I’ve been really impressed with a couple founders I’ve been working with recently, by how intentional and mindful they’re being of the culture they’re creating. Thinking about how their first hires, organization structure, and communication will influence the resulting culture. They’re the exception.
Most startup founders are so busy worrying about funding and problems with their prototype – “culture” hasn’t even made it onto their Top 10 list of things to worry about this week. Culture is something they’ll worry about “later” – when they’re big enough to hire an HR leader or a consultant to help them with that “touchy feeling stuff.”
Don’t get me wrong – funding and problems with the prototype (and with FDA certification and with finding sites for your clinical trial and…and…and) are real problems that should be at the top of founders’ lists.
Here’s the tricky thing about culture, though – it isn’t an add-on or a program that happens later – it is the direct result of what you are doing now. Culture is something we live into being. The way we work creates the culture, and the culture then shapes the way we work. This includes:
- Who and how we interview and the criteria for hiring
- How we communicate, collaborate, and make decisions
- How we prioritize work and resolve conflicts about those priorities
- What we fear and what we celebrate
- The “values” we’ll violate and the ones we’ll defend, even at great cost
All of these create the invisible structure of the organization, the pattern for “how we work” that shapes the behavior of anyone who joins the company. Once we establish a particular way of working, we tend to keep working that way until some sort of major disruption challenges all of our assumptions (a pandemic, anyone?).
There are consultants who will help you create a program to change your culture further down the road – I’ve done that kind of work myself – but it is generally slow, challenging, expensive work with a 50/50 chance of success. In the end, it usually comes back to the Founders/C-suite needing to fundamentally change the way they operate for there to be any hope of sustained change in the ranks.
So what kind of culture do you want to create? Is that envisioned culture reflective of your own personal values and beliefs or are you just repeating something you heard or read about “good cultures”? If your vision is authentic, are you and your team’s current day-to-day actions consistent with that vision? If someone came in from the outside and watched you for a day, how would they describe your culture? What would they say are your most important values?
A final note – there is no single “right” culture, only the one that’s right for your company, that accurately reflects your core values and the contribution you want your company to make to the world.
