(Extracted from Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook by Dan Shapiro)
Most companies boast of their “company culture” thinking that it’s the thing that makes their company wonderful. It’s not. Most companies run on “the default settings” most of the time, and as a result, look pretty much interchangeable. It’s the changes from those defaults, for better or for worse, that truly define your culture. Your company culture isn’t what makes you great–it’s what makes you different. Hire the best, teamwork, ethics… these are all platitudes. Real company cultures are made of four things:
- Polarizing decisions
- Excesses
- Quirks
- Dysfunctions
Polarizing Decisions: Many decisions in companies are delicate balancing acts between two desirable but opposing goals. The default setting for most companies is to strive for balance. But company cultures are defined when a company puts its thumb on the scale—choosing one at the expense of the other.
… Typically, four weeks of vacation is considered generous. Although they were fully aware of the financial impact of the decision, they decided that everyone got twelve. They don’t strive for balance between work and life, at least by any conventional measure; they give life the upper hand.
Excesses are a cultural component that comes from taking a good thing as far as it can possibly go. Unlike polarizing decisions, where there’s a tension between two ideals and one is sacrificed to fully embrace the other, excesses are about taking universal company virtues to their logical extreme.
… Other companies take the excess of transparency further: Buffer, the social sharing app, has published its salaries on its hotseatbook.com/buffersalaries.
Quirks are the smallest and simplest forms of company culture. While often mistaken for the entirety of company culture, they’re usually the smallest component. Quirks aren’t policy (“casual Fridays”); they’re traditions that emerge organically (“Dress Like Raymond Day”).
… dysfunction is the mirror image of an excess—it’s not having enough of something that’s important. Of course every company has problems, and most of the problems are present to some degree everywhere. Those aren’t dysfunctions. A dysfunction becomes culture when it’s distinctive and impactful—much like a positive culture trait. Typical dysfunctions include management and employee antipathy, lack of ethics, and disregard for customers. You know them when you see them. They creep in over the years, and left unchecked, they can sabotage a company. But here’s the scary thing about dysfunctions: they are usually the direct result of something you love about your company culture. Rewarding individual initiative and achievement can lead a company to backstabbing and rumormongering. Generous benefits and an employee-first culture can create lax attendance, a sense of entitlement, and carelessness about the bottom line. Rigorous and selective hiring processes can lead to elitism and arrogance that leaks into the company’s interactions with customers and partners.