There are a lot of misconceptions about what culture is and why it’s important. But having the right culture is an essential ingredient to building a great business. I reached out to a few top entrepreneurs to get their thoughts on culture and the right way to build it.
What is culture?
While almost every company characterizes its culture in different ways, there’s one definition that works almost everywhere: Think of culture as your values expressed in action. It’s the guiding principle for how you want your employees to behave.
“If values are how we behave and make decisions, then culture is the environment we create to reinforce those values,” says Rahul Vohra, co-founder and CEO of Superhuman, an email client and productivity app that aims to provide a faster, easier email experience.
Why is that important?
A lot of founders don’t think about culture at the beginning. In fact, when you talk to serial entrepreneurs, they realize how important culture is and then they start thinking about it more in their companies later on. That was the case with Vohra.
“At my previous company, Rapportive, we didn’t take values too seriously, but at Superhuman, we take values very seriously,” he said. “At Superhuman, we want to build a generational organization that will hopefully exist for hundreds of years to come. And for that to work, you need to be clear about your values and what you stand for.”
Tom Griffiths, co-founder and CEO of Hone, a leader in large-scale live learning rollouts and a former co-founder of FanDuel, had a similar experience. “What I learned from FanDuel was that we waited too long to try to codify culture,” he says. “I was determined to embed culture at Hone from the very beginning and to be really intentional and clear about how we were going to build our culture and values.”
How to build culture
There are many tools and processes that can guide you in building culture, but they all come down to the same starting point: acting with intention.
“We asked everyone to fill out a survey,” says Mary Katherine Rudder, chief operating officer at Uniswap, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange. “What does Uniswap mean to you? What are the values we look for in the people we hire?”
Vora is advantagePatrick Lencioni of The Business Review writes that before bringing the topic up internally, he first discussed it with his management team.
He also stressed the need for multiple trials: “I think most companies go through a few iterations to get their values right,” he said.
Make sure it’s unique
One of the most common mistakes companies make is to use generic words and ideas to describe their company culture. This doesn’t tell employees what to do and it certainly doesn’t help the company build a competitive advantage.
Building a distinctive culture helps with the right work and attracts the right employees. “Our company culture prioritizes excellence and quality,” Vohra says. “That’s really unique and a lot of the reason why people want to come and work at Superhuman.”
Griffiths emphasized the importance of memorability: “We wanted to maximize memorability. If you can get 80% of the emotion of your company culture and have everyone on your team remember it, that’s better than having a few people get 100% of the emotion.”
Determine what it is not
One way to ensure that your culture is truly your own and not an imitation of someone else’s is to identify what your culture is not.
At Uniswap, Rudder said they asked their team to include in the survey what they didn’t want in a company culture. “We asked them about their anti-values,” she said. “It’s easy to react to the company culture you worked in before. It’s easy to define what you don’t want.”
Vohra’s team of superhumans have discussed past team members who were bad fits: “You have to ask the hard questions: What was it that made them difficult to work with? What were their problematic traits?”
Hire based on values
“There was a time in the past when we weren’t clear about our hiring values,” Vohra says. That changed the type of people we were hiring. It took us a while to diagnose what was happening, but when we did, we realized it was because we hadn’t written down our values and made the right selections based on them.”
Bestselling author Kim Scott Radical Kander And her new book The fundamental respect, emphasizes the importance of ensuring new hires can inherit the culture. “Asking for ‘culture fit’ is like saying, ‘I’m afraid to rock the boat, so I’m asking for more of the same,'” she says. “Asking for ‘culture add’ is like saying, ‘I’m looking for a new perspective to help me innovate.'”
Building culture is an ongoing process that never ends, and great leaders recognize this and constantly monitor whether the culture is serving the company.
