Why Building Culture Leads To Results

There are many myths about what culture is and why it’s important. But having the right culture is an essential part of building a great business. I contacted a few top entrepreneurs to get their take on the right ways to think about culture and to build it.

What is culture?

While almost every company characterizes its culture differently, there is one definition that works almost everywhere. Think of culture as your values in action. It’s a guidepost for how you want your employees to act.

“If values are how we act and take decisions, then culture is the environment that we create to reinforce those values,” Rahul Vohra, Co-Founder and CEO of Superhuman, the email client and productivity app that aims to provide a faster, easier email experience.

Why is it important?

Many founders don’t think about culture initially. In fact, when you talk to serial entrepreneurs, culture is something they think a lot more about in their companies later because they’ve realized its importance. That was certainly true for Vohra.

“At my last company, Reportive, we didn’t really think too hard about our values., Bbut at Superhuman, values are something that we’ve taken incredibly seriously,” he said. “At Superhuman, we want to create a generational organization that’ll be here for hundreds of years to come, hopefully. And in order to have that work, you really do need to define your values and what it is you’re all about.”

Tom Griffiths, Co-Founder and CEO of Hone, leader in deploying live learning at scale, and formerly the Co-Founder of FanDuel, had the same experience. “What I learned from FanDuel was that we tried to codify culture way too late,” he said. “I was determined to bake culture into Hone from the start and be really intentional and explicit about how we’re building the culture and the values.”

How to build culture

There are plenty of tools and processes to guide you in building your culture. But they all come down to the same starting point: be intentional.

“We had everybody answer a survey,” said Mary-Catherine Lader, COO of Uniswap, a decentralized cryptocurrency exchange company. “What does Uniswap stand for to you? What are the values we should look for in people we hire?”

Vohra followed the guidelines laid out in The Advantage, a book by Patrick Lencioni. He said they had their discussions with their leadership team first before they brought the topic to the rest of the company.

He also emphasized the need to take a few tries. “I think that most companies take a few iterations to get their values right,” he said.

Make sure it’s unique

One of the most common mistakes companies make is that they fill in generic words and thoughts to articulate their culture. This doesn’t help your employees know what to do, and it certainly won’t help your company build a competitive advantage.

Building a distinctive culture helps you do the right work and helps you attract the right employees. “Our company culture prioritizes remarkable quality,” Vohra said. “That’s fairly unique, and it’s a lot of the reason why folks want to come and work at Superhuman.”

Griffiths emphasized the importance of being memorable. “I wanted to optimize for memorability. If you can get 80% of the sentiment of the culture, but a hundred percent of the team remembering it, that’s better than having just a few people getting a hundred percent of the sentiment.”

Determine what it’s not

One way to make sure your culture is really your culture – and not some knock-off of someone else’s culture – is to identify what it’s not.

At Uniswap, Lader said they asked their team to include in their survey what they didn’t want in the culture. “We asked them about their anti-values,” she said. “it’s easier to react to a prior company culture you worked in. It’s easier to define what you don’t want.”

Vohra’s team at Superhuman discussed past team members who weren’t a good fit. “You have to ask the tough questions. What exactly was it that made those folks difficult to work with? What are the problematic traits?”

Hire for values

“We had a time in our past when our hiring values were not explicit,” Vohra said. That caused a drift in the kind of person that we hired. It took a while to diagnose what had happened, but when we did, we realized it was because we hadn’t written those values down and we weren’t screening against them properly.”

Kim Scott, best-selling author of Radical Candor and her new book Radical Respect, emphasizes the importance of making sure that new hires extend the culture. “Looking for ‘culture fit’ is like saying, ‘We want more of the same because we are afraid of rocking the boat,’” she says. “Looking for ‘culture add’ is more like saying ‘we want a new perspective that will help us innovate.’”

Building culture is a constant process that never ends. Great leaders recognize that and make sure they always keep an eye on culture to make sure it’s serving the company.