Culture is how things get done, without people having to think about it.Frederick Laloux, Reinventing Organizations: A Guide to Creating Organizations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness
Culture is an oft-discussed topic of building startups. What are the core values of the company? What is the company culture like? Are new hires “culture fits”? Is “culture fit” a dogwhistle for discriminatory hiring practices?
One of the things I have come to believe strongly is that culture is real; it’s also incredibly important, and it’s something that many people don’t understand at all. It’s both an easy, natural consequence of your company’s evolution and something that can quickly become a problem if you don’t tend to it. Consciously guiding the culture of your team is part of a leader’s job, and to do this well, you need to understand what it means in the first place.
So what is culture? Culture is the generally unspoken shared rules of a community. American culture dictates that we shake hands as a greeting, for example, while in some other cultures, touching strangers is considered very odd. The way you address people of different standings or different relationships to you is part of your culture. Culture doesn’t mean that every single person holds exactly the same values, but it tends to guide a general overlap, and it creates a bunch of rules of interaction that you don’t have to think much about if you are deeply ingrained in that culture.
People do make decisions using methods other than cultural values. They may adhere to the standards of a formal or informal contract, for example. They may do a pure data-driven analysis and determine the optimal outcome. But in complex environments where the needs of the group must override the needs of the individual, cultural values are the glue that enables us to work as a team and make decisions when faced with uncertainty. This is why figuring out and guiding your culture is such an important part of building a successful company.
If you’re forming a new company, there’s no guarantee that a predetermined healthy culture will fall out. You may hope that you can create a planned community of people, a community of like-minded individuals who will bind together to create this great workplace and product. But reality is much messier than that. Reality is much more of a race for survival, with culture as an afterthought or a post hoc justification. The early employees will form the culture, for good or for bad — or likely for a mixture of both.
Not every person will fit in at every company. The sooner you realize this, the better. Sometimes we are afraid to have core values because we believe they will create discrimination. I would argue that a thoughtfully created set of values that are actually values should reduce the kinds of surface discrimination that often happen at tech companies in favor of creating a real community of employees who share core principles and ways of communication. It is to your advantage to create a culture that allows for bringing a broader range of people into your community. “Engineers who graduated from MIT” is not a culture. “People who value technology innovation, hard work, intellect, scientific process, and data” might be. The first allows only an incredibly narrow subset of humanity to pass through it successfully. The second allows a much broader set of people to fit, while ensuring those people actually have the same values.
If you come into a company with core values, those values were probably created by the founders, or founders and early employees, and thus they reflect the company’s culture. This is important to understand, because you’ll be measured against these values whether you realize it or not. The founding team’s values will be reinforced, recognized, and rewarded inside of the company. My experience has shown that employees who truly embrace and exhibit all of the core values of a company tend to do well naturally. The fit is easy for them. They may get stressed out or work too hard, but they are well liked and usually happy. Those who do not match all of these values as easily will have a harder time. That doesn’t mean they will fail, but there will be more friction for them, and it may feel like more work to fit in and feel accepted.
How does this apply to you? If you are a technical executive, cofounder, or CTO, this information has deep applications. If you join or create a company with very different values than your own, you’ll feel a great deal of friction that will make your life harder. At the highest levels, all of this cultural alignment comes to play in everything you do, because you spend so much of your time in the land of negotiation, collaboration, and cross-functional teamwork. This doesn’t mean that you can’t be successful in a company that holds some different values from your own. In fact, it’s pretty rare that you agree perfectly with every value of every person on the senior team of a company. You probably don’t even agree with every value of every person in your family, or among your friends! Still, the amount of overlap between the traits you value most and the traits your company values most largely determines how easy the fit will be for you.