’t want a thick, artificial handbook which no one reads to dictate what people do or don’t do.
To create a no-rule or low-rule environment, leaders have to walk the walk and talk the talk when it comes to the values being cultivated.
Over the years, I’ve had to fire a number of people because they didn’t align with the values we espouse. And though difficult, we’ve also had to say no to some very talented applicants because we assessed a misalignment with one or more of our values.
How a company and its leadership team deals with incidents which endanger the values will have a large effect on whether the values take root.
Even “small” instances cannot be ignored. Once an individual sees a “small” instance is ignored, she’ll push the limit just a bit. Soon, you’ll find your value isn’t reflective of reality.
At the same time, we have a lot of value-centric activities, like:
- we have “relentless meetings” (ask any stormer)
- there are required books and a book club
- Prayer before every meeting and 3:00pm
- We identify and celebrate “hanep service” moments
- Every person’s first day, she exhibits a talent in front of everyone (this has been an amazing practice :)
It’s not the job of “HR” or Management to enforce the values, too. It has to be clear that EVERYONE is accountable.
Not at all a finished product
Culture-building is a permanent part of a company’s existence. As STORM now scales and we continue to experience growth, the challenge is how the culture scales with our growth. While I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished in creating STORM’s culture, I think its far from perfect and we have a LONG way to go. (helps to have a super People Operations manager in Angeli Recella)
Again, I think its of the utmost importance that the company TALKS about it. Talk about how the culture has been changing. Talk about how difficult it is for just the culture to shape behavior and NOT automatically put on more rules as the number of heads in the organization swells.
What clearly helps for me is awesome recruitment. The better the recruits, the better leaders you can grow to evangelize their constituents. You know what in turn helps to make recruitment awesome? An awesome culture.
It helps to start early.
What can you do NOW in shaping a great culture for your organization?
