Culture is what happens when you’re not in the room

Culture is what happens when your boss isn’t in the room. Which means it’s also what your team does when you aren’t in the room.

I’ve been a part of painstaking, months long exercises to wordsmith the perfect pithy phrases for defining Company Values¹ . It’s rarely worth it.

To me, culture is all about how we treat each other, what we celebrate, and how we make difficult decisions. And, as the social animals that we are, we mirror what our leaders do.

Posters on a wall or on company t-shirts don’t create culture. Seeing how your boss reacts to bad news, or who gets promoted and who doesn’t, or what gets prioritized and funded vs what does not — all of that gets absorbed into our subconscious as company culture.

Founders create culture every minute of the day without realizing it. Everyone is watching them, to see what they care about, how they choose to spend their time, what generates positive or negative reactions. And they copy what they see² .

If you want to start having an impact on changing culture, I applaud you. I also caution you to be realistic about how much impact you can have. Culture flows down hill. If you are an exec, you may be able to influence your CEO. Maybe.

If you are a middle manager or PM of a squad, you can likely influence the culture of the people you directly work with, up until the point where those people bump into others within the company who are beyond your sphere of influence. Just realize that insurgent culture is like an organ transplant — antibodies may swarm to attack and reject the transplant.

Most importantly, exemplify the culture you believe in. Others will notice, consciously or subconsciously. Maybe it makes a difference, or maybe it makes clear that this isn’t the right place for you. Either way, you’ll be bringing your authentic self to work.

The Workshop

This is a newsletter-only section where I share a half-baked idea in hopes that y’all who are smarter than me can work it out with me.

It’s Friday so I’m gonna treat this section a bit differently today.

I don’t really know why I’m doing this newsletter.

I have this belief that, when finding Product Market Fit, a useful approach is write down your hypotheses for each of the four PMF areas — Problem, Solution, Market, GTM strategy — and use Minimum Viable Experiments to confirm or iterate those hypotheses.

Right now, I don’t really know what Problem I want to solve here and what Market I’m solving for. So I’m gonna think out loud for a bit, with apologies.

When I think back to earlier in my career, I remember being heavily influenced by a few blogs and books: Steve Blank & Eric Ries’ books on Customer Development and Lean Startups, Ben Horowitz’s posts on Good PM/Bad PM and Wartime vs Peacetime CEOs, Rands in Repose’s articles on management. And then later, Teresa Torres on Continuous Discovery, Ben Thompson on Aggregation Theory and innovation, Marty Cagan on outcomes over outputs.

So there is a part of me that wants to give back, to try and share with the people 5-10 years behind me some of the lightbulb moments that I had.

I’ve also amassed a ton of scar tissue from screwing up and reflecting on what I did wrong, and maybe there’s a desire to spare people from going through it as unequipped as I was.

With all that said, I am so grateful to the 60 of you who are receiving this newsletter today, only a week after launch. It means a lot to me and thanks for hanging in there as we figure this out.

1  Early stage founders in particular seem drawn to Values exercises. Presumably they’ve been told, or heard on a podcast, just how important culture is (“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”) and so, the magnificent entrepreneur that they are, what could be more important than to etch into stone tablets the Commandments that will be their company values. And which, of course, everyone immediately forgets and ignores.

2  The early hires who mirror this tend to become early leaders in the company. And the people they hire do the same, and so on and so on. And suddenly, you’ve got a company culture that is lived and breathed by 25-50-100 people.