Building and maintaining company culture as you scale requires a continuous, concerted effort. CEOs often struggle with this topic because it’s not immediately clear what a good company culture looks like or when and why their company culture starts to go sideways.
As a company grows, the everyone-knows-everyone atmosphere starts to disappear. Your new managers and new executives bring their own values and ideas to your company, which in turn starts to evolve your company’s culture. This is normal and you should expect your company culture to change overtime, but you can’t be asleep at the wheel while it’s happening. To be successful, you’ll need to make a conscious effort to identify and retain the best, authentic qualities that resonate with you and your team on an ongoing basis.
1. Define your mission, vision, and core values
Do this as early as you can. Its ok if you haven’t quite figured it out entirely, but you should push yourself to define a v1 early. Read some examples here and here. And this is a twitter thread we really like from an entrepreneur on how he defines his mission, vision, and core values. Here is the full post for a deeper read.
2. Pick core values that you embody yourself to ensure authenticity
Actions speak louder than words, so don’t just copy the most popular and aspirational values, think through what you experience everyday and your team experiences. Your stated values have to match what people see.
3. Recognize and reward your core values at every opportunity
First off, ensure you’ve written it all down in a document and make sure everyone at the company sees it, especially new hires. Then set up regular times when you publicly recognize your employees for embodying your company values. Use shout-outs during all-hand meetings or company-wide emails for example, to celebrate the person, their action and the company value they displayed all clearly linked together. And do this as often as possible.
4. Hiring for a culture fit
One of the quickest ways your company culture can go sideways is by bringing in one or several seasoned executives that come in with their own hardened views of how a company should run. Discuss company culture early in the interview process and feel out whether the candidate will successfully adapt and embody your values, whether they’ll be a culture add over time, or whether they’ll bring it all down.
5. Fire quickly
Much is made of firing quickly but it only takes one bad attitude in an important enough position in the company to spoil it for everyone. Firing someone who is a good individual performer but is a negative influence on those around them can be a very difficult, but necessary decision to make. Strive to be uncompromising on the values you hold dear. You can read our post on firing here.
References
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