People underestimate the indispensable value of culture to the sustainability of an organization or their role in it — whether it’s job seekers, HR personnel or founders. That’s a grave mistake. Culture is the glue that holds the disparate people of an organization together and channels their energies and behaviors towards a shared purpose or common goal. All the OKRs and KPIs you set don’t hold much value if you don’t pay heed to the process of getting there and optimize it. And frankly there will be little fuel left in the tank to go on if you don’t truly enjoy how you and others do what you do; and if the collective environment doesn’t help you grow or shine.
My two cents on beginning to build an effective culture, a nebulous and difficult task in and of itself? Start with your customers and collaborators. What do they truly derive value from? What do they want? What will delight them? What will make them loyal to you? Once you’ve reflected on this, map your values. One way to do this, is ask yourself, if your enterprise were an individual, how would you describe him or her? How would he or she interact with his or her environment and others? What beliefs would he or she hold and why? Once you’ve deliberately mapped out your values (thought about not only what they are but also why you’ve chosen them), you are ready to pair each value with a set of behaviors that will help you realize your values. While drafting your values, think of ways to reconcile contrasts to help manage conflict in the future and drive effectual decisions. If you have too many values, you may consider prioritizing them to identify what’s truly important and help drive focused effort.
Let me paint an example. At mindU Health, a mental healthcare platform that’s in the works, we strive to produce high quality content, processes and products. While it seems obvious that quality is something all enterprises should be offering to their customers, quality will especially make or break our mission to make minds lighter and hearts brighter. Having gone through multiple routes to get information or seek help, but not finding useful answers or not seeing progress for a long period of time, many people seeking mental health support become disgruntled, tired and disillusioned. They demand quality at every juncture, to help them feel better and do better. And to deliver quality on the outside, it is paramount to deliver quality on the inside. That’s why we’ve set up supporting values and behaviors to help us deliver quality. Some measures include a mandatory peer review process (this also invites diversity of perspectives, which leads to better solutions), a hard-nosed recruiting process and iterative testing.
Once you’ve mapped out your values and the key behaviors that support them, it’s important to continually check how you are doing compared to what you’ve promised to do. There are multiple ways to perform a continuous audit. If you are a founder or CEO, have key personnel report to you and get a sense of how people are interacting with other people; what steps and criteria are being used to make decisions; and what’s getting in their way to do great things. Just as it’s important for you to actively listen to the realities around you, it’s equally important for you to find ways to invite criticism. Because when you are leading a company, people often don’t tell you what they don’t like about working there — or at least until it’s too late. An obvious way to do this is to reflect on how you can do things better and what your mistakes and learnings are, and share it with others. The point is to normalize inviting criticism, delivered respectfully.
Finally, it’s important to acknowledge that just like a resume, an enterprise’s culture is a continuous work in progress. You should directionally know where you are headed, but be open to continuous change and experimentation along the way. Seek edits from others and make clearer, what you are trying to achieve, how you will try to achieve it, and the results or benefits of doing so. Trust me, it’s worth it.
