(Extracted from Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook by Dan Shapiro)
Company cultures are echoes of their leadership, so if you are trying to lay the groundwork for the culture of your startup, you will need to start by showing your team what you expect.
Whatever your culture is, you need to find a way to promote it through your hiring process. Ask questions that help you understand if the interviewee is going to share the values and priorities of your company. If your business is obsessive about something like shareholder value or consumer experience, ask candidates about their priorities and see if they’re a good fit. Just be careful: “culture fit” questions can easily turn into exclusionary screens that quietly and indirectly repel diverse candidates. Asking candidates what their favorite movies are, if they like to go out drinking, or other non-work-related questions inevitably leads you to hiring candidates who look, act, and think just like you.
Keeping a strong company culture means rewarding the stewards of it and coaching or removing those people who undermine it. If you claim to have a culture of honesty and teamwork but your best salesperson hoards her sales leads and refuses to help her teammates, you don’t actually have the culture you think you do. You need to compensate and promote (or reprimand and finally fire) people based on your cultural values if you want them to stay strong.
It’s easy to think that you can set culture by speeches, morale events, policy, or even employee handbooks. But the unfortunate truth is that culture is, by definition, an emergent behavior and not one that you dictate. It’s the example you lead with; the people you hire; the way you reward people who embody your culture—and reject those who don’t.