On Culture

Super early in my first full time job at Robinhood, I remember one of the operation managers changed his slack job title to be "Culture Builder". At the time, I considered a job a job. Clock in, get your work done, and clock out. I remember feeling a twinge of annoyance - why does this person care so much?

Since then, I dabbled at tech leading, dove into climate tech, joined a 10 person robot recycling company as a Senior SWE, and then joined a another 10 person carbon capture company again as a Tech Lead.

I can confidently say that I was a fool. I now see how good culture leads to happy thriving employees and how (I think) it can be done right and wrong. You spend at least half your waking time working, might as well try to shape your work experience to be as pleasant as it can be. I view myself as a culture builder too and think that's one of the most important aspects of being a leader. This blog post covers some of my thoughts on culture that I've formed over my last 5 years of being both a leader and a follower.

Values form the foundation of company culture

I view culture as a consistent pattern of actions, decisions, and behaviors performed by a group of people. Culture is driven by a shared set of values that everyone in the group actively follows and enforces.

Values are also critical to scaling an organization. A leader can't be everywhere at once, but with a clear and complete set of values, they can trust that other individuals in the organization can make the right decisions by following said values.

What should the values be?

Entirely depends on the type of company you're trying to build. There's plenty of online content about values from successful companies, so I won't dig deeper here. Values that I personally like to practice myself are:

• Radical transparency - all work is done in the open. Any employee can ask any team about anything. Unless there's legal/HR related reasons, nothing is hidden in DMs or information silos
• "Go fast go alone, go together go far" (First heard from Ivan) - Patience and willingness to bring others along with you, whether that's with pair programming, clear documentation, or educational presentations
• "Fast is slow, slow is fast" (First heard from JDF) - Rushing is where mistakes happen, and mistakes cause setbacks that make you slower. Sweat the details and cover your bases to get shit done.
• "In the end, it's really just being a good person" - (First heard from Guy)

How I've seen culture done wrong

Think of a bunch of values by yourself. Gather up your team. Point to list and say "these are our values now".

Espouse certain values, but fail to practice them yourself. Every single employee in the company is watching, and hypocrisy never goes unnoticed.

How I've seen culture done right

Determining company values

Before you start building a team, figure out what the core values you want your team to practice. Go through various critical scenarios you know your team will encounter. It's 2 am and a member of the team just got paged for an urgent issue. How do you want them to react? The company just lost a big customer. How will your team take the news? A coworker just had a loved one pass away. How do you want the rest of your team to react? How will you react?

From those scenarios, identify the values that your team should be practicing in the their ideal response and clearly define them. Keep it simple. Your team will have a harder time engraining the values when you have more than 5.

Then hire! Try to make sure the first few hires aren't just values practitioners, but values evangelizers. Evangelists won't just go with the flow, but will also act as guardrails to ensure your company values are maintained as the company scales. You can't be everywhere at once, but if your trusty teammate catches a transgression and calls it out, your company can stay on the right path.

The flip side of the above is if you've screened hundreds of people and can't find people who fulfill your values...it might be time to double check your values to make sure they make sense.

What if you're a newly hired leader or already lead a team with no defined values?

Do a world tour. Talk to every single person in the company. Watch how the team operates. Ask what's going well and ask what's going poorly at the company. Really listen.

Call your team together for an open values session. Call out the values you think are critically important. Note down whether the team is already doing them well or not. Point to key good examples and bad examples of values that show that you've been listening and understanding. This goes a long way in instilling team trust. It lets the team know that you are truly listening, watching, and trying to understand how everyone operates.

If you’re a new incoming leader, you also have the opportunity to shake things up for the better. If there's an unfixable bad apple that's clearly ruining the culture, fire them.

Maintaining culture

Regularly celebrate when people practice company values. Terradot (where I currently work) does a great job of doing this by maintaining a kudos Slack channel and dedicated time at the end of all hands where great work by employees is publicly recognized.

Careful what you call out though! You don't want to incentivize the wrong kind of work. A person that does 20 small tasks for 20 different people can easily rack up a bunch of kudos, but won't have made clear progress to important long term goals. On the other hand, people doing critical behind the scenes work can easily be overlooked if you're not careful.

A strong culture doesn't develop overnight. Shared time and experiences are still critical ingredients, even if you've done all of the other steps right. I don't personally support everyday in office policies, but also I think fully remote isn't fully conducive to a strong company culture. Personally I'm pro-hybrid, with clear in office days to maximize the time people overlap.

Revisit values on a regular cadence. More if the team is growing fast and less if the team size is at a steady state. Revisiting usually entails bringing the team together to have an open forum to reaffirm or update the existing set of values and review current team practices to see if they are aligned with said values.

What do you do if the existing culture is a toxic trainwreck?

I'm not sure. Thankfully I've never seen this before, but if you've seen someone successfully remodel a terrible culture, I'd love to hear about how they did it!

With AI rapidly changing how companies operate, will culture become more or less important in the future?

As I was writing this piece this question popped into my head and I wasn't sure what the answer was. My better half gave a great response. To paraphrase her, AI makes specialized work that takes years to learn less valuable (e.g. engineer with 10 years of deep typescript knowledge). What will set people apart will instead be soft skills, human skills that AI can't replace. "Being human" is ultimately what underpins culture, making it even more important in the future.

I hope she's right!