Culture (n.) mid-15c., from Latin cultura "to tend to, cultivate.”
Wouldn’t it be great to automate high-performing behavior?
How happy would your leadership team be if they didn’t need to micromanage their reports?
How relieved would your people team be if your employees were attracting values-aligned talent to the company?
— The benefits of having a strong company culture are evident. However, cultivating a strong company culture is much easier said than done:
There is no formulaic, step-by-step recipe that guarantees you will have a great culture.
Human beings vary in their value-systems and motivations— while you can influence people’s behavior; ultimately, they choose what they will do and what they won’t do.
Change is accelerating. Therefore, what works today won’t always work tomorrow. Furthermore, how you express your cultural values in the current context will need to change in the future.
If your company is growing incredibly fast within a year (if not months), from a tight-knit core team to hundreds of employees, it will be natural to feel like you are losing control. Furthermore, it will be natural to fear that the behaviors and practices that made your company great today, won’t translate to your new team members in the future.
We can’t tell you how to build your culture. But we can share essential first-principles that will help augment your culture-building efforts. In this post, we share seven things to consider when growing, cultivating, and refining your company culture. This post will help you:
Identify and organize the functional behaviors that you want to see in your company.
Prescribe values, symbols, and metaphors that remind people who you are as a company, what they stand for, and, more importantly, the behaviors and actions that demonstrate that.
Articulate your company culture and values in a way that is easy to interpret and action horizontally and vertically.
Monitor your progress, elicit feedback, and make adjustments at scale.
1: Culture As an Expression of Values
Nathalie McGrath, former VP of People at Coinbase, shared a very astute statement with us, “Culture is an expression of values.” While culture is much more than a clever description of values, crafting a culture requires a deep understanding of value systems and fulfillment because core values and automated behaviors are intertwined. Let’s explore this together:
First, let’s define what core values are in the context of this written post. Core values are representations—things, activities, interactions, and subject-matters— that we deem to be most important in our lives. Our hierarchy of values— most important to least important— determines what we filter for in life, and more importantly, what we use to govern our decision-making processes. Therefore, that which governs our decision-making processes determines our behaviors:
What we decide to act upon (or not).
How we decide to act.
Who we decide to take action with.
When we act.
We do not need to consciously think about fulfilling our highest values because they are intrinsic and automatically prioritized. For example, people who value skiing or surfing don’t need reminders to check the weather reports to determine where and when they should go out. Someone who values investing in public markets does not need reminders to consume information from financial news sources. Someone who values fashion and aesthetics does not require a reminder to dress to suit the occasion.
Similarly, the hierarchy of company values determines what your company perceives to be of high priority and how you act upon those priorities. For example, if customer-centricity is exceptionally high, that means people will automatically filter for their customers’ needs, voices, even anticipate what they will need before they recognize it themselves. Great teams in the hospitality industry are an excellent example of this, and their behaviors demonstrate it:
They ask a customer if they want another coffee before the customer asks themselves.
If the customer’s meal is going to take a little longer to prepare, they give the customer some delights— entree samplers, complimentary beverages, for example.
They offer corporate customers a portable iPhone charging dock, knowing that most business customers draw down their smartphone batteries quickly.
An ex-manager at Hilton once told me, “The struggle with great customer service is people notice when it isn’t great, but when it is truly great, they barely notice anything at all.”
Another example: if your company values subject-matter excellence and performance, that means people will automatically filter for ways to improve their performance. For instance, they will set clearly defined benchmarks to measure their performance and have a systematic method for eliciting feedback and adjusting their behaviors. Great early-stage startup teams are an excellent example of this, and the behaviors we have observed include (but are not limited to):
They code company success as personal success. That means they understand how their accountabilities directly contribute to the company’s success.
Direct, candid feedback delivered with as little delay as possible; traditional performance review cycles are typically too long to be useful for this environment.
They hold each other accountable. While high performers are typically aware of their responsibilities, they are also unafraid to remind others of theirs if others are not pulling their weight.
Merit-based hiring and promotion of employees—not just hiring based on college degrees, logos, and years of experience.
Proactive communication, both vertically and horizontally. For example, an engineer won’t simply wait for a product manager to deliver critical customer feedback from their beta group, the engineer will ask customer success leads, “How are customers responding, what changes do we need to help accommodate, and by when?”
An unwillingness to miss their performance metrics. Period. This could mean them working extra hours, working odd hours, asking for additional help, for example. Some might describe this behavior as being ‘self-competitive.’
They run lots of experiments, measure feedback, and then pivot. That means they are unafraid of trying and failing, knowing that the more trials they make, the sooner they will arrive at something that succeeds.
2: Behavioral Specificity > Wordsmithing Values
Open any company website and read what they value— it could be in their ‘About Us’ page or on their ‘Job Descriptions’ pages. Likely, you will find single words or catchy phrases that describe their culture, who they are, and how they operate. Now, I would love you to imagine what behaviors (people, pictures, sounds, activities) come to mind when you think of the following words:
Empathy.
Authenticity.
Ownership.
Candor.
Take note of your answers then consider the following: how do you know the behaviors you painted in your mind’s eye is the same as what others in your company interpret to be? For example, is ‘listening more and asking more questions’ a sign of empathy? Or, do you expect empathetic people to use statements to the effect of, “I’m sorry for what happened…” Or is it a combination of both?
Let’s suppose an engineer identifies a critical software error at 11 PM and fixes it even though it isn’t his or her responsibility— is she or he demonstrating ownership?
What if a co-founder isn’t optimistic about the next fundraise, and independently starts a parallel fundraising process on his/her initiative? — is she or he demonstrating ownership, or crossing boundaries of accountability?
How about junior staff prioritizing the solving of severe problems beyond their expertise, at the price of fulfilling their specifically designed responsibilities?
Does authenticity mean speaking your mind without a filter? Or is that more like candor? Maybe someone authentic is open to sharing their strengths, weaknesses, and where they need help— or is that more about truthfulness and honesty?
There are no ‘absolute’ answers to the above questions.
But here is what we have noticed: if it is not clear what behaviors your company values and expects, then people are left to their interpretations and personal biases of what behaviors are expected of them. Their behaviors could be aligned or misaligned with what you expect. However, they are only doing the best they can with what they know, drawing on their historical experience of what those words mean.
Therefore, when articulating your company culture, it is useful to start with the behaviors that you expect. For example:
A friend and former hardware operator (now turned investor) shared with us his day-to-day activities in his business, “I used to take out the trash and sign million dollar bills.”
Legendary Frank Lloyd Wright valued ‘Learn by Doing.’ (the value) He would tell his students (and I’m paraphrasing), “Don’t design spaces you haven’t worked in and don’t design using materials you haven’t worked with.” At his famous site in Scottsdale, Arizona, Taliesin West, he assigned a student as an apprentice in a kitchen with the chef for months before allowing the student to design a kitchen— this is the behavior. Furthermore, most (if not all) of the buildings on site were built by the hands of his students— they raised the beams, mixed the cement, moved the boulders, and poured the foundations themselves—this is the behavior. To this day, students who study their Masters of Architecture at Taliesin West must design and build their student accommodation.
Some tips for behavioral specificity:
Be context-specific. Every behavior is useful in some contexts. However, they can be limiting in others. It might be appropriate to share your feelings and challenges with a colleague over lunch. However, it might not be so appropriate to do that with your customers over the phone. To set the context, consider using the standard ‘verb, subject, object, place’ structure for descriptions— who are the parties involved? What activities are happening? Who is performing what action? When and where is this taking place?
Describe the behaviors in a way that if you could use it to film a short movie scene. The description should be sensory-rich— confirmable by the five senses— so that someone could picture what you mean. By using sensory-rich descriptions in your communications, people are less likely to rely on their own stories and interpretations to make sense of what you mean.
Example:
"When a customer complains over the phone and is angry at this CSM, this CSM takes a deep breath, sits upright in his/her office chair, and spends most of the time (60-70%) listening to the customer first. The CSM then confirms their understanding with the customer by backtracking the customer’s response, and responding with questions before verbalizing their opinion/recommendation over the phone."
Note: this does not mean you shouldn’t do your best to find unique statements to describe your culture and values! However, by focusing on behavioral specificity, you can commence organizing those behaviors into distinct sets of values and statements to represent your culture. When you take this approach, the word or statement you prescribe to the value has the following richer meaning behind it:
A Value is a Symbol for Patterned Behavior.
Here is a template you can use to translate your company values with behavioral specificity:
Value: (Word or Phrase)
What it Means: (A General Description)
In Action: (Actions speak louder than words)
Context 1: (without context, people can’t imagine the action
What are 3-5 Aligned Behaviors:
What are the 3-5 Misaligned Behaviors: (contrast is an excellent way for learning)
Context 2: (without context, people can’t imagine the action)
What are 3-5 Aligned Behaviors:
What are the 3-5 Misaligned Behaviors:
Context 3: (without context, people can’t imagine the action
What are 3-5 Aligned Behaviors:
What are the 3-5 Misaligned Behaviors:
What it Is Not: (Clarify misconceptions)
Here is a hypothetical example we enjoyed crafting:
Value: Read Minds and Act!
What it Means: This means understanding people’s motivations, desires, fears, and concerns before they even consciously recognize it themselves, or express them— then taking a proactive set of actions to enrich their lives.
In Action:
Context 1: Customer Success
Present a solution to your customer’s needs by emailing and texting them a day before they even realize they needed it.
Context 2: Sales
Preemptively address a warm prospect’s key objection to purchasing your product within the first 30 seconds of speaking to a warm sales prospect over the phone.
Context 3: Hiring
Have a compelling, time-sensitive, job offer package (written) handy in your in-person interview with the perfect candidate you already know will be perfect for your company.
What it Is Not: This does not mean purchasing a hypnosis device, shaking a crystal ball, hacking into people’s data sources, hiring a private investigator, or outsourcing activities to 99psychics.com.
3: Assess the Present, Create the Future
When crafting your company values and culture, don’t seek differentiation for differentiation sakes. Your company is already unique. You just need to understand how. As we discussed in the previous section, you can wordsmith the final descriptions to match the look, feel, and tone of your brand, as long as you are clear on the patterned behavior you want to see in your company.
Articulating your company culture is best done:
Before your company gets too big (50+ people)
After your company has operated for some time and gathered data points on what is working well and what behaviors are unique to your company (e.g., 20+ people).
You want to build on what is already working well— the functional behaviors that are already generalized and part of your team’s unconscious competence. There will always be behaviors like this, or your company wouldn’t still be in business.
However, there will likely be a discrepancy between:
Functional behaviors that are already patterned in your organization
Dysfunctional behaviors that are already patterned in your organization.
Functional behaviors you want to have patterned in your organization.
In crafting your company culture and behaviors— it helps to understand the present state of affairs at your company and to create the future you aspire. It is much easier for companies to evolve their culture by building upon what is already working. Questions you want to have clear answers to:
What behaviors are working well that should continue?
What behaviors are not working well that we should discontinue?
What new behaviors should we adopt?
— having answers to the above will help you craft new core values (and, therefore, new patterned behaviors) that the team can grow into with some time.
Assessing present state: here is a questionnaire frame you can adapt for your use, whether in a company-wide questionnaire or an in-person interview with key team members:
Name (Optional). Making this field optional creates sufficient psychological safety so that responders can be as candid as they want about their feedback.
What are 3-5 behavioral traits that are exemplary of our culture? Please describe the behavior in a way that someone could picture exactly what you mean— as if you were using a script to film a movie! It can help to think of a specific person, event, and interaction. Example: "When a customer complains over the phone and is angry at this CSM, this CSM spends most of the time (80%) listening to the customer first, responding with questions, before verbalizing their opinion/recommendation over the phone."
Think of someone (you do not need to disclose their name) who performs well in their role and is a good model for our company values. Please describe their behavior in such a way that someone could picture exactly what you mean— as if you were using a script to film a movie! Example: "When I approach my manager for help on a specific problem in-person, he/she asks me questions to understand my thinking and guides me to find my answers. When the meeting is over, I leave feeling confident, and seldom does my manager need to call or email me every day to check-in on my progress.”
What 3-5 behavioral traits are an absolute misalignment with our culture? Please describe the behaviors in such a way that someone could picture exactly what you mean— as if you were using a script to film a movie! It can help to think of a specific person, event, and interaction. Example: "When this person commits to finishing a task by a specific deadline, they seldom meet it. When their manager approaches them in person to understand why and to offer help, they blame the manager for not giving them enough time."
What are the top 3-5 rules of belonging at this company? Example: 1) Always do what you say you will do. 2) Only use first-class language with external stakeholders (e.g., “Thank you” instead of “Thanks!”). 3) Spend more time in the office vs. working remotely. 4) Always eat lunch with your colleagues. 5) Never speak ill about your colleagues.
What are 3-5 words you would use to describe our people & culture? Example: Focused, Patient, Caring, Inclusive, etc.
How do you maximize questionnaire engagement? How do you maximize the chances of getting quality, thoughtful responses? In this instance, you want to frame the questionnaire in a way that demonstrates the following attributes:
Communicate your positive intent first. You don’t want the team to think they aren’t already doing things well. This builds psychological safety so that people don’t perceive the process to be an attack on the present state of the company.
Communicate belonging using collective pronouns— ‘‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our’ — this builds tribal safety.
Communicate that you value their input. You want to make clear that their contribution will be part of what shapes your company culture— this communicates the significance of their input.
Here is a helpful frame for the questionnaire:
“Our company is what it is today because of everyone's contribution— we have a culture and a set of behaviors that is defined and driven by every one of us. As we gear up for even greater achievements in the future, we want to account for and include what specific behaviors and attitudes you think are benchmarks of our culture. The purpose of this questionnaire is to capture your feedback so we can further understand what makes us uniquely us and continue to refine our core values and culture in the future.”
4: No Two Value-Systems Are the Same
The prime objective of human beings is values-fulfillment. You share this life with other people who have unique value systems, and like you, are seeking to fulfill their highest values. However, a company’s value system is never an exact match with a human being— there will always be discrepancies. This is natural and promotes diversity.
Instead of expecting team member’s value systems to be an exact match, it is more useful to artfully link individual value systems to the company (and vice versa) to generate alignment and maintain intrinsic motivation to work at your company.
Find ways to express our values in terms of how they support the company's values.
Ask the company to express its values in a way that fulfills our values.
For example, if an employee values international travel, you might propose the following:
"We will sponsor your travel to these 5 locations in the world next year, and allow you to work remotely. There, you will secure meetings with investors and strategic partners so you can expand our business and help secure our global footprint."
If an employee values board games and cards, you might ask them:
“During our company retreat, we would love for you to facilitate a game night that everyone can get engaged in. You will lead and explain the rules, and we will have a friendly competition to determine the ultimate winning team.”
People are already good at doing the above— especially those who have a natural affinity for identifying win-win arrangements. The possibilities are endless if you:
Understand how value systems work.
Elicit your team’s unique value systems. This questionnaire was designed to help you identify your— and others'— core values.
5: Celebrate Your Culture Champions
Adopting new behaviors is hard unless people have a clear model for what is expected of them— culture champions provide that model. The human brain has mirror neurons that fire off to mirror the behavior of another human being— as if the observer were adopting those behaviors. If no one in your organization can demonstrate the new behaviors needed, it becomes increasingly challenging for anyone else to learn or adopt them.
Therefore, building and changing a culture requires leaders and managers to adopt new behaviors and exemplify them within the workplace. Of course, leadership can come from the bottom-up and cross-functionally too. However, the highest leverage is from the top-down. Therefore, it is important to:
Identify who your culture champions are. Your culture champions are individuals who most congruently demonstrate the functional, patterned behaviors your organization aspires to uphold. Period. These are people others look up to, providing a clear north-star for performance and satisfaction.
Celebrate your champions behaviors and outcomes in multiple forums and formats. Human beings process information through various channels. Some like to read facts. Others consume stories via videos. Some people want 1-to-many in-person presentations. Others, a fireside chat, and some wish to receive information in a many-to-many environment (e.g., social gathering over dinner and drinks). The more channels, the merrier. When celebrating, it is crucial to focus on the behaviors you want people to model, not just the champion's personality.
A great mechanism to help you achieve the above is storytelling. The reason we don’t make storytelling the focus in this post is that storytelling is a technique, a mechanism, for achieving a specific outcome. We find it more important to understand the result you want to accomplish than to get lost in the process. However, storytelling does a few things effectively (but not limited to):
Engages emotion. Human memory relies on emotion. The events and activities in our lives that have the highest emotional valence— whether positively pleasurable or negatively painful—are the events and activities that we will remember. Example:
“In 2008, the world financial crisis left our business leaders in shock. They had just hired 3 new graduate engineers as part of committing to their continuity plan and addressing the skills and experience shortage between senior talent and junior talent. The graduates were certain that they would lose their jobs. But they didn’t because the executive leaders decided to cut their salaries by 20% and work 4 days a week until their client base grew in size again.”
Communicates operating principles. A story communicates how people behave in specific contexts and circumstances. Since you want to reinforce functional behaviors—a story serves to contextualize your company values appropriately. Example:
“At 3 AM, our technical support engineer, Jane, was notified of a mission-critical bug within our enterprise product. The bug, if not fixed within the hour, would have led to us losing our biggest corporate client, accounting for 30% of our topline revenue. Jane worked tirelessly that night and resolved the issue by 3:34 AM. But that’s not all. She could have stopped there and decided to pass out to rejuvenate her energies. Instead, she documented the problem, how it occurred, how she solved it and proposed measures that the team could take to avoid future issues from occurring. She distributed this comprehensive work instruction to the engineering channel for feedback, and notified her boss that she would be going home early tomorrow as soon as things settle.”
Demonstrates a personal transformation. Recall any movie you enjoyed watching, and you can bet the protagonist (main actor/actress) was met with challenging circumstances and had to grow to overcome them personally. What the protagonist needs to learn is often unexpected, even contrary to their natural abilities. Example:
“At no point did I, the CEO, ever realize that my radical self-sufficiency would become the downfall of my organization. The less I relied on others— the less they wanted to depend on me. So, just as I thought our business was going well, I have seen my top performers leave my company, one by one, over the last 3 months. Nothing I could do would convince them to stay— increased salary, promotions, increased ownership, autonomy to hire and fire people they want for their teams, etc. One day, my COO walked into my office, and she asked me, “Do you even need them at this company?” I said, “Of course! It’s obvious I do, or I wouldn't be so stressed and disappointed…” She responded, “Do they know you need them?” It never occurred to me that I could have just said, “I need your help— you!” I started sharing that with what was left of my key people, and one by one, they helped me rebuild the company we all genuinely cared about. I used to think that needing anyone was a weakness— I was wrong.”
So, where appropriate, use storytelling to reinforce the behaviors and values of your culture champions— the right stories engage emotions, stimulate people’s mirror neurons, and helps you pattern new behaviors across your organization.
6: Create High-Speed Feedback Loops
When a child is learning that he/she can affect their environment, they assess how their actions can cause specific effects. For example, if they reach their right hand to grab a toy, they can bring that toy closer to them. However, sometimes, their reach is off the mark— either slightly off-angle or off-distance— the child will then use this instant feedback to adjust his/her motor function until they produce the desired effect.
Similarly, when conditioning behaviors in your company, we recommend having an infrastructure or practice that welcomes, reviews, and acts on high-quality feedback. This could be achieved in multiple formats:
Leadership all-hands meetings.
Department meetings.
Digital communications channels.
Feedback forums, whether digital or a physical suggestion box.
Manager one-on-ones.
In-person, casually, in the corridor or over lunch.
Quick quarterly culture-checks (see next section).
Bi-annual questionnaires such as the one we shared in Section 3 of this post.
Here is a helpful frame that assists in helping the organization elicit feedback to act upon (or ignore) is:
What behaviors are working well, and who else needs to know?
What behaviors aren’t working well, and who else needs to know?
The importance is getting into a regular cadence, daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly.
7: Perform Regular Safety & Belonging Check
As your company grows, it might not be realistic to read and process long-form answers from questionnaires such as the one we shared in Section 3 of this post. You might need to create a questionnaire from which you can simply quantify how well you are doing, such as:
Pre-filled options— A, B, C, D.
Scoring scale— 1 to 10 (10 being the highest).
Qualitative ranges— low, medium, and high.
Again, we won’t be prescriptive in how you achieve this. However, here is a simple 2-point frame we use to assess how well a company’s culture is performing, and, we also adapt it for use in assessing how well a leader is performing.
Psychological safety index.
Belonging index.
We want to measure psychological safety and belonging— both are very primal human needs. A culture of people who don’t feel safe or feel they belong— is a fractured culture that won’t perform. Imagine feeling like you are walking on eggshells within your company, and, at any moment, someone is going to eat you— that’s similar to the psychological experience of being in an unsafe environment full of rules you simply can’t adhere to with ease.
Here is a sample questionnaire you can use to roughly measure how well your company is performing in terms of psychological safety and belonging:
I: Psychological Safety Index
On a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), how psychologically safe do you feel working at our company? Why did you choose this number?
On a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), how safe do you feel to share difficult feedback with colleagues at our company? Why did you choose this number?
On a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), how safe do you feel to express disagreement with colleagues at our company? Why did you choose this number?
On a scale of 1- 10 (10 being the highest), how safe do you feel to express your deepest concerns, fears, or challenges with your manager? Why did you choose this number?
On a scale of 1- 10 (10 being the highest), how safe do you feel to ask for help? Why did you choose this number?
What about people’s behaviors, and specific attributes help you feel safer? Please provide 3-5 examples, and be as behaviourally specific as possible so that someone could take your description and film a movie. A helpful frame to use is: “When this person does [insert behavior], I notice [insert outcome].” Do not be concerned with brevity— write as much as you think is needed.
What about people’s behaviors, and specific attributes diminish psychological safety? Please provide 3-5 examples, and be as behaviourally specific as possible so that someone could take your description and film a movie. A helpful frame to use is: “When this person does [insert behavior], I notice [insert outcome].” Do not be concerned with brevity— write as much as you think is needed.
How do you generate more psychological safety in your company? In another post, we cover some of the fundamental behaviors that help generate psychological safety. Furthermore, many of the behaviors that generate psychological safety also happen to generate stronger belonging (connection within groups). Or, as Daniel Coyle aptly describes in his book The Culture Code:
“Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.”
II: Belonging and Culture Index
What are the top 3 to 5 rules of belonging in our company?
On a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), how heard and understood do you feel when working at our company? Why did you choose this number?
In reporting to your manager, on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), how included do you feel in making important decisions? Why did you choose this number?
On a scale of 1- 10 (10 being the highest), how supported do you feel by your colleagues? Why did you choose this number?
In working at our company, on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the highest), how empowered do you feel to grow in your career? Why did you choose this number?
Summing Things Up
Understand that values exchange is what makes the world go around, not money. Money is just the mechanism to facilitate an exchange between diverse value systems. An individual’s (or company’s) hierarchy of values is what dictates that decision-making processes, behaviors, and hence results.
Link company values to individual value-systems. By linking individual value systems, you can create an environment in which a mutually beneficial exchange can occur, one that is driven by individual intrinsic motivation.
Communicate values and expectations using behavioral specificity. If you can’t describe the behaviors to another party in a way that they could film a movie, then you rely on their personal history, experience, and bias to write the script. People do their best with the information they have— the more behaviourally specific your description, the easier it is for people to align with your expectations.
Company values are symbols for patterned behaviors. Rather than relying on fancy wordsmithing, it is better to understand what behaviors are worth patterning, and organizing them into unique symbols (values).
Build on existing, functional behaviors— design and grow into aspirational behaviors. Assess the present state of affairs, what works well, and design new behaviors and aspirations for your team to grow into.
Celebrate ‘champion’ behavior. People learn by example— by identifying champion behavior and communicating it with behavioral specificity, people will have a model for your expectations of excellence.
Communicate positive intent in rapid feedback loops. When delivering and eliciting feedback, communicate positive intent upfront— this creates psychological safety and allows your message to be received rather than defended against.
Use strategic storytelling to engage emotion, memory, and mimicry. Storytelling is a powerful tool for generating vertical and cross-functional alignment.
Measure safety and belonging frequently. High-performing behavior is built upon the foundations of human needs— 1) Psychological safety, and 2) The feeling like they belong. There are multiple indicators for someone experiencing strong psychological safety and strong belonging, such as; ease of asking for help, feeling like their opinion counts, peace of mind that the team has their back, and freedom to be uniquely themselves.