Discover Your Culture

TL;DR: A strong culture begins with an understanding of your vision and values. Drafting a vision statement and writing down your core values is useful, but only as a process of revelation, not creation.

For my past two companies, I started every all-hands, quarterly review, etc. with the same slide of our vision statement and core values. I would spend the first few minutes of every one of those meetings saying the same thing the team had heard dozens if not hundreds of times before.

It was comically repetitive.

But repetition is vital because if your team lives and breathes your vision and values, your culture grows from a solid foundation. This is not to say that a slide does the job of ingraining that culture into the hearts and minds of the team, that’s the hard part. However, every single person on your team should still be able to repeat verbatim your vision statement and core values. They should equally feel that vision and those values in their day-to-day work. Words and narratives have power and your vision statement and core values inform actions and how people view their work. These two concepts, your vision and your core values, are the foundation from which you build a strong culture. A strong culture keeps an organization healthy, resilient, and productive.

This piece is not about convincing you that culture is important. This piece is also not a guide on how to create your vision and values. If you have a team of humans working on an endeavor, you already have a vision and values. You already have a culture. You just haven’t written it down.

Uncovering and then codifying your vision and values is crucial for an early startup. Only after you define and articulate your vision and values can you mold your team around them.

Definitions

Let’s start with some definitions. My thoughts around vision and core values are greatly influenced by Patrick Lencioni and his book, “The Advantage.” Specifically, my definition of the two terms is derived from the first third of his book.

VISION: Why you exist

CORE VALUES: How you behave

I like these definitions because I think that, when taken together, they efficiently describe your culture. They are not all-encompassing, but many concepts that we would think of as culture derive from these two concepts. If you know why you exist and how you behave, everything else seems to be a manifestation in a given circumstance. For example, maybe an annual ski trip is a cultural highlight for your team. That in itself is not your culture. Many teams do similar events. I’ve been to annual ski trips with my past three teams and they were all completely different because they took on the identity of those respective cultures. A gaming software team was rowdy. A hospitality team focused around food and mellow recreational activities. The Prime Movers team sits around the fire for six-hour marathon conversations about the universe. These trips reflect the reasons why these companies exist (entertainment, hospitality, breakthrough science).

An anthropological approach

Whether you have an existing vision statement and core values pinned to your wall or are gearing up to undertake the exercise, I strongly suggest you view this not as a process of creation, but rather a process of discovery.

As I mentioned before, every team forms around a vision. That’s what unites people together no matter how banal that vision may be. Similarly, every group of humans forms natural rules around behavior and what is praised and what is shunned.

If you gave a team of anthropologists access to your company so that they could attend every meeting, listen to every phone call, read every document, etc. and then tasked them to write a study on the underlying cultural pillars of your “tribe,” do you think they would write out your vision statement and the core values hanging on your wall? Would they be able to discern those two cultural pillars from how you talk, why you do things, how you treat each other and your stakeholders?

If your vision and core values are not self-evident in the daily behavior of your team and how you prioritize the company’s focus and strategy, then what you really have is a nice piece of aspirational wall art and a shadow culture that you don’t fully understand and can therefore not mold.

The exercise of codifying your vision and values should be a process of discovery because your culture should reflect who you really are. Hopefully, you like what you find, but if you don’t, you will know what you need to change.

After going through the vision and values exercise multiple times, my advice to new teams is to hold off for 6 months to a year before you put pen to paper. Don’t worry! You already have a vision and are molding your values every day. Give your team time to organically reveal your culture through action. Give your team time to collect data. You can then sit around a table and dissect how you actually behave and what is your actual vision.

For existing teams, a vision and values audit is an enormously beneficial exercise. When I went through one, we ended up changing the vision statement and most of the core values.

Why is this so important? False visions and values break your credibility and ability to lead. From an employee’s perspective, having false cultural pillars is like building your house on a foundation of lies. You do not want your team to roll their eyes and mutter “yeah right” under their breath when you talk about your vision and chuckle when you talk about your values.

So how do you ensure that your vision statement and core values connect with your team?

Why you exist

Your first cultural pillar is your vision.

Every founding story has a “WHY” in the narrative that connects a business insight with a strong enough motivator that makes you devote years of your life to building a company. It’s the first principle that allows founders to inspire others to also devote themselves to the pursuit. It is aspirational, it is hopefully simple, and once you have a true vision statement, it rarely changes. Changing your reason for existing is changing your company.

Your vision statement is the genesis story for your tribe; why you were put on Earth summarized into one sentence or statement. Note that a vision statement is not a mission statement. Mission statements are usually much longer and combine your WHY with your HOW and even your WHAT (more on those three later).

For example, Google’s vision statement is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It doesn’t mention Search or Android or anything it actually produces on a day-to-day basis. However, it does connect all of its products from YouTube to Waze. The universality of the statement allows Google to constantly expand its products and allows (or at least used to allow) every employee to create an aspirational connection to why they are devoting their precious time to that endeavor. Regardless of your views on Google, you can clearly see how that vision affects their business decisions.

One exercise I have found useful for this is to gather your early employees in a group and simply ask them to tell you the history of why they joined the company. Within each person’s narrative, certain patterns will emerge. The founding story is also very important, but listening to how that narrative molded itself around each individual uncovers a bigger truth of how the vision is growing. When you finally arrive at your vision statement it encapsulates the founding story in the language that has succeeded in speaking to people and ingraining itself in their hearts.

How you behave

The second pillar is core values.

Core values are not abstract concepts. They should be manifestations of your behavior on a daily basis. Even hourly. Every employee should be able to point to a moment in their day where one of your core values lived through action. Your core values are lines in the sand. They are reasons for rejecting an acquisition offer, letting go of a top performer, sunsetting a product line, saying no to a lucrative contract, etc. It is the moral code that makes you unique. Patrick Lencioni has a fantastic chapter on values in “The Advantage” that has greatly influenced how I have molded values in my last two companies.

Let’s start with some definitions that I found very helpful:

PERMISSION-TO-PLAY VALUES: Values like integrity, creativity, transparency, accountability, and kindness are not your core values — they are best practices for any professional organization. If you want to build any type of team that thrives and lasts, you need to do certain things. If you want to be a successful professional, you need to behave in a certain way. If you have a core value that a myriad of companies also have, it is not core to you. It is core to your industry or country or business in general.

ASPIRATIONAL VALUES: There are some behaviors that you wish your team demonstrated or you think your team will need to succeed but does not possess. These are not core values, these are aspirational values. Don’t confuse the two. Founders (including myself!) find it hard not to sneak something in there that they feel is really important or may even embody themselves but that does not play out in the day-to-day work of the company. Be disciplined and do not include that as a core value until the behavior is demonstrated by all team members. If you must, make a separate list of Aspirational Values and reward / train / hire / fire for those values until they become core.

NON CORE VALUES: I strongly recommend not having more than three-to-four core values. I’ve seen lists of seven, eight, nine values and although all of them seem important and noble, it’s very hard to hold that many things sacred. You can still promote to all those values, but what are the three that most clearly define how you behave internally? If you have too many values, start by cutting out the aspirational and permission-to-play values. For the remaining ones, write down specific examples of when someone on your team lived that value. Do this for each value. Some will come very easily. Others will feel more abstract. Hopefully, you end up with the top 3–4 values that are your core values.

CORE VALUES: “Core” is a strong qualifying term. If everything is important, nothing is important. Your core values should be unique to you, not all companies that look like you. They are what defines your tribe. An anthropologist could see tape of a conversation, event, etc. and without knowing the individuals pick out to what tribe they belong.

I have led a few core values exercises and followed Lencioni’s advice on structure. Again, my suggestion is to wait 6–12 months to do this exercise and see how the team naturally evolves before writing anything down. This does not mean you don’t have core values — they are already present. This just means you are giving them time to become more concrete.

First, you go around the room and ask everyone to pick a specific example or two of when someone on the team did something that elated everyone. Something that gave people spontaneous joy. Something that garnered tons of praise and became almost part of the mythology of the company. Write those down. If you have enough trust built into your team, you might also talk about examples of something that felt really wrong. Examples of behaviors that are taboo to your tribe. After several rounds of this exercise, you begin to see patterns of what your tribe values, what it holds sacred, what defines your behavior. These are your core values.

What culture is not

A quick warning: do not confuse company culture with the socio-economic and demographic grouping that exists independently of the company within most early-stage teams.

Oftentimes, early employees are a group of friends or acquaintances in the same demographic bracket that generally share similar political opinions, interests, and hobbies. This group also shares a common aspirational reason for joining the company. These two cultures, the pre-existing social culture and the new company-based culture, often become muddled. It is important to separate the two early on because one of them cannot scale. When these two cultures are confused you get things like a “beer test” during recruiting that fails Mormons, devout Muslims, and wine-lovers (this is from personal experience!).

Be weary of hiring a demographically homogeneous early team. Architect your early team to be homogenous around vision and values and heterogenous around demographics. Don’t confuse “we all love ping pong, organic food, and Bernie” with “we all want to organize the world’s information” (e.g. Google’s vision).

You hold the shears

So now you have taken a deep, hard look at your culture and have written down what you believe to be your de facto vision and values. Maybe you do not like what you have uncovered. It is not what you originally intended. A shadow culture has emerged. On the other hand, maybe you are pleased, but you are afraid that as you scale it will change. If culture evolves organically, how do you control it?

Several years ago, I was discussing this with one of my favorite people and culture leaders, Katelin Holloway, and she had an amazing metaphor that I have used ever since to guide how I think about shaping culture: Your culture is like a Bonsai tree. You can’t force it to grow and you can’t tell it how you want it to grow. The tree will do what it’s going to do. What is within your control is (1) the water, food, and sunlight you provide the tree and (2) how you prune it. Let’s break these two actions down further.

Firstly, ensuring that your culture has all the right resources to grow strong IS under your control. Do you screen candidates for your core values? Do you have an onboarding process that reinforces your vision? Do you make decisions that clearly connect to your vision? Do you talk about your values and culture? As a leader, you have complete control of what you talk about, how you make decisions, and how you behave. If you live your vision and values, your tree will grow strong.

Secondly, as a leader you have the power of correction — you have shears in your hand and you get to prune your culture. I can’t emphasize enough the power of correction. Giving critical feedback, cutting projects, and terminating employees are incredible cultural tools. They are effective, efficient, and necessary. The faster your company grows the more pruning you have to do to keep the shape of your culture.

In my opinion, the power to hire and fire are the most effective ways to shape culture. Throughout human history, if someone does not play by the agreed-upon norms of the group, they are expelled from the group. Whenever I’ve had to terminate employees because they didn’t live up to cultural values, the positive effect across the organization has been immediate and long-lasting. The warning here is that because hiring and firing is so effective, both must be done carefully.

Your roadmap is a derivative

Lastly, I also want to introduce a final concept that I have found incredibly helpful: Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. I find this model relevant to this discussion of cultural pillars because it cleanly connects vision to product. The Golden Circle is composed of three concentric circles.

1. The innermost circle is “WHY” your company exists (Vision). This rarely if ever changes.
2. The next circle is “HOW” you intend to make your vision manifest. This includes the things that make you special or set you apart from competition. This may change over time.
3. The last circle is your company’s “WHAT” — the products you sell or services you offer. This changes frequently.

A helpful example he uses is Apple. Their WHY is “Think Different”. Their HOW is “through consumer electronics. Their WHAT varies from iPhones to Apple TV to iMacs.

I wanted to introduce this model to reemphasize that from a cultural perspective, your product roadmap is a derivative of your vision, not the other way around. This does not mean that your product roadmap is unimportant. I am keenly aware that if a startup can’t find product-market fit, it will die. My belief is that if your company has an ever-present connection to WHY, they will find product-market fit faster.

Finally, as an employee…

Be honest with yourself on whether your company’s vision and values reflect reality. If you cannot directly map your product and strategic roadmap to the vision of the company, ask! Ideally, all actions of the organization should map to why it exists. If you cringe every time leadership talks about core values because they behave in the opposite manner to what they say, your company has an inevitable culture problem. In my opinion, this terminal rot may be hidden by growth and hype, but in the end, will always lead to severe company pain.