A practical guide to recognizing, protecting, and finding the right organizational culture
In this post, I’m revisiting a keynote I gave in 2013 at the BBC Developer Conference, titled “Building a Strong Engineering Culture.” Twelve years later, my thinking has both stayed the same and evolved. I want to discuss culture, not just for engineering teams, but for you as an individual, as a manager, and as someone seeking your next role.
What Actually Is Culture?
Culture’s a heavy word. We use it in many contexts, including company culture, engineering culture, and team culture. But what does it really mean?
Henrik Kniberg, whom I had the immense pleasure of working with at Spotify, distilled it beautifully:
“Culture is the stuff people do without noticing it.”
My definition is more formal: Culture is the manifestation of the shared values of the organization as represented by the actions of its members.
The key words here are values and actions. It’s not what you say, it’s what you do. And to Henrik’s point, it’s what you do without even thinking about it.
Real Values vs. Aspirational Values
Every company I’ve worked at has had its values spelled out somewhere. The problem? Many companies have publicly stated values that aren’t really their values. These are what I call ‘aspirational values’ – they are the values the company wishes to have or believes it should have, but they may not necessarily reflect the actual behaviors and beliefs of the employees.
How do you know what your current team or company’s actual culture is? Scott Berkun created a great test:
“Can an employee say no to a decision from a superior on the grounds that it violates a core value?”
If your company has a core value of honesty to customers, and your boss tells you to lie to a customer, could you say, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that. That doesn’t align with our core values”? And would your boss fire you, give you a poor review, or say, “I don’t care, do it anyway”? If so, it’s not actually a core value.
Think about what the real values of your company are. Not the stated values, the real ones. In companies where the stated and real values matched, those values would become shorthand. Someone would say “That wouldn’t be aligned to [value]” in a meeting, and it would just end the discussion. No disagreement, no argument.
Another way to think about this: if your team shares an office, where’s the thermostat set? Has everyone determined the temperature that they agree on? A new person enters, tries to change it, and somebody says, ‘Whoa, no. This is the temperature we work at.’ That’s a shared value in action. It’s not an important one, but it’s the same principle for how you approach coding or organize your work. This is a simple example of how shared values can manifest in everyday actions, from the way you dress to the way you communicate.
The Flow: Values -> Culture -> Everything Else
Your values create the basis of the culture. The culture then influences everything else:
- Processes: How work gets done, or how you account for vacation time, and expenses.
- Artifacts: Physical things like signs, swag, and how offices are decorated. At Microsoft, receiving the “Ship It” award upon shipping your product was a significant achievement. It reinforced the core value of delivering value to customers.
- Rituals: Company and team meetings, how you celebrate, or how you bring teams together.
- Beliefs: What you believe about the industry, about product development, and building successful companies.
Why Culture Matters
You’ve probably heard the quote attributed to Peter Drucker: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” I agree with the general sentiment, but I’ve seen plenty of companies with great cultures that struggled as businesses, as well as successful companies with punishing cultures. Patty McCord, former head of HR at Netflix, said it better: “Culture enables success, but it does not cause success.” A great culture helps you go faster, happier, and healthier. While an amazing culture alone won’t guarantee success, it will make things a lot harder without it.
Protecting and Reinforcing Your Culture
If you have a good culture, you need to protect it. Your culture and values must inform every process and framework that guides the company’s operations. Otherwise, you’re creating conflict within the organization between what you say and what you do. If you reward something other than the culture, the culture will shift to the behaviors and values that you reward.
Start With Your Career Ladder
I get particularly frustrated when companies adopt another company’s career ladder. You’re two different companies with two different cultures! Hopefully, that other company designed its ladder to support its values. If your values aren’t aligned with theirs (they aren’t), you’ll start promoting, hiring, and rewarding based on another company’s values.
Build your own career ladder based on your values. It’s a tremendous first artifact because it informs everything else, from how many levels you have (which affects promotion frequency) to the expectations at each level.
Hiring Is Critical
Who you hire either supports or hurts the culture you have. I don’t suggest requiring “perfect” alignment or becoming a monoculture; you need diversity of thought. However, if you have a core value of collaboration and you hire someone who prefers to work alone, dislikes collaboration, and produces good work independently, you have problems.
One: they’ll be unhappy because people keep wanting to collaborate. Two: if they stay and receive raises or promotions, it sends a strong signal that collaboration isn’t actually a core value. Three: if they end up in interview loops, they will be looking for people like them due to similarity bias, which will accentuate the problem.
Onboarding Matters
You can’t simply throw new hires into a team and expect them to pick up the culture. At Spotify, when someone joined, they would spend a sprint with all the people who joined on the same day, plus a few experienced Spotify folks: an agile coach, a development lead, and a product manager. They would build features together and ship them. They would learn why the company did things in a specific way.
Because those new joiners would end up in different parts of the organization, they’d reinforce and refresh that cultural understanding. If a team started to drift, they’d help steer it back.
This intro sprint was also an excellent opportunity to identify if someone wasn’t aligned with the company values. Better to know in the first sprint than months later.
Performance Reviews and Firing
When deciding an employee’s performance as a manager, your reference isn’t other employees; it’s the rubric, the career ladder. What are they supposed to be doing? What is the expectation at this career step? You’re comparing them against the rubric because your culture and values inform the rubric.
If you don’t use that as the yardstick, you start promoting or giving raises based on something else. People notice. I’ve heard “My friend in another team got promoted and they’re way worse than me, so why am I not getting promoted?” more times than I can count. That usually means management is not being consistent.
Can you make hiring mistakes? Absolutely. When it becomes apparent that someone isn’t aligned, even if they’re fun to be around and do adequate work, they will erode your culture. You have to make a decision. It’s better to move them along where, honestly, they’ll be happier. If you aren’t aligned with your company’s culture, it’s not a happy place for you.
Team Culture vs. Company Culture
I used to think Microsoft had a broken culture. I spent eight years there. I was happy for about one or two of those. But the problem was that I wasn’t well aligned with Microsoft’s culture. Nothing was wrong with Microsoft; I wasn’t a good fit for the company culture.
I tried to make my team work the way I wanted the company to work. I convinced my management to let me build a team and use extreme programming to deliver a feature. The project was incredibly successful. When I went back and said, “Look, it worked, can we do more?” my boss said, “You’re absolutely right, it worked better than we expected. However, no, we’re not going to do that anymore because that’s not the way the company works.”
He was right. That wasn’t who Microsoft was. I wanted to turn the company into the place I wanted to be, but that wasn’t what the company wanted.
If you’re hoping your team can change the dominant culture, good luck. It’s unlikely, especially in larger organizations. It isn’t impossible, but it’s very, very difficult.
I had a different experience at Adobe. Adobe was open to change, not fixed in its mindset. When I worked on a lean, startup-like project there and succeeded, Adobe rewarded that success rather than saying, “Wow, that was great, we’re never doing it again.” Adobe had a core value (stated or not) of being open to change. That was much in line with who I am, and I was very happy there.
When Culture Shifts
Culture isn’t fixed. It will evolve with the company and its employees, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.
Slow, Organic Change
Organic change happens naturally. Companies grow, expand into new markets, and hire new employees. Over time, the culture will change to incorporate the new shared values and new processes required to support the larger entity. That’s okay if you’ve been careful in your hiring to ensure that new hires align with the company’s core values.
If the company’s core values are genuine, they will endure as the company doubles in size, becomes public, or changes its funding models. The culture may shift slightly, but what makes the company the company — the culture — stays consistent.
Fast, Disruptive Change
Fast cultural change occurs when a company is acquired or when the board brings in a new CEO. An acquiring company may have no interest in your culture; they’re buying you for financial or business reasons. Your processes will change to align with them, you’ll inherit their career ladder (and thus their values).
Or a new CEO comes in and says, “This is crazy, we can’t run a company this way,” and starts making changes based on their values. This change is often a deliberate choice from the board to “shake up” a company, or because the board is unaligned with the company’s values.
You often see this in startups. They hire a C-level person from Meta or Amazon, and that person starts implementing things from their prior company because that’s what they know works. An Amazon person says, “We need six-page memos for all meetings because that worked well at Amazon.” It does work at Amazon. Will it always work at your company? No.
You can hire talented individuals from these companies; they have great people there. You need those who are open-minded, who understand their experience was for that environment, and who ask, “How do I take what I learned and apply it in this new context?”
When rapid cultural change occurs, you’re either going to be pleased about it or not. If you’re unhappy, complaining or fighting the change is not a good use of your time. If you’re open-minded and don’t actively hate it, try it out. You might learn new skills or approaches. But if you’re unhappy and unaligned, why are you staying?
There’s a quote from Shanley Kane: “Broken cultures break people.”
Finding a Culturally Aligned Company
If you’re looking for a new job, it’s essential to determine if a company aligns with your values. First, you have to know your own values. What’s important to you? What are your must-haves versus nice-to-haves?
Then develop questions you can ask your interviewers. Ask about what happens when the company is under pressure. What happens when revenue is short for a quarter? What happens when a product is late? If you’re in B2B, what happens when a customer is about to churn? When a company or its leadership is under pressure, that’s when its true values are revealed.
I once joined a company where the CEO told me great stories about fixing broken cultures and the great culture he wanted to build. The team was terrific and shared many of my values, as well as the stated values of the CEO. But when the startup hit a rough patch, we started violating those stated values one by one. When I said, “I’m not going to do what you’re asking because that’s not who we say we are,” and the response was, “I need you to do it anyway,” I knew it wasn’t the right place for me after all.
So, ask for examples of stressful situations and how they affected the company’s operations and processes. If the person you are speaking to can provide concrete examples of how they reacted under stress in ways that align with their stated values, that’s a sign that they are genuine core values.
Final Thoughts
I loved working at Spotify. It’s the best job I’ve ever had. Why? The stated values were the actual values. They weren’t aspirational. That’s one reason I took the risk of moving my family to another continent to work there.
My experience with Adobe was very similar. The core values and culture of both companies were incredibly aligned with my personal values. Not only did that make me a happy employee, but it also made me a successful one, as I naturally worked in a way that was aligned with my peers and management.
Am I happy at my current company? Yes, I am. Because my values align closely with the company’s actual values. Will I be happy forever? It will depend on how the culture evolves.
I hope your company’s values align with yours. If they aren’t, I hope you’re in a position to influence the culture or find a place that’s better aligned with your values. It’s worth paying attention to. It’s worth being aware of. It’s essential to consider this, especially if you’re aiming for professional growth. If the company isn’t aligned with your values, you might learn the wrong things.
To hear an extended discussion of this topic, please listen to my most recent podcast episode: https://itdependspod.com/episodes/values-culture-everything-why-company-culture-actually-matters/
Originally published at https://kevingoldsmith.substack.com/p/values-culture-everything
