I. Key Takeaways: Cultural Checklist
1. Cultural Design – make sure your culture aligns with both your personality and your strategy. Anticipate how it might be weaponized and define it in a way that’s unambiguous.
2. Cultural Orientation – an employee’s first day at work may not be as indelible as Shaka Senghor’s first day out of quarantine (someone was stabbed first day in prison), but it always makes a lasting impression. People learn more about what it takes to succeed in your organization on that day than on any other day. Don’t let that first impression be wrong or accidental.
3. Shocking Rules – any rule so surprising it makes people ask “why do we have this rule” will reinforce key cultural elements. Think about how you can shock your organization into cultural compliance.
Rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years:
3a. It must be memorable – if people forget the rule, they forget the culture.
3b. It must raise the question: why? – Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “are you serious?”
3c. Its cultural impact must be straightforward – The answer to “why?” must be clearly explain the cultural concept.
3d. People must encounter the rule almost daily – If your incredibly memorable rule applies only to situations people face once a year, it’s irrelevant.
Examples:
Tom Coughlin (NY Giants) – if you are on time, you are late. Late 5 minutes – fined $1,000.
Amazon – no powerpoint presentations in meeting.
Facebook – move fast and break things – evolved to move fast with stable infrastructure once it got to scale.
Yahoo – nobody is allowed to work from home.
4. Incorporate outside leadership – sometimes the culture you need is so far away from the culture you have that you need to get outside help. Rather than trying to move your company to a culture that you don’t know well, bring in an old pro from the culture you aspire to have.
5. Object Lessons – what you say means far less than what you do. If you really want to cement a lesson, use an object lesson. It need not be a Sun Tzu-style beheading, but it must be dramatic
6. Make ethics explicit – one of the most common and devastating mistakes leaders make is to assume people will do the right thing even when it conflicts with other objectives. Don’t leave ethical principles unsaid.
Examples: “We do the right thing. Period.” – Uber’s new CEO – Dara Khosrowshahi – makes it a priority and the period makes it simple and therefore trivial.
7. Give cultural tenets deep meaning – make them stand out from the norm, from the expected. If the ancient samurai had defined politeness the way we define it today, it would have zero impact on the culture. Because they defined it as the best way to express love and respect, it still shapes Japanese culture today. What do your virtues really mean?
– Samurai Code – Honor, Politeness, Sincerity
8. Walk the talk – “do as I say, not as I do” never works. So refrain from choosing cultural virtues that you don’t practice yourself.
9. Make decisions that demonstrate priorities – it was not enough for Louverture to say his culture was not about revenge. He had to demonstrate it by forgiving the slave owners.
II. Key examples
A. Netscape – “We have three rules at Netscape. The first rule is if you see a snake, don’t call committees, don’t call your buddies, don’t form a team, don’t get a meeting together, just kill the snake.”
“The second rule is don’t go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made.”
“And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking for snakes.”
B. Shaka Senghor Learnings
B1. Your own perspective on the culture is not that relevant – your view or your executive team’s view of your culture is rarely what your employees experience. What Shaka experienced on his first day out of quarantine transformed him. The relevant question is, what must employees do to survive and succeed in your organization? What behaviors get them included in, or excluded from, the power base? What gets them ahead?
B2. You must start from first principles. Every ecosystem has a default system. Don’t just blindly adopt it.
– You may be adopting an organizing principle you don’t understand (e.g. Intel – casual dress policy)
Ask new employees – what behaviors do they perceive will help them fit in, survive, and succeed? Ask them in their first week and make sure they tell you the bad stuff, the practices, or assumptions that made them wary and uncomfortable. Ask them whats different from other places that they’ve worked – not just what’s better, but what’s worse.
– If you were me, how would you improve the culture based on the first week here? What would you try to enhance?
Diagnose the power struggle – who can get the things done and why? What did they do to get in that position? Can you replicate it? T the same time, how you behave on arrival – how other people see you – affects your standing and potential in the company and determines your personal brand
C. Suresh Khanna – AdRoll – Identifying Good Employees
C1. Smart – not just high IQ, it means disposed toward learning. GOod interview questions: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better” or “what’s something that you’ve automated” or “what’s a process that you’ve had to tear down at a company.”
C2. Humble – people want you to succeed if you’re humble. Foundation for collaboration.
C3. Hardworking – When you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, ad gritty.
C4. Collaborative – being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. Good interview question: “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped fix it.”
III. Other Takeaways
A. How to tell your culture is messed up?
A1. The wrong people are quitting too often – if your business is going well, yet people are leaving at a higher rate than industry expected rate, you have a problem. If you have good people leaving, there’s something wrong.
A2. You’re failing at your top priorities – customer service still sucks even with improvements – some fundamental items are wrong – e..g product/sales/marketing.
A3. An employee does something that truly shocks you? (e.g. lying middle manager)
B. Good Cultures: Trust, Openness to Bad News, Encourage Bad news
B1. Trust
Delivering bad news –
B1a. State the facts clearly – “we have to lay off 30 people because projections came in $4 million short.”
B1b. If your leadership caused or contributed to the setbacks that necessitated the layoff, cop to that – did we think that we would grow faster than what we did?
B1c. Explain why taking the action you’re taking is essential to the larger mission and how important that mission is?
B2 – Openness to Bad News
– “Kimchi problems” – the deeper you bury them, the hotter they get. Get these addressed immediately!
Why employees don’t volunteer bad news:
B2a. conflicts with an ownership culture – don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution – what if they can’t solve the problem? What if they don’t have the authority?
B2b. the company’s long term goals may not align with an employees short term incentives
B2c. Nobody likes getting yelled at – no one likes to admit guilt
B2d Encourage Bad news – be ecstatic about it – “isn’t it great that we found out about this before it killed us” or “this is going to make our company so much stronger once we solve it.”
B2e Focus on issues and not people – most times the root cause of the issue was communication or prioritization or some other soluble problem rather than an employee.
B2f Look for bad news in the regular course of business – ask: “is there anything that’s preventing you from getting your job done?” Or “if you were me, what would you change about the company?”
B3 Loyalty – it’s about quality of your relationships. People don’t leave companies, they leave managers. If there is no relationship between a manger (or a bad relationship), you won’t get loyalty regardless of your cultural policy.
Take a genuine interest in the people she meets, stay true to her word, and is known throughout the organization as someone you want to get behind, she can create deep bonds and loyalties even in the most dynamic industries.
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