Company Culture

As a startup, you need to:

1. Build a product that people want
2. Take this product to the people who want it

If you fail to do both of those things, your culture won’t matter one bit. The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.

Why does culture matter?

1. It matters to the extent that it can help you achieve the above goals.

2. As your company grows, culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work and help it perform better in the future.

Goals for company culture

• Distinguish you from competitors
• Ensure that critical operating values persist such as delighting customers or making beautiful products
• Help you identify employees that fit with your mission

Culture is the invisible binds and unspoken rules that enforce “how people do things around here”.

How to create culture?

• Keep What Works
• Create Shocking Rules
• Incorporate Outside Leadership
• Make Decisions That Demonstrate Cultural Priorities
• Walk the Talk
• Make Ethics Explicit

Communicate with candor with employees and executive team

• Frequent, candid feedback
  • Encourage everyone to say exactly what they really thought, but with positive intent—not to attack or injure anyone, but to get feelings, opinions, and feedback out onto the table, where they could be dealt with.
  • Openly voicing opinions and feedback, instead of whispering behind one another’s backs, reduces backstabbing and politics and allows teams to be faster and efficient.
  • When giving and receiving feedback is common, people learn faster and are more effective at work.
• 360 degree feedback
  • Collect feedback from everybody for everybody. This will maximize learning.
  • If possible, do NOT do it anonymously.
• Feedback for Leadership team
  • The higher you get in an organization, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to “come to work naked” or make another error that’s obvious to everyone but you.
  • Get your employees to give you honest feedback by regularly putting feedback on the agenda of your one-on-one meetings.
  • You must show the employee that it’s safe to give feedback by responding to all criticism with gratitude and, above all, by providing “belonging cues.”

More freedom, less policies, less approvals

• Dumb rules prevent people from using their brains to do what is best.
• Too many rules just frustrate your people and you’ll lose out on the speed and flexibility that comes from a low-rule environment.
• But at most organizations, no matter how much autonomy is given to employees to set their own objectives and develop their own ideas, nearly everybody agrees that it’s the boss’s job to make sure his team doesn’t make stupid decisions that waste money and resources.
• Giving employees more freedom leads them to take more ownership and behave more responsibly. Freedom is not the opposite of accountability. Instead, it is a path toward it. Let employees take bets, big decisions
  • Dispersed decision-making can only work with high talent density and unusual amounts of organizational transparency.
• Lead with context, not control

Vacation policy

• Time off provides mental bandwidth that allows you to think creatively and see your work in a different light. If you are working all the time, you don’t have the perspective to see your problem with fresh eyes.
• Unlimited vacations: The amount of vacation people take largely reflects what they see their boss and colleagues taking. Which is why, if you want to remove your vacation policy, start by getting all leaders to take significant amounts of vacation and talk a lot about it.

Travel and Expense approvals

• Simple policy: Act in the company’s best interest.
• Before you spend any money imagine that you will be asked to stand up in front of me and your own boss and explain why you chose to purchase that specific flight, hotel, or telephone. If you can explain comfortably why that purchase is in the company’s best interest, then no need to ask, go ahead and buy it. But if you’d feel a little uncomfortable explaining your choice, skip the purchase, check in with your boss, or buy something cheaper.
• Manager’s keep an eye on spending. If your people choose to abuse the freedom you give them, you need to fire them and fire them loudly, so others understand the ramifications. Without this, freedom doesn’t work.

Transparency: Open up financial performance

• When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.
• When one employee abuses your trust, deal with the individual case and double your commitment to continue transparency with the others. Do not punish the majority for the poor behavior of a few.

Transparency: Do not hide reorgs, mistakes, firings

• If you want to build a culture of transparency and you don’t tell your people about the potential change until it’s finalized, you’ll show your staff you’re a hypocrite who can’t be trusted. You preach transparency and then whisper about their jobs behind their backs. 
• It is our job to treat employees like an adult and give them all the information we have, so that they can make informed decisions.
• Spinning the truth is one of the most common ways leaders erode trust. Your people are not stupid. When you try to spin them, they see it, and it makes you look like a fraud. Speak plainly, without trying to make bad situations seem good, and your employees will learn you tell the truth.
• With big decisions, what happened will eventually come out. But if you explain plainly and honestly, gossip ceases and trust increases.
• The biggest advantage of sunshining a leader’s errors is to encourage everyone to think of making mistakes as normal. This in turn encourages employees to take risks when success is uncertain… which leads to greater innovation across the company. Self-disclosure builds trust, seeking help boosts learning, admitting mistakes fosters forgiveness, and broadcasting failures encourages your people to act courageously.

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