Building a culture is bigger than building a product
It has been 11 months since I joined with Sequoia Consulting Group, a leading provider of Benefits, Payroll processing, 401(k) management, HR out-souring solutions for 1200+ companies from California and New York for the past 2 decades. Adding some of my experience as being a team member as well as leading the team on why it is important to build the right culture for a long-term success. After interviewing ~200 people on various roles, we are team of 26 people Engineering team right now at Sequoia.com.
We have seen people declining our offers. We should accept a fact that we are living in a time where potential candidates have more options for jobs. And every company needs the same top-notch engineer to get their job done. Some of the points mentioned here are more from an opinion of a company building a product & team from the scratch. And the thoughts are based on a perspective of a person who is building the team. If we don’t set our self apart from other companies, it is very difficult to attract the talent and company culture and the hiring process plays a major role in it.
To give a quick preview on our hiring process, on an average, we are hiring 1 in 8 candidates that we have in our interview pipeline. We keep improving our self in picking the right candidate for the initial rounds of interviews.
Did you say Culture?
Culture refers to the character of the company if you think company as a person. It. Involves various aspects including the company’s mission, value, goals and work environment, etc.,
People at a company tend to be happier if the values and needs are more consistent in nature with company as well as the colleagues.
This will lead to better relationships with the team members as well as make them even more productive.
Often companies tend to look for people who is “culture fit”. It doesn’t mean people you will look for people who thinks and behave like the existing people in the organisation. Companies should look for “culture addition” who possess the right values that company requires as well as come up with more diversified values in terms of thoughts, opinions, experience will help in building the team right on the longer term.
If we follow the traditional approach, the team members may not be able to get additional opportunities on their role to perform well. If the workplace follows a casual cultural approach, team members tend to take up new tasks and additional roles whenever the time permits. The culture generally differs between a company with 1–5 people, 5–100 people, 1000+ people & 100K+ people. But what we follow when the company was very small will make a huge difference when the company grows.
Building the team could be easier but building a long-lasting team will be the real success of it. This is one of the greatest value that Sequoia possess. Also this is the major reason why some of the managers may not become a good leader or why a leader may not reach the highest peak of success. This needs knowing the people well in terms of the way how do they think, what is required to motivate them to perform beyond and how to utilise them in the right way.
This is equivalent to playing a game of soccer continuously where every move can be vulnerable towards becoming a goal or a failure. Sometimes the people you work with may not appreciate the way how you function. As a person who is building the team, it is your responsibility to do the corrective course of action to change the approach with more respectability.
It is very easy to become a bad manager by exhibiting a few qualities like not trusting, micro managing, being cynical, not listening, not giving credits when required, not appreciating when required, the list goes on 😒
Free lunches, parties and outings may not hold the team on a longer term. People actually prefer to know where the team is heading towards and what is the ultimate goal of the company and is it actually adding value in their professional growth. This is same as a kid asking the parent, “where are we going? How do we go there? When are we going to reach there?”. If the company and the leaders has an answer on all these questions very clearly, they tend to reach the success most probably. This may look very simple but one of the key aspect of a company’s success. While celebrating every small success is important, picking the right one to celebrate is more important.
Feedback is the best way to keep the team on track on a daily basis. Proactive approach in giving feedback will keep the team on the right path. This should be a two way communication going upward, sideward and downward inside the company.
It is very easy and normal for people to be more cynical in their approach at work. This could potentially become a reason to have unnecessary office politics which should be avoided. Team members will quickly identify if a leader is being cynical.
Often mail communications tend to bring in issues what the sender is thinking whether the person is irritated, joking or sarcastic since the receiver may not know the tone of the sender over an email even they are known to each other. This can lead to an angry response. If there are many people in the email thread it could affect your company culture. It is better to resolve issues in person or through a video call for the remote teams.
It is easy for people to run through all the imaginary trucks about why the other person is doing something to them when the other person may not even know or realise something is going on and they are responsible for it. Proactive feedback mechanism upward, downward, sideward will help in resolving these.
Keeping the communication in the right way will make you a better leader. For example,
“Hey John, I am noticing that your performance is not up to the mark“ — The person who made the comment have crossed the line.
“Hey John, I am noticing that the quality of the code you are writing is degrading and I feel like you should focus more on improving it” — A small tweak to the same comment can make a difference. The person who made this comment is inside the line and the team member can’t argue much on how someone feels.
“Hey John I just wanted to check with you if its all good? I do see that your code is not up to the mark and I do feel that you may need to focus harder on improving them! Is there something you need me to do?” - Even a better way for John to open up if there is an issue why he is unable to keep up the quality.
If anyone ask me about the way how I function, I will quickly say that “I hire the right people into my team to build the world class product. Also I don’t micro manage and delegate tasks in the best way”. Hiring is easier but need more attention towards managing the team. Leaders play a major hands-on role to make sure every team member gel together well and making sure that their focus is on the righteous path without nit-picking. Providing more autonomy in the right way will lead to building future leaders and one of the powerful way to motivate the team members.
tl;dr
There are various factors that set the right culture and long-lasting teams.
- Involve only the relevant people whenever there is a work or a conversation whether it is email or in-person conversation
- As a person building the team, you should stand as an example in following all the values that you expect the team to possess
- Keep the communications right. Even a slight modification in the way how a statement is communicated will make a huge difference
- Follow all the process when it comes to code quality and especially when writing code, raising a pull request and merging code into production
- Celebrating every small successes are important but pick what is really important that is worth celebrating
- Make everyone in the team understand how much important their work is for the company and make everyone understand about how does their work impact the end users
- Keep feedbacks a two way communication upwards, sideward and downwards in an organisation to avoid imaginary trucks from people’s mind
- Provide the right path for the team members by understanding how they think and how they can excel in their work
- Bring in people who will add more value to the existing culture rather than finding a clone
About Sequoia
Sequoia is a name of a national forest at California with enormous trees with roots of every tree connected to each other for hundreds of years. We are looking to build a team and product that lasts long.
We are building the company’s vision on building one integrated platform to manage people in the organisation. From our platform, companies can manage all the employees’ on-boarding, payroll, 401(k), benefits. We have 5 offices in US with 350+ team members and one in Bengaluru, India. We are 26 people team now here at India office. Soon we are hiring another 20+ team members on various roles that business requires. With our major product going live this month, we have a huge road map in what needs to be developed for the next 1–2 years.
Our tech stack: https://stackshare.io/sequoia-consulting-group/sequoia-consulting-group
Careers page: https://www.sequoia.com/about/careers/
We are looking for people across all the roles at our Bangalore office. Reach out to me at karthikeyan.ng[at]sequoia(dot)com.
