Listen And Cultivate

Listen

As new faces multiply, it gets more difficult and more important to keep a pulse on what it’s really like at all levels. Talk to trusted confidants and lean on your cultural founders. Be visible. Open your door for regular office hours (you can learn just as much as you teach). Are people leaning on your core values in meetings? Do they feel both empowered and challenged? Use every exec meeting to collect feedback from the frontlines of each department. Is your leadership team still drinking the Kool aid? Are their people? Just beware that your managers are most likely going to add positive spin on reality. Ask new employees after their first week what they think your culture is like. Ask them for advice: “if you were me, how would you improve the culture based on your first week”? New employees are great subjects for this.

As you get into Series B and beyond, it might make sense to implement a software tool that helps you keep this pulse (more on this in a later post). Software can augment but should never fully replace personal check-ins.

Cultivate

Beyond good listening, strong culture requires constant tending and reinforcement. Just beware of getting too dogmatic on anything but the mission (even values can change, though it shouldn’t happen often). Remind your exec team that — by nature of their positions — they are culture setters and they need to model how things should be done. Publicly recognize individuals with specific stories of how they embodied your culture code.

When something breaks down (e.g. the wrong people are quitting, you’re failing at your top priorities, an employee does something that truly shocks you), dig several layers deep to get to the root cause. Where did the breakdown happen and what does it say about the strength of your culture? Was the person in question not effectively trained during onboarding on how people talk and act? Did they see the same behavior in their superior(s) and conclude it was okay? Usually, there is something more systematic at the core. Think about the cultural system first and don’t hesitate to terminate individuals for clear cultural violations when necessary. Pruning is part of good hygiene and it also sends a clear message to the organization. As the military adage goes, when you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. The same goes for culture.

There are a lot of ways to systematize your culture feedback loop. Ultimately it comes down to what works best for you. However you do it, it needs to become a part of your everyday thought. Make it one of your core mental compartments, right in there with growth strategy and product.