Being the Boss Starts with the Right Culture

In this series, professionals share how they embrace the entrepreneurial mindset. See the stories here, then write your own (use #BetheBoss in the post).

As the founding CEO of a company that has grown to more than $400 million in revenue in five years, I’ve learned that the culture you build and the type of people you hire must be inextricably linked through the company’s unique stages of launch, growth and scale.

Launch Stage

Founding a company is tough. It’s like riding a bicycle for the first time. You wobble and sway and have no idea how it’s supposed to feel, all the while thinking you’re going to crash if you don’t balance every movement.

For founding CEOs, it’s a benefit to have a great founding team of people who possess the technology, marketing and sales skills to build your product and get it to market. However, it’s even more critical that these founders like to work with each other and are truly cohesive. If the founders aren’t in sync at the outset, no one who joins later will be able to do anything effectively. The dynamics of how the founders work together lay the cultural foundation of the company, even if it’s not explicitly stated.

Hiring anyone at this stage of the company is easier said than done as the talent war can be intense. It’s likely no one has heard of your start-up unless you’ve raised a huge Series A investment. Just make sure to take a critical eye towards how any potential employee fits into the early cultural ‘working dynamic’ of your young startup.

Growth Stage

The growth stage is like being an awkward teenager: the company may look mature from afar but up close you see all the blemishes and body parts that are disproportionate to the rest.

The company culture at this stage amounts to how people make decisions when the CEO isn’t in the room. As the CEO, you need to ask yourself if you’ve provided a clear vision and company mission. Have you established the company’s values? Are employees generally doing what you want or are you concerned that some people are veering off in a range of directions? If cringe-worthy moments outweigh pride and satisfaction, now is the time to firmly establish your culture and align it to your company’s market strategy.

Take the time with your senior team to define, refine and commemorate the company’s Vision, Mission, Values and Strategy. Dedicate several hours a week to the process until it’s complete and rolled out. Avoid the temptation to only focus on the immediate business issues at the expense of getting this done. Your company’s future success depends on the explicit culture you build at this stage.

Hiring the right people is easier when you’ve taken the time to define the type of mission, values and market strategy that you and the other co-founders and key management really care about. It's critical these new managers are well aligned with your cultural values, as they’re the ones bringing them to life for a majority of employees.

In addition to being aligned with your culture, the managers you hire at this stage need to be experts in their domain. Founders can get tripped up hiring these managers. Since you and your founding team likely have little to no experience in some of these specialist domains, it’s hard to know who’s truly good and who just interviews well. I’ve found that assigning candidates an interview case study with real-life scenarios helps you ascertain their skills as well as cultural fit with your company as the candidate discusses their solution.

Your biggest challenge at this stage is to learn how to entrust these new managers with true responsibility. Letting go can be awkward because it’s your company, and you’ve gotten the company to where it is by doing it all yourself in the past.

Scale Stage

At the scale stage, your culture should become your most important hiring criteria – your exciting growth trajectory and growing brand make hiring much easier than the Launch or Growth stages. Because you have several layers of employees and management spread over many different functions, you need to ascertain if that strong culture you put in place hundreds of employees ago permeates the organization. If people are consistently asking questions about the company's purpose, its values, and what behaviors are and are not acceptable, you need to go to work to deeply communicate, personify, and enforce your culture. Make your culture a key part of how the company makes decisions. When your culture is universally understood, then hundreds of people can row in the same direction efficiently and effectively.

At this stage, there’s a need to distinguish between leaders and managers. Cultivate great leaders who are cultural pillars. Your employees will look implicitly at the type of behaviors exhibited by the people you promote or hire into leadership positions as what you really care about in your culture – even if you think you’re hiring for rare experience or skillsets.

Culture and hiring go hand-in-hand at each phase of the stages of launch, growth and scale. I’ve been humbled and gratified by the once-in-a-lifetime experience to go through these distinct phases since founding Kabam. And I always keep in mind, success is never final.