“I like to think that the C in CEO stands for Culture.”
Satya Nadella – Hit Refresh
As a business owner, you’ll want to have a consistent culture that’s aligned with your values all across your company. Below I talk about the importance of defining your startup culture.
If you are not upfront with the culture you want to create from the very beginning, hire accordingly and talk about it at all times you run high chances that your company culture will just happen and once established it will be very difficult to change.
Culture is what your employees do when they don’t think about why they do what they do. Culture is what we do as a habit and once that habit is deep in your organization minds; people will stop questioning why they are doing that. To illustrate this point is very interesting this social conformity experiment. Hopefully, you will not want this to happen at your company…
Culture is also important because it will guide how employees behave when you are not looking. Strict management is not the solution to this, as a company where people don’t believe in why they do what they do is not sustainable in the long term. Eventually, people will find a company where they feel more identified with what they do and that’s why defining a culture for your company that’s aligned with your values is so important
Define values
When your company starts growing; recruiting talent will become key to your company’s success. Having a defined culture will be fundamental to recruit good talent.
“Many people, when considering a job are primarily concerned with their role and responsibilities,… Smart creatives, though, place culture at the top of the list”
How Google Works, Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg
The best way of defining culture is by defining 3 to 5 values you really believe in. Actually, verbs are much better than “values” as it gives it’s much more actionable.
“Imagine someone coming to work on their first day of a new job and seeing a poster of the company’s core values in the cafeteria. Seeing the word “integrity”, they might think, “Okay, sure. But what do you want me to do?” Now imagine that same employee is given a copy of the company’s Why Statement and sees the HOW “Always tell the truth.”
Find your Why, Simon Sinek
Sort values in terms of preference
Another way of doing this right is by defining your values in terms of preferences or choices. For example one of Facebook’s values says:
Move Fast: Moving fast enables us to build more things and learn faster. We’re less afraid of making mistakes than we are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly. We are a culture of builders, the power is in your hands.
This way of writing values is really effective as it leaves very clear to Facebook employees that it’s ok to do some mistakes in order to move fast. “Move fast” by itself would be useless as values are always intrinsically good.
This is really important, especially when your hiring plan is agressive and run the risk that value communication become less efective. You need to make sure everyone understands your values.
At InstaCarro as we were entering intro a stage of high growth and lot of new hires would arrive in the next months we decided we needed to re-brand our values and update them to the current state of thinking.
As a result of that we did several workshops with the team trying to understand what made them feel the proudest, we invited several clients to talk about the had liked about InstaCarro and after a couple of weeks of frequent discussion we arrived to a new set of values.
Make decisions based on your values
This values today are used in different settings: hiring, strategic discussions, employee recognition, etc. Below you can see a picture of our ATS which allows our interviewers to evaluate our candidates in relation to our values for more assertive hiring.
As your startup grows it’s important you talk all the time about your values. If you have an HR director is important you properly align with him on how to recruit and recognise with rewards according to your culture. Otherwise, your culture & company values will become only nice posters on the wall.
If you started talking about culture a little bit late, things will more challenging as probably there will already be another culture happening. Your job will be to rebuild it.
As I said before, the first thing you’ll need to do is communicate the values of the company and constantly talk about them. Eventually, you’ll also need to let go of the people that are not aligned with the new’s company way of thinking.
“For anything monumental to happen… there needs to be a great mind or a set of agreeing minds. I don’t mean yes-men. Debate and argument are essential… But there also has to be a high quality agreement. We needed to be aligned on mission, strategy, and culture.“
Hit Refresh, Satya Nadella
Remember that at that moment you should involve your employees & executive team. If you are the founder of the company, its values should be very much aligned with yours; but its also mandatory you involve your team.
“If a movement is to have an impact it must belong to those who join it not just those who lead it”
Find your Why, Simon Sinek
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