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recruiting he looked for people who were smart, humble, hardworking, and collaborative.
Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?”
Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed.
Hardworking.
disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life.
Collaborative.
providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting.
We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that.
“Will what I do make a difference? Will it matter? Will it move the company forward? Will anybody notice?” A huge part of management’s job is to make sure the answer to all those questions is “Yes!”
a gigantic portion of your cultural success will be determined by what gets rewarded at your company.
Every time an employee works hard to make a change or to propose a new idea only to be met with bureaucracy, indecision, or apathy, the culture suffers.
According to bushido, a culture is not a set of beliefs, but a set of actions.
the prime cultural virtue of any startup is survive at all costs.
Your employees will test you on your cultural virtues, either accidentally or on purpose, so before you put one into your company, ask yourself, “Am I willing to pass the test on this?”
If your business is going well, yet people are leaving at a higher-than-industry-expected rate, you have a culture problem. If they’re precisely the people you want to keep, that’s an even worse sign. When people selected for their cultural fit don’t feel at home it’s a particularly bad omen—you picked them for a culture you don’t have.
customer satisfaction starts with the product, runs through the expectations set by sales and marketing, and finally lands in customer support.
If somebody behaves in a way you can’t believe, remember that your culture somehow made that acceptable.
Everyone has input, then I decide tends to balance informed decision making with speed. It also acknowledges that not everyone in the organization has enough information to make a given decision, so someone has to be in charge of becoming knowledgeable and then deciding how to proceed.
“I hear you and, quite frankly, I agree with you, but I was overruled by the powers that be.” This is absolutely toxic to the culture.
If you are a manager, at any level, you have a fundamental responsibility to support every decision that gets made. You can disagree in the meeting, but afterward you must not only support the final decision, you must be able to compellingly articulate the reasons the decision was made.
After a major decision like this, it’s a good practice to ask employees what they thought of the decision—that way you can find out if the rationale behind the move cascaded down the organization with fidelity.
zero-tolerance on managers who undermined decisions,
At a large company
it will often be faster to make the wrong decision, discover that it’s wrong, and pivot to the right decision, than to spend the time a priori
In the speed-versus-accuracy calibration, the cultural question of empowerment plays an important role. How far down the org chart can a decision get made?
Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive.
Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid.
Your company’s culture should be an idiosyncratic expression of your personality, beliefs, and strategy—and it should keep evolving as your company grows and conditions change.
Telling the truth requires courage. Less remarked on—but equally important, for our purposes—is that it requires judgment and skill.
Good CEOs run toward the pain and the darkness; eventually they even learn to enjoy it.
By getting to the root cause and addressing that, rather than playing the blame game with an employee or two, you create a culture that won’t be secretive or defensive—a culture open to bad news.
people will talk about the problems if you encourage them to.
when people look back, they will think that they were able to do the most meaningful work of their careers here. In exchange, I expect two things: first, ethical integrity. Second, that they optimize for the company rather than for themselves. If they satisfy those two expectations, then they have our appreciation, respect, and loyalty.
The job might not work out, but they will hear that from me first and immediately and they will have time to land safely somewhere else. In exchange, they need to let me know early on if they are unhappy in any way.”
Your goal is to have the best possible culture for your company, so it stays aimed at its target.
If you don’t know what you want, there is no chance that you will get it.
Culture begins with deciding what you value most.
you have to pay close attention to your people’s behavior, but even closer attention to your own. How is it affecting your culture? Are you being the person you want to be? This is what it means to create a great culture. This is what it means to be a leader.
