The Culture You Want or the Culture You Get?

Originally posted by Joaquin on Orrick's Total Access blog

If corporations were, in fact, people, culture would be the personality. Culture is what it’s like to interact with an organization. Whether you’re an employee, customer, investor, partner or press, you’re exposed to the organization’s culture in each of your interactions with the entity.

Cargo Cults

As a consultant that helps startups understand how to scale their culture as they experience high growth, one of the biggest problems I’ve come across is the concept of culture hacking. In my experience, culture hacking almost always creates cargo cults. After World War II, the indigenous people on some Pacific Islands that had been occupied by Japanese and then American forces started performing rituals depicting the behaviors of military airmen in the hope that they were magic incantations that would bring gifts from the sky. They would perform parade ground drills with wooden rifles, or man makeshift air traffic control towers while wearing headphones carved of wood. They had seen the military men do these things just before cargo fell from the sky; to them, it made sense that these were magic gesticulations, so they mimicked them, trusting they would please the gods and be given cargo.

When I see companies in search of “culture hacks” hoping they’ll find a magic incantation that will make their company the next Google, I immediately think of these Pacific Island cargo cults. What most companies don’t understand is that these practices follow thoughtful plans, and the collection of practices the best companies enact all reinforce one another. If your company adopts them piecemeal, without a plan, you’ll get the cultural equivalent of Dr. Frankenstein’s monster while hoping for Prince Charming to drop from the sky (#AwesomeMixedMetaphor).

A Cultural Blueprint

If you ask about culture at most startups you’ll be directed to a ping pong table, kegerator, or pictures of drunken karaoke. While these cultural artifacts give hints as to what the culture is, they are simply that: artifacts. Some, more sophisticated, companies may point to a set of values hanging on the wall. While values are important, they are simply a blueprint. Sticking with that metaphor, let’s think about what it might be like to build an actual building. Though I’m no architect, I’m pretty sure the first thing I’d do would be to get a team together made up of the most important stakeholders and decide what the structure is meant for. I’d ask them to talk about their vision for the building to unearth their hopes and to make explicit their assumptions about what would make for a successful build. This process would lead to the creation of a blueprint. At this point, however, if you were to hang the blueprint on the wall and call it a building, people would laugh at you; the same goes for hanging your values on the wall and calling them culture. Those values, informed by assumptions, are simply a framework, just like the blueprint. That blueprint should inform policies and procedures that make the values come alive. Artifacts, policy, process, values and the assumptions that underlay them mix together with leader personalities and the employees an organization hires to create culture.

So what are these cultural assumptions, and how do you figure them out? You can start by figuring out your answer to the question: “How do we win the market we’ve chosen to compete in?” These assumptions are similar to the ones that underlie your business’s vision — though most organizations are much more rigorous about unearthing the assumptions underlying their vision than the ones underlying culture. Just as vision leads to a strategic plan, cultural assumptions lead to a set of values. Like a strategic plan leads to tactics, values lead to policies and procedures that enact your values.

Assumptions, Values, and Behavior in Practice

Take SumAll, for example. SumAll is a connected data company. Their customers trust them with real-time access to their most sensitive business data. One assumption SumAll has made is that customers won’t trust them with this data unless they are seen as a trustworthy company. Based on that assumption, one of the values the team adopted encompasses trustworthiness. Thus, from the vision comes a plan. Following from this value, SumAll created policies and procedures intended to encourage the company to operate in a trustworthy fashion; this includes an open cap table, simulcasting board meetings to employees, and fully transparent salary structures. These policies and procedures are the tactics that enact a cultural strategic plan.

If you want to shape culture, start by unearthing assumptions, distilling values and creating norms through policy and process. Is a collaborative sales team the key to winning your market? Maybe you want to get rid of your individual commission structure and create a team incentive instead. Do you want your engineers to focus on customer needs? What if you did something crazy like pay engineers a commission on sales? Want to build a culture that learns from its mistakes? Try blame-free retrospectives like Etsy. Want to create a culture of serendipity? Try what Steve Jobs did at Pixar and move all the mailboxes, food and restrooms into one central place and create serendipity. Don’t just pick and choose from these techniques, however, or you run the risk of creating a cargo cult. Align everything you do with your values to create a strong culture.

What You Want or What You Get

Whether you reap the culture you want through hard work, sowing the seeds of success and tediously pulling weeds, or you end up with a potluck style culture that evolves naturally from your whims, one thing is clear: your company is going to have a culture. Your choice is whether or not to take an active role in shaping it. When making that choice, keep in mind that your strategies and products can and will be copied by a fast follower. Your culture will ultimately be what differentiates your company and decides your fate.