Establishing Your Company Culture

Culture might be one of the most discussed and least understood components of a startup. It can be an asset that elevates small teams far beyond the sum of their parts. It can also be detrimental enough to sink a promising startup before it even leaves port. Culture is something every company strives to do well, but very few really achieve at scale. Despite its apparent intangibility, building a corporate culture can and should be approached the same way as anything else — strategically and with clear intention.?

Culture is something every company strives to do well, but very few really achieve at scale.

Let’s start by stepping way back. Why do you even need a culture? What is the role of culture in a startup, or an early stage company? Speaking from my own experience as well as in seeing a number of early stage companies, as a founder, there are set of primary and interconnected reasons: Talent acquisition, talent retention, and employee alignment for operating execution.?

As a founder or early stage leadership team, you have the privilege, opportunity and responsibility of creating a company culture from scratch. The early days are your opportunity to create a blueprint for the culture you want to someday instill at scale. Take a proverbial (or real) walk in the woods and ask yourself, “What type of company do we want to build?” How do you not only build a company that fits with your outlook on the world, but attracts other people to be part of the journey with you? Startups don’t hold the promise of a big paycheck out of the gate, most people who join early stage companies want to know they’re going to have an opportunity to do the best work of their careers and that is the reason they will stay for the longer term.?

As a founder or early stage leadership team, you have the privilege, opportunity and responsibility of creating a company culture from scratch.

Whatever your cultural values are — good, contrarian or just plain crazy — finding people who will do their best work at your company is only possible with clear communication of those values. Having everyone on the same page and aligned is worth its weight in gold when you’re executing massive lifts with a small startup team. You want diversity of opinion, always — but you want people who care and execute at the same level, who match your expectations as a founder, who match your effort level. The only way they can do that is if you communicate your expectations clearly, every day, and through everything that you do. That’s how a founder simplifies their own role through a thoughtful and strategic approach to culture.?

Communicating that culture and your own reasons for it, really comes down to leading by example. From my personal standpoint, the only prerequisite for a leader is that they never ask anyone to do anything they’re not willing to do themselves or stand by that decision to be held accountable. Employees take notice of the way the people above them work and behave. No amount of meetings, emails or team building exercises can overcome the cultural void of a leader that holds themselves to a separate standard. There’s no set of spoken principles people will consistently follow — they’re going to follow you.?

You also want a culture that customers are attracted to, one with which they want to be regularly associated. At Pure Storage, one of our biggest problems was the sheer number of our customers who wanted to come work for us. It was a pretty great problem to have. The ecosystem and channel partners, vendors and customers you come into contact with will use culture as an unofficial barometer for whether or not they want to do business with you. If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that you want people in the trenches with you that you can count on, who you trust are on the same page about how to work and treat one another, and who have a shared, reciprocal way of working.?

The culture you build will set expectations for employees, leaders and partners. I often speak with a number of CEOs who have led enterprise companies and it’s consistent that they have been great at setting expectations for all their stakeholders.?Some have a long history of doing this to a great extent. I know one such CEO who conveys from the start the expectations that every team members is going to work hard - because he demonstrates this through his own work ethic. He signals very early that he’s going to build a hard-driving team and instill a culture to match. He’s clear about how he operates, he communicates his expectations around effort regularly, and the results speak for themselves as he has led three multi-billion dollar revenue companies. It’s not that his way is the only way to proceed, or that there’s a right or wrong approach, it’s about alignment of motivation and work style. His ability to clearly communicate expectations early helps him build a team that fits the mission more efficiently. He’s also made clear that he knows it is not for everyone. Agree or disagree with his approach, the employees at his companies know where they stand and how they need to operate.?

Great culture can manifest in many ways, but there are a few foundational elements that always seem to exist within the very best. Here are five steps every founder should take, from day one and onwards.?

1. Have a clear, productive process for dealing with failures and mistakes. They’re going to happen, the question is do you have the right culture to learn from and rectify them?
2. Think about how you can aid morale from a reward standpoint. Is yours a culture that celebrates success??
3. Hiring/firing: Can you admit when a mistake has been made, and there’s not a fit? Can you define why they’re not a fit? A lot of founders have a hard time firing people. The harsh reality is that’s a costly mistake, especially in an early stage company when execution is key. Cultural fit is a good test.
4. Be able to signal your culture to the board early. I’ve been part of boards where much later on the company leadership has talked about the culture and observed reactions from board members that weren’t on the same page. It’s important to think about culture early and communicate it to your stakeholders early so that they aren’t taken by surprise down the road. You want?people on your board who fit your culture, too.?
5. It comes back again to answering that first question — what type of company do you want to build? Imagine tomorrow you have 100 people working for you. How do you see an all-hands meeting operating? How do you see successes celebrated, failures dealt with? What does the makeup look like? How do you deal with problems? How do their families talk about where their parents and siblings and spouses work? That will help you start to frame out your vision. It has to be what you want, and there’s no right or wrong answer, but it needs to be something you believe in and something you can personally deliver on every day.?