Starting the culture conversation (even when it’s not “your” job)
This is Part 2 of a three part series. (Part 1 on operational success is here; Part 3 on tracking team goals here). In this piece, I reflect on the initial steps I have taken to get our company thinking and talking about culture on a more regular basis.
One year into my role, after achieving some operational success, I realized something that should have been obvious: systems are people-driven, and if people aren’t sure how to work well together – or they can’t – then whatever I have built isn’t going to work.
Culture is the support system of any team. It’s the interplay of the unwritten rules that dictate what people expect from one another as teammates and the trust that results from adhering to those rules. As a mission-driven company, culture is especially important: if we live our values, we can accelerate our growth and have a more significant impact.
I wasn’t paying as close attention to the company culture because, well, it wasn’t my job. I didn’t see it as my strength and, anyway, it wasn’t what I was hired to do. But why should I not have given it attention? Both operations and culture guide our interactions with teammates in important ways: the former defines the steps we need to take to get from A to B whereas the latter ensures the journey itself is a pleasant, productive one. A map is one thing but worthwhile travel partners are what make the trip memorable. Operations and culture are both critical for a company’s longevity, and there should be nothing preventing me from doing everything I need to tackle both.
As I was trying to figure out where to start, I discovered that most of what I read assumed that I already understood the company’s values, that the leadership team was involved in the culture-building work, and that it was within my power to make structural changes to fully realize our ideal culture. I didn’t fit into any of those boxes: I didn’t understand how my colleagues defined our culture; we lacked formal organizational support in the form of a People Ops team; and I didn’t have a history of being a “culture shift” leader.
And yet I pursued this anyway. Spoiler alert: this is a work in progress, nowhere near complete. Still, there are insights gleaned from the last six months that might help in kicking off your own conversations about culture:
- Talk to your team first. Get their buy-in.
Like I said above, I had no idea what my teammates thought our company’s values were or what behaviors they believed led to our success. So I asked them. I interviewed two people from each team (mostly managers and team leads), asking the same questions:
- What do you value?
- What unspoken values have led to our success?
- What do successful Minerva employees have in common?
- What other values should govern the way we interact with each other? With our partners?
My conversations revealed commonalities and shared perspectives as well as key differences that helped us to surface potential areas of friction.
Most importantly, though, the conversations showed my team that someone was thinking about this and that their input mattered. Having the chance to share their thoughts and views during the earliest stage gave a sense of ownership in the process, something critical for the long term success of the initiative. Reflecting on where we are now, I should have given more frequent updates or looped back to ensure continued buy-in. A lesson learned as we move forward.
2. Confront toxic behaviors.
This one seems obvious – why would anyone intentionally adopt a toxic work culture? The truth is it’s very easy to accept toxic behaviors if they have played some part in the company’s growth and success. During my interviews, a few teammates pointed out that there were behaviors that at one time contributed to early achievements at the company but were no longer serving us.
I’ll take one: a scrappy attitude. As an early-stage startup, we relied on employees to have the gumption to jump in whenever needed and on as many projects as possible. In fact, we still expect this because we’ve remained a small team. But the “all hands on deck” attitude has the potential to lead to burnout, inefficiencies, and conflict as the company – and the number of projects we take on – grows. If resourcefulness is something we value as a company, which we do, then we need to understand when it starts to drift from motivating value to destructive behavior.
To avoid a potentially destructive behavior, we spent time thinking about when resourcefulness mattered most. We recognized that it is most important at the start of projects; anything longer term, and we risked employee health and fulfillment. In taking a measured approach, we were hopefully saying to our team, “We hear from you that this behavior won’t work in its current form, so let’s mold it to work for us.”
3. Relentlessly pursue senior leadership support and participation.
Your leadership team needs to participate. This does not mean that they green-light the work and then give you a thumbs up and a smile when you share updates. It means that they actively participate in the process by giving input, sharing feedback, and modeling values.
Getting our CEO’s buy-in was critical for moving the initiative forward. After he shared his feedback on a rough draft of our values, pointing out that our initial read missed the mark in some areas, I spoke to him about his overall philosophy regarding culture. I left thinking, “How have I never understood your perspective on our culture before? Everyone should hear this.” Having him publicly comment on a draft and shape the values through conversation gave the initiative weight.
I will share what worked for me, but I recognize that we all have different resources, interest, and power dynamics to accommodate:
A. Find your champion. Our Chief Product Officer was as bought into the initiative as I was and had his own ideas on what might resonate with others.
B. Expand the circle. Work with your champion to bring other senior leaders into the fold as quickly as possible. Our CPO went straight to the CEO and told him that this would not work without him.
C. Proceed until apprehended. Keep working on the project as you make progress on the first one or two steps. It may take some time to get the support you need, and the more data you have on what’s working and the benefit to the company, the better off you’ll be.
4. Define what the values look like in practice. Stress test them.
We had our list of principles. Now what? One thing everyone wanted to avoid was another list of words. What we needed now was an understanding of what our values and principles looked like in our day-to-day work.
The deck we shared included just that: the principles, a brief description, and what it was meant to look like in practice. For instance, Personal & Professional Fulfillment. Left alone this could mean anything to anyone. So that there was no door left open for misguided interpretation, we added examples of what this meant, often responding directly to some of the challenges surfaced from the interviews.
It means everyone will have an updated job description that matches what they do. It means that we write personal goals alongside our team goals. And it means building transparency into career conversations: Not feeling fulfilled in your role? Let’s figure it out.
5. Keep the conversation going and call out what’s working.
Maintain the momentum you gained through buy in by continuing to talk to teammates about what’s working and what isn’t working. Reaching full adoption and changing behaviors takes time – months or even years. We’re still in the early stages, but I’m already soliciting feedback and considering where we can recognize progress. This could take shape in several ways:
- Find time in team meetings to discuss the values in “plain” language. I recorded a discussion with our CEO to get his take on this.
- Use the values as a lens through which you give quarterly feedback.
- Post positive examples in a shared channel (for us, it’s our Slack #shoutouts channel).
- Re-interview everyone after 6 months to assess what impact the initiative has had and what modifications are needed.
- Solicit ideas during the annual all-company event on how employees can live the values.
Our work is far from finished. It will take a collective effort to ensure that the culture we want to see at the company takes hold and that we continue to maintain buy-in. So then how do we know when we are moving in the right direction?
In order to ensure we are making steady progress on this and other initiatives, my team and I have taken a deliberate approach to setting and working on personal and professional goals. I will detail our approach and lessons learned in the next article, “Creating a goal-tracking process.”