Corporate culture shouldn’t be an accident, but it often is. This is a mistake.
My hope here is to share insights on fostering corporate culture, particularly for young leaders venturing out to test their entrepreneurial chops and for key executives and owners of mid-sized companies.
Early in my career, I began making observations and mental notes about the culture I would like for my (eventual) company. Initially, this was more hypothetical, since I had yet to start a company. I have since worked at both large and small companies, founded several companies, sold a company, and advised numerous mid-sized companies.
With time, I boiled my overarching corporate philosophy down to three statements:
- We hire adults and then treat them that way.
- We manage projects. We don’t manage people. We work with people.
- We work hard, but our personal lives and families always take priority.
In fact, we put these three statements on our job postings for future employees. We also discuss them during performance reviews with our team, as I believe the team should also review the company, with specific attention to the question – does the company live up to the culture we profess to value as outlined in these three points?
A lot of external influences helped shape these points into the overarching corporate culture I wanted to build into the company. Literally hundreds of authors poured into me through their books and talks. For me, two exceptional business leaders and entrepreneurs stood out from the rest.
- Paul Hawkin provides fantastic business perspectives through wonderful prose in his book: Growing a Business (1987)1
Your job as an owner and manager is not to solve every problem. Your job is to create a company with compelling problems that attract bright, unusual people to join in solving them.
– Paul Hawkin
- Ricardo Simler has an unorthodox approach to business leadership, outlined in his book: Maverick (1993).
…concentrate on building organizations that accomplish that most difficult of all challenges: to make people look forward to coming to work in the morning.
– Ricardo Simler
While these books might seem aged based on the publication dates, both provide evergreen business wisdom that remains highly relevant today.
Defining & Building the Culture
To ensure your company’s culture isn’t left to happenstance, pause work for a moment to define the desired corporate culture you want, (ideally from the founding of the company). This should be authentically aligned with you and specific to your personality. It should also be aspirational. For me, the three main points above define the ethos I wanted the company to exemplify.
Identifying and succinctly describing the desired corporate culture is only the first step. We must also ensure we only bring partners and employees into the company that align with our ideal corporate ethos, people who radiate the attributes that support the culture we want to maintain, cultivate and grow.
This is particularly important with remote work. Although small, my company operates in five countries across three continents. More cultural and geographic diversity requires more effort to nurture your ideal corporate culture.
Each person we bring into the company shapes the company’s vibe, some more than others. If we have a “no jerk” rule and then hire a jerk. Guess what. He or She doesn’t suddenly stop being a jerk. Instead, the jerk adversely shapes the company’s culture away from what we ideally intended.
In practice, this means building a checklist of hiring guidelines that supports your desired culture. This will help you more thoroughly screen potential candidates in your hiring process for the personal attributes that match your desired culture, and then continually review the team (and yourself) against this ideal. This is my list.
Personal Attributes to Align with the Company
- Chemistry – they are nice, have stable personalities, and are generally enjoyable to work with. The question is, would I enjoy hanging out with this person for numerous hours per day, because that’s what work is.
- Communication – they communicate well, efficiently, pleasantly, frequently (without excess).
- Competent – they have the requisite skills to do the job we are asking them to do with further upside potential and versatility.
- Quality – they do high quality work in everything they work on and yet have a keen sense to know when to quit something as it approaches diminishing returns for their time.
- Initiative – they go beyond the job description and actively look for smart opportunities.
- Results & Execution – they focus on the bigger picture, the end result, rather than simply doing a task. They are fundamentally wired / predisposed to get stuff done.
- Attitude – they have a positive demeanor, most of the time. It’s their default mode.
- Professionalism – they perform their work in a professional manner.
- Consistent & Reliable – they can be counted on to do what they say they are going to do, when they said they were going to do it. This is a key component to not having to manage people.
- Growth – they are committed to their own professional and personal growth. They are intellectually curious and interested in learning.
- Integrity – they make the right moral decision for the company, for the customer, for their fellow employees, and for themselves, even when it may not be in their best interest. They make the “right” decision, even when no one else would know. They are transparent about their own mistakes and learn from them.
- Trust – there’s never a doubt about the ethics of their decision making.
Hiring for Cultural Fit
While we specifically focus on evaluating each of these attributes during multiple rounds of interviews, you really can’t be too sure you know what you are getting from a few hours semi-awkward conversations.
When applicable, we prefer to give candidates sample projects to work on before we make an offer. This is particularly useful for our data research team. We also pay for their time on these projects, because it’s the right thing to do.
The key to the pre-employment project work isn’t that we necessarily need the work done. Normally, we already know the answers. The main points are:
- Did they understand the assignment?
- Did they ask good questions upfront and perhaps clarifying questions during the assignment?
- Did they give us the overall impression that they grasped the project guidelines and the expected output?
- Did they complete the assignment on time?
- Were they thorough?
- Did they spend too much time on it?
- Was the output neat, tidy and well-formatted?
- Did they communicate well throughout the process?
- Did they execute on it with minimum direction and supervision?
While we do want great work, we don’t expect perfection on the first project. There is some learning curve, partly in how we work and our overall expectations (in particular, the ever-present trade-off between speed and quality). The key is, we give select candidates a second small project as well. The goal of the second project is to ascertain if they can take the feedback provided from the first project and apply it to the second project. If not, no employment offer is made.
All the while, we are evaluating the candidate along the 12 metrics listed above for cultural fit.2
Designing Your Company
Compare the corporate culture you would like to the three main culture points I outlined above that describe the type of company I want to lead. Yours will likely be different from mine, as it should be, because it is authentic to you and your personal style. The main point is that you…
Spend time upfront defining the corporate culture you want and then build those fundamental values into your hiring processes and on-going management.
Oh yeah… one last thought. You can’t just state your ideal corporate culture, put up well-meaning posters in the hallways (like in the 90’s), and then not live it out with the people on your team. Employees are masters at sensing inauthenticity, second only to teenagers. So, be sure to live up to the standards of the culture you yourself want and readily admit when you or the company fall short of that ideal.
Culture isn’t just something you talk about – it’s embedded and reflected in every decision you make. Define it clearly, hire people who align with it, reinforce it consistently, and lead by example.
Now get back to work…
Related post: Being the Boss & Making Mistakes
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FOOTNOTES:
Must agree Andy that finance are more difficult however the basic culture of a person still usually triumphs. One of the things I used to impress upon those in the accounting area was if you don’t know, ask. I would let them know that I have done every small task in payroll, accounts payable, accounts receivable and general ledger myself during my career and probably made every mistake they may ever make. So if a problem arose for them, I had probably seen it and could probably help them fix it.
I’d happily work for you…if I had the skills required (I do not) & if I wanted to work in a corporate environment (again, I do not). Good job on the blog, again. There were no surprises because I know you.
Your article on corporate culture was insightful — I sure wish a few of the leaders at some of my past jobs would read it.
One other thing that has been of huge value to me as a leader and when hiring is to think about hiring not just for a fit/match, but hiring additively. So the question becomes not just “will they match my company’s culture/bring skills that match the posting?” But “what will this person positively *add* to the company’s culture and team’s skills?” I fear that line of thinking might die alongside DEI initiatives, but it has helped me make some amazing hires for my teams.