"Platanizando" Silicon Valley culture

Recently, a friend shared a piece of advice that a successful business man in Colombia had once given her. “Never take more than a week of vacation. Otherwise your boss will realize you are not critical and will look for someone cheaper to do your job.” 

I was shocked. That piece of advice sounded ridiculous and contradicted almost all of the core principles I had learned at my time in Silicon Valley and Amazon. Sadly, “career tips” like this one, resonate for many Latin Americans. I know business people who refuse to up-skill their employees to avoid giving them a raise and many managers whose worst nightmare is having a direct report who is smarter than them. It is no surprise that the people working for them live in constant fear and are always looking for ways to game the system.

Latin America operates under a scarcity mindset and a lack of trust. Individuals see poverty all around them and assume that people are out to get them. You see this reflected in everyday life. From cell phone companies who send somebody to your home to verify you live there to an over reliance on the number of hours worked as a measure of work ethic and performance.

When I moved back to Colombia, I was excited to apply all the best practices I had learned throughout my career in Silicon Valley. I thought (naively) that by applying leadership principles like “disagree and commit” or being vocally self-critical, employees would break old habits. I also thought that managers would be open to direct reports challenging their assumptions to come up with better solutions. I was wrong. In order to build high-performance startup cultures in Latin America you need to do two things:

1. Build a culture of trust - This will be the foundation of your company culture. Without trust, people waste time worrying about how others will perceive their actions. They will also prioritize things that make them look good vs things that add the most value. 
2. Adapt (platanize) best practices - In Colombia, we use the term “platanizar” when we talk about adapting something that works outside of Colombia to the realities of the Colombian market. Latin Americans are not individualistic by nature. They care strongly about consensus and dread uncertainty. In much the same way you cannot expect your average New Yorker to sit politely through a 3 hour Latin American family lunch, you cannot expect your average Latin American to speak up in a meeting and challenge a flawed assumption her boss is making. Hence, you need to adapt what you think of as “best practices”. For a good comparison on cultural values for different countries go here.

Building a culture of trust

This will be complex and time-consuming. There is no “right way” to do this but below are some general guidelines:

1. Acknowledge the scarcity mindset - Acknowledge that most people will operate from a scarcity mindset. Work proactively to encourage people to adapt an abundance mindset. This will be hard work and mostly done through your 1-1s as well as coaching your leaders on how to challenge scarcity mindset assumptions. You should also be deliberate about the language you use (ie. talk about "due?os" vs "dolientes").
2. Delegate decision-making - The more decisions your team members can own, the more comfortable they will become with ownership. You can start small (ie. you can allocate a discount budget of $XXX USD as you see fit) and create safe spaces for them to practice decision-making (ie. next time somebody asks you to make a decision, ask them what decision they would make and why). It will be difficult at first for your team and they will make mistakes. Remember the goal is to build your team's decision-making abilities.
3. Worry more about the result and less about the process - As a leader you should set ambitious goals and give your team the freedom and guidance they need to succeed. This also includes the freedom to fail (as long as they are learning from their mistakes). 
4. Use mistakes as learning opportunities - You will make a lot of mistakes when building a hyper-growth company. If you are not making mistakes, you are not taking enough risk. Make sure you focus on learning from the mistakes as opposed to finding the person you should blame for the mistake. 
5. Avoid creating unnecessary stress - Working at a hyper-growth startup is stressful. You need to keep people accountable but remember that stress prevents people from thinking creatively which is exactly what you need at a hyper-growth startup. Phrases like “everybody’s job is on the line”, or “if you fail you are out” can be necessary in extreme circumstances but in general only serve to add unnecessary stress. This unnecessary stress will trigger scarcity mindset and impostor syndrome making it harder for your team to trust each other.
6. Lead by example - If you want people to trust you and trust each other, you will need to trust them. At some point somebody will steal from you, slack off or take advantage of the trust you have given them. Have zero tolerance for people who abuse trust. At the same time, do not make all your staff pay for the mistakes of a few.

"Platanizando" best practices

Once you create a culture of trust (or begin creating a culture of trust), you can adapt best practices. Which best practices or guiding principles you use in your startup will depend on your leadership style and your company’s culture. Below are some general tips to keep in mind. 

1. Power distance - Latin Americans expect people in positions of power to make decisions for them and accept that those in power will dictate things for those with less power. This means you cannot expect a manager to feel comfortable with others challenging her in public. It also means that even if you implement an open-door policy, people will defer to your opinions as a leader. Does this mean you need to adopt an autocratic decision making process? No. It does mean that you will need to spend additional time and effort to create open debates and people may never get to the point where they feel fully comfortable challenging their superiors. 
2. Individualism - Latin Americans are not very individualistic. People will care deeply about their relationships with others. This means you will need to coach people to get them to the point where they feel comfortable being more direct (without being jerks) or making unpopular decisions.
3. Uncertainty avoidance - Latin Americans hate uncertainty. We will take refuge in convoluted processes and hierarchies as a way to exert control and reduce uncertainty. Make sure you are clear with your team on the level of uncertainty they should expect by joining your team and work to minimize uncertainty via transparent communication whenever possible. For example, make it very clear for your team what types of risks they can take and what types they cannot. Assume most people will avoid failure or perceived failure so you will need to invest more effort to understand what problems are hiding beneath the surface.

To build a high-performance culture, you will need a high level of trust. Building a high-trust work environment in Latin America will take time but is worth the effort. As you start platanizing best practices, remember you need to take into account the cultural context you are in.