Culture Makes Or Breaks Your Team

Good candidates always ask about the culture in the team. After going through a few hiring cycles, I know why — they’ve been burnt before by bad culture. Different people approach it from different angles, but most of the questions boil down to “Will you treat me like a dispensable resource, or will you create an environment for me to thrive?” Fortunately, we have good answers at Klinify.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I’ve had the chance to pose these questions to multiple organizations myself. Most of the time, their answer is either unclear, haphazard, or fluffy. Sometimes, I find teams that can answer in clear, specific terms. This shows that they’ve put some thought into it, so I listen intently to see whether our values are compatible.

So…How Do You Define Company Culture?

Company culture is a set of norms that encourages certain behaviors and attitudes within the team. A well-defined culture will dictate what we work on and how we work. Having a healthy culture that aligns individuals with the goals of the organization is necessary for success.

There are 3 ways of going about defining your culture:

1. You leave it up to fate. Like it or not, the people you hire will shape the underlying culture. If randomness is the only guide, some of it will very likely be unhealthy and create friction. Some of you might object, saying you will hire for the right cultural fit. But remember, you haven’t defined anything in writing yet. So the “cultural fit” you’re hiring for might be justification for your biases.
2. You define them during annual off-sites. This is something we see in big, corporate organizations often. The “leadership” meets at a nice, little resort in an exotic country for an extravagant weekend. This results in a top-down “revamp” of the entire company with a few, catchy, nebulous words thrown on a slide for justification. By the time it reaches the “lower rungs”, the words mean very little and become subject of eye-rolls and scoffs.
3. You cultivate the culture you want. We believe this is the only way to cultivate a healthy culture. But, you can’t do it by yourself. This is true regardless of whether you’re the CEO or new hire. Culture in the company has to be actively defined and upheld by everyone in the team. Otherwise, it’ll drift.

The initial culture of the company is shaped by the guiding principles and values that the founding team agrees on. It’s a WIP. Frequent introspection is necessary to ensure the values make sense in most (if not all) contexts. Why is this important?

The Importance of Guideposts

When you have these core values written down, 3 things become easier:

1. Making decisions in the face of multiple choices. Taking decisions that uphold our values sometimes means taking a difficult path. An example of this would be hiring. It’s very tempting to hire someone — even if you see small red flags — because you desperately need more hands. We’ve been burnt by this before by hiring people who were not ready to thrive in our environment, and it’s not worth it.
2. Onboarding new hires. Demonstrations are more powerful than words. At the same time, it’s important to have our values down in writing so readers have a better understanding of our core values. This is especially true for newcomers. We want to set the right tone with this document as this is one of the first documents they read at Klinify. Once they read this, it’s easier for them to spot how we reinforce our culture.
3. Getting your incentive structure right. This means making sure there’s a positive feedback loop between 3 things: (1) living up to our values, (2) achieve company goals, and (3) flourishing as individuals. This includes how we assess performance bonuses, what perks team members get, how we define project goals, etc.

Core Values at Klinify

Recently, the team at Klinify came together to redefine what our core values were. We had to ensure that documentation offered clarity and concreteness to future teammates. I’ll reproduce the 5 core values we have at Klinify down below (in bold), along with some examples and personal commentary (not in bold).

Openness

Transparency and Candour increase team cohesion and psychological safety

• Make sure you’re respectful and assume good faith
• Seek to understand before being understood
• Be suggestive rather than instructive
• Be liberal with ideas, suggestions, feedback, and comments
• Accepting your mistakes and rectifying them is a sign of humility and strength
• Be liberal with compliments, gratefulness, and lightheartedness

We have company-wide meetings on Mondays where we communicate what’s going on in different business units. This helps clarify our priorities and brings out potential cross-functional discrepancies. There’s always more to do than you have resources for. Making sure everyone is rowing in the same general direction is paramount to good execution. We cultivate a culture of healthy conflict where everyone questions any decision they don’t understand or disagree with. This forces concise communication of ideas, a rigorous thought process, and well-documented decisions.

Everyone has access to everything across the company. Yes, that includes the salary information of everyone else. The only content with access restrictions are places where security trumps all else. This level of transparency can be scary to most people. There’s also no place for politics, factions, and silos since everything is out in the open.

This is not to say we’re not having fun. The people I work with are some of the nicest people I know. We care about each other, know what’s going on in their lives and try our best to help when someone is having a tough time. We play games on https://www.bored.social/, make terrible puns and dad-jokes (spoiler: I’m the self-named Chief Meme Officer), play guitar during backend syncs, and stay lighthearted even during existential threats.

We’re a globally distributed, diverse, remote team. Most of our communication is asynchronous (over Google Docs and Slack). Meetings are minimized since they incur coordination overhead.

Initially, people do have some trouble adjusting to this. Unless all parties in a conversation fully understand what “openness” means in Klinify (common with new team members), this may cause discomfort and friction in the short term. In the long run, we find our conversations much more productive. You don’t have to spend energy thinking about how the other person perceives it, so you can focus on solving the problem together.

Accountability

Holding yourself and others accountable is key to effective collaboration

• Take ownership and responsibility of your work
• Keep people updated to avoid shocks; err on the side of over-communication
• Strive to be consistent, reliable, punctual, reachable, and responsive
• Make commitments you can keep, and follow through — Quality over Quantity
• Set clear expectations and provide clear feedback to hold others accountable

We don’t have managers at Klinify. We hold everyone to the same standards when it comes to accountability, taking ownership of our work, and assuming responsibility for consequences. This is as flat of a hierarchy as it gets.

Each project has a subteam responsible to ensure the goals are met. This tends to reduce the “diffusion of responsibility” problem.

There’s no way you can spend time “pleasing the boss” instead of being productive. You can’t play the “blame game”.

There’s no one there to tell you what to do. You’ll know best about what you need to do to get the job done. This is one of the things new hires struggle with the most since they are not used to this level of freedom. It takes them a few weeks to figure out that we trust them enough to call the shots. They eventually learn how to ask for help and ask good questions.

You work how you want, when you want, where you want. If you want time off (for whatever reason), let the team know and hand over responsibility. As long as you’re getting the job done, all’s good. If you’re automating things to reduce your workload, you get bonus points for making the team more scalable!

To have such a results-oriented culture, the criteria for success in everything needs to be clearly defined. This can be a tough balance to pull off. The criteria need to be general enough to not pigeonhole our creativity, but specific enough to minimize subjectivity.

First Principles Thinking

Helps us break down complicated problems and develop original solutions

• Strive for a simple solution and clarify your thought process
• Make assumptions clear and demarcate clearly between facts and opinions
• Recheck your assumptions often
• Think like a scientist — try to disprove your mental model

When you’re responsible for executing crucial projects, you need to use the correct mental models and avoid common fallacies. I’m a fan of https://fs.blog/ and https://www.adamgrant.net/book/think-again/. Learning how to think from first principles is a superpower, and you don’t have to be “old and experienced” to unleash it. Once they get the hang of first principles thinking, interns do some of our best work. Their fresh perspective has given us a competitive advantage in the market multiple times*.*

This is not an easy thing to do. You don’t get away with fluff. People question your assumptions and poke holes in your logic every time something pricks up their ears. Even if you’re focusing on a single problem, it may take weeks before you understand the problem well enough. Doing that for multiple projects for months on end can get tiring.

But, you get better (and faster) at it with time. It’s a worthwhile endeavor. It (usually) prevents you from going off in the wrong direction. You have to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing and know the problem space well. Defining the problem well is 60% of the work. The rest is extrapolating your solution space into the future, making good tradeoffs, coming up with a good-enough plan, and executing flawlessly.

Continuous Learning

Knowledge compounds and fresh perspectives may find better solutions

• Stay curious and try something new!
• Celebrate exploration and initiative, regardless of the outcome
• Seek to understand yourself, and finding the time to reflect is key
• Consolidate and share lessons learned

We don’t expect anyone to be perfect. We’re all human, with different levels of expertise in different dimensions. The important part is to make sure you’re doing your best and striving to get better.

This is reflected in our post-mortems, project reviews, annual performance reviews, etc. We’re suckers for introspection. Everyone focuses on learning as much as they can to do a better job.

We’ve created a company-wide Learning Program. Everyone gets a subsidy for anything they want to learn — it doesn’t have to relate to their role. I’ve taken guitar lessons, someone else bought tickets to the pool to learn how to swim. If you need to get a book for a task on the job, you can buy it and claim it as well.

We encourage teammates to look at the range of things we do and experiment with something that they want exposure to. It’s an inexact science, but everyone is entitled to take 20% of their time off for playing around with things.

We also encourage sharing what you learn, be it on Confluence comments or slack channels. I’ve found some of the best resources out there because my teammates shared them.

Leadership

Empowers each of us to decide and act for the benefit of the team, company, and customers

• Be decisive and take initiative
• Lead by example
• Always rethink the bigger picture
• Be a force multiplier

It’s important to understand that your title is not what makes you a leader. The amount of responsibility you “get” is dependent on your track record and willingness to take things up. Everyone at Klinify exhibits leadership potential. We optimize our hiring process to filter for these qualities. Hiring becomes tough for this reason. There’s a very small percentage of candidates that would be a good fit for our culture and have the strong foundation required for the role.

Case in point, all our interns almost always lead important projects and teams. They are responsible for coming up with a feasible solution to a business problem and leading the team through execution. (Fun fact: I joined Klinify as an intern back in 2019 when another intern hired me 1 week into the job because he thought I could help him achieve the goal.)

If anyone thinks something can be done better, they are empowered to take a crack at it. Explain why there’s a problem, and come up with a solution. We’ve had new hires rethink how we do our all-hands meeting, change the tools we use, and even revamp our software release process.

You need to be very clear about the mission and vision of the company if you want to lead. You need to understand the bigger picture. You need to think about how you can help the entire team do better to bring more value to our customers. This isn’t easy, but it’s absolutely something you can learn.

Conclusion

I wrote this article as a form of introspection — to make sure the core values at Klinify resonated with me.

I’m not saying everyone at Klinify is perfect, we make mistakes and entropy takes hold from time to time. The important part is someone spots it, calls us out and helps us get back on track to get better every day.

I’m proud to say that I work with some awesome people. No matter where their journey takes them after this, I’m confident of the following:

• They won’t hold back on constructive criticism, but they will push back very hard if you abuse communication protocols in the name of openness (example: personally attack someone)
• You can’t “tell” them what to do, how to do it, when to do it. But you can be sure they’ll get it done if you can convince them of the “why”.
• They will come up with good solutions that surprise you, given enough time and space.
• They will get better with time, and their skills/abilities will compound.
• They will be leaders.

I hope the article has inspired you to look at the core values in your organization and reflect on personal ones. Do they align? What are you going to do about it?