How To Uncover Your Company's True Culture

How to Determine Your Company’s True Culture

I think a lot about culture. I talk a lot about culture. I write a lot about culture. But most importantly, I worry a lot about culture.

Every company has a culture: the vast majority as a function of time and institutional evolution, and a few through deliberate intent and design… and constant defense and iteration of that design.

It should come as no surprise that one of the common characteristics of successful companies is the fact that each has a distinct culture. Wildly successful companies tend to have a unique culture; many companies have tried to adopt, say, the Zappos culture or the Google culture… but in most cases those attempts fail because culture is something that can be mimicked but almost never successfully copied.

Why? When you take away the ping-pong tables and beanbag chairs and inspirational posters and funky branded t-shirts – which often serve as proxies for “culture” – the real nature of your company’s culture is displayed by your first response.

In short, the true nature of your company’s culture is determined not by what you declare. Assertions are easy to make. Mission statements are easy to create. A quick litmus test on culture is to ask: When folks on the team assert some of our values, are they putting mental “air quotes” around the value? Example: At our company

The true nature of your company – and its culture – is determined by how you instinctively react.

For example:

Your culture code says, “Quality is sacred.”

One day, Susan from your engineering team lets you know a highly anticipated product feature that is about to launch doesn’t meet your quality standard, and she's worried. If your first reaction is to say, “Later we’ll figure out what happened, and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again, but right now we need to launch,” then, I'd argue that quality is not really “sacred” (it might be important — and you really may go back and revisit the issue after the launch).

On the other hand, if your immediate reaction is: If Susan's worried, I'm worried. Lets figure out how long it's going to take to fix the problem and move the launch date. It'll be painful, but we'll get through it…” Then, chances are, quality really is sacred.

Note: I'm not advocating that either is the “better” position to have. There are arguments that can be made on either side. The point is that you need to understand your true culture and recognize that making repeated assertions of something that doesn't match the culture doesn't “fix” it. People

And someday “Quality is sacred” becomes “When in doubt, keep going, we'll figure it out.”

Your culture code says, “We treat our employees like people.”

One day you’re told an employee who never misses a day has called in sick. If your first reaction is to say, “Is she okay? Is there anything we can do?” then you’ve backed up your assertion. You care about the employee as a person… and everyone notices and starts to emulate your values.

If your first reaction is to say, “Who is going to cover for her?” then your company is process-focused. You care about operations. There’s nothing wrong with that… but it does refute your culture statement. And everyone definitely notices and starts to emulate your values.

Your culture code says, “We put customers first.”

One day, someone on your team suggests adding a simple way for customers to send you feedback and ideas. If your first reaction is to think, “That’s a great idea. If we make it easy for customers to give feedback, we'll likely get more of it — and it's hard to solve for the customer if we don't know what they want and how we're doing in terms of delighting them. Let's do it!”. Then, your actions are matching the culture you think you have. Your initial reaction is “that makes complete sense — there's no such thing as too much customer feedback”.

If your first reaction is to think, “We are already overloaded. This is just one more channel that we'll have to deal with, and it's one more way for customers to file complaints. Where will we find the time to react/respond to what customers tell us? It's just asking for trouble…” Then, chances are, you may not really think that customers should come first.

Your culture code says, “We value transparency.”

One day someone raises an issue during a meeting. You disagree completely with their position. If your first reaction is to speak up and say, “I don’t see it the same way; here’s what I think…” then you put candor – polite and professional, but candor nonetheless – ahead of politics, because you feel transparency supports smarter decisions.

If your first reaction is to stay quiet and think, “How stupid is that? That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,” and then have the proverbial meeting after the meeting (where you say all the things you thought but didn’t say at the time), then you care more about appearance and politics than about speaking the truth and facing the facts. And soon everyone starts having meetings after the meeting… and nothing great ever gets done.

Your culture code says, “We trust and empower employees.”

One day you learn that a couple of employees worked on a weird project to try and improve internal efficiency. They'd been laboring on it a couple of weeks. Turns out the idea wasn't great and just never got adoption. If your first reaction is to think, “That was a waste of time. I could have told them it was a bad idea and saved them the grief. I need to figure out a way for us to stay efficient and not go on wild-goose chases. We have enough to do as it is…” then, you don't really trust and empower employees. Trust does not mean 'I trust you to do exactly what I want…”

On the other hand, if your first reaction is to say, “Hmm. I wouldn't have thought of that idea, and I'm not surprised that it didn't work out. But, I'm worried that people are going to see this as a failure and be discouraged from trying crazy things in the future. I need to figure out a way to recognize those people and send a signal to the rest of the team that we want to be trying bold new things and failing at them every now and then…” Then, you probably do trust and empower your employees.

Culture is a set of shared beliefs, values, and practices. When you believe something, you don’t need a mission statement to remind you. When you value something, you don’t need a checklist or policy to remind you. You simply respond and in time the people around you respond the same way – and that’s how a company’s true culture is built. Having said that, it's very useful to document or manifest your culture. If nothing else, it will help identify gaps between what your true culture is and what you think it is.

Also, it's OK to start with both truth and aspiration in your culture (for an example of this, see the HubSpot Culture Code deck below). We identify the things that are true about our culture — and things that we want to be true, but we're not quite there yet).

So, figure out what kind of company you want, uncover the truth about the culture you have and work feverishly to bridge that gap.