You Can't Copy Your Way to a Great Culture

Nine times out of ten, no one in a company knows what the company's values are.

Usually some executives did an exercise once, maybe with a consultant like me, put the words on a wall, and everyone forgot about them.

And yet, whether anyone follows the values or not, every company ends up with a culture. The only question is whether it's one you built on purpose.

This recently got brought up because a founder I've coached for years is building a new company. The first time around taught him the cost of getting culture wrong.

He spent years rebuilding it, and today, people who worked there have a reputation among recruiters as multipliers, the kind of people who make everyone around them better.

He asked me how to build the culture he wants from the very beginning.

It's a question I've spent sixteen years helping founders answer. Some cultures bring out the best in people: they do the best work of their careers, that energy spreads to everyone around them, and years later they're still measuring every workplace against it.

From my experience, the difference comes down to something most founders skip entirely.

The Step Most Founders Skip

Most founders start by asking what their culture should be. They study the companies everyone admires, borrow the values that sound good, and assemble something that was never true for them.

The founder I mentioned did exactly this at his first company. He'd look at companies he admired and think, "What are Amazon's principles? Ooh, I like that one." His team could feel it. They'd even laugh about it behind his back, not in a mean way, but saying "he wishes we were like this, but we're not."

Turns out a team can sniff out borrowed values quickly, and a hodgepodge of other people's values is what creates the cynicism around culture in the first place.

Defining your values is more a self-discovery exercise than a strategy exercise. Most people don't know themselves that well, so the most useful thing a founder can do is get clear on two questions: What's actually true for me? What do I actually value?

That clarity matters because of where culture actually gets set. The 80/20 of culture is who you let into your organization. Who you hire, who you fire, who you promote, who you compensate, who you recognize, and who gets your attention as the leader. Every one of those decisions expresses what you value, whether you've defined it or not.

Reverse Engineer Your Values

Sitting down with a blank page and asking "what do I value" rarely gets anywhere. I find all of this easiest by reverse engineering. Three questions I use with founders:

Question #1: The People Who Light You Up - Think about your favorite people you've ever worked with, the ones where you think, I get to spend time with this person today. What are the qualities in them that make you feel that way? Your values are a reflection of what gives you energy, and those people are a mirror.

Question #2: The Peaks - Draw a graph of your life and your energy level. What are the peaks? What values were you honoring in those moments?

Question #3: The Bathroom Mirror - What values would be useful to write on your bathroom mirror? Things you truly value, and might forget to live on your worst days, when the going gets tough. Values are a bridge from your best self to your everyday self.

Then Build Them Into Hiring and Reviews

Answers to those questions stay abstract until they show up in the two places culture actually gets decided. The way I've been doing this with teams recently is working backwards: instead of asking what our values are, we create these:

#1: Your Interview Questions - If you could only ask five to seven questions to figure out who someone is, what would they need to be? You're deciding what you have to filter for.

#2: A Culture-Based Review - For each value, write a behavior, and ask everyone to rate each other on it, one to five: to what degree does this person exhibit the following behaviors? Writing those lines forces a clarity that a list of words never will, because for every value you have to answer: How will you know?

There's something about working backwards that makes it real. It grounds culture in who you'll actually hire, reward, promote, and let go, and it forces you to prioritize, because the truth is you have lots of values. The question is which ones matter most.

And this is what protects you in the moments that count. Say you badly need an ML engineer, the search has been brutal, and you finally find someone great, except they've got sharp elbows and one of your values is collaboration. All these little marginal decisions are how founders undermine culture, one reasonable-sounding exception at a time.

Where This Matters Most: Your Leadership Team

A few months ago, I wrote that the single highest-leverage move for scaling a company is building a truly exceptional leadership team, one that can essentially run the company without you.

The bar I hold clients to: hire leaders you genuinely believe would do the job as well as or better than you could. When you do this, all you have to do is set the vision, create clarity around goals, and they mostly run without you.

Every hire expresses your values, and no hires express them more loudly than your leadership team. Your team watches who you put in charge, and they read it as the clearest statement of what you actually value.

Most founders know this intellectually. And the reason they don't have that team isn't that they can't attract the talent. It's that holding a genuinely high bar, and letting go of the people already on the team who don't meet it, turns out to be much harder than it sounds.

One question cuts through it, borrowed from Reed Hastings: if this person told you they were leaving, would you fight hard to keep them? Notice what your honest answer is made of. Wanting to keep someone because replacing them would be painful is a different thing from wanting to keep them because they're extraordinary and they make everyone around them better.

Your clarity about what you truly value determines the standards you're able to hold. The standards you hold determine who you let in. And who you let in determines more of your company's trajectory than almost anything else you'll do, because you're either building a team that multiplies everyone around them or managing one that needs you to push it.

I wrote a full piece on this, including why letting go is so hard and what to do with the resistance: The Single Biggest Lever for Scaling Your Company​

The Moment That Undoes All of It

Say you do this work. You get clear on what you actually value, you build it into your interview questions and your review, and you start holding a higher bar for who you let in. Imagine one of your values is taking risks. Then someone on your team takes a big one, and it doesn't work out.

You're human, so you get scared. And because you're scared, you rip into them.

In that moment, what would actually serve the culture would be to reward them for taking the big risk. Instead, everyone just learned what happens to people who live your values when it costs you something. But the thing is you weren't even lying about the values. You meant every word. When we perceive threat, we react from the reptilian part of our brain, preventing us from choosing to live out our values.

I've watched moments like this undo years of intentional culture building. It's why the presentations I give on culture these days are titled "Building Culture from the Inside Out." The structure we've covered here matters. But underneath it, there's a foundation that determines whether any of it holds when things get hard.

And if I had to choose between the two, helping a founder design their culture or working with them on that foundation, I'd choose the foundation. That's what I'll write about in the next newsletter.

Until then, the fastest way to see where your culture needs attention is a question I often ask founders:

Where are you letting fear stop you from being authentic?

Look honestly at your answer, and you'll find the exact edges where your culture is not yet a true expression of what you value.

With love,

Dave Kashen

P.S. Enrollment for the third annual Sun Valley Founders Retreat opens August 25th. Four days in January with eleven other founders, doing the deep inner work that will allow your culture and your team to be the best they can be. Those who apply early get first pick of the twelve spots. Click Here to Learn More >>