

Good Culture, Bad Culture, or No Culture at All - LukeG

We try to spend a lot of time talking to startups and startup folks, and I've recently heard an increasing number of stories about "broken" company cultures. What experiences or resources can you share about working in a company with a great culture, a bad culture, or a lack of "culture" altogether? Books, articles &#38; posts help, but I'd also love to hear any personal experiences and insights that you're willing to share.<p>It seems that one of the most dangerous times for companies is as they transition between growth phases - from 10 to 30 people, for example, or from 50 to 100. Have you left a job because you hated what had happened to your company? Have you been in a situation where growth was extremely well managed? Seen or been a part of a cultural turnaround?<p>So: what happened, and why?
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jyothi
The transition that I went through was a team of 4 dev team + 4 leadership
folks blow up into 18 tech + 5 leadership. It was more than 400% growth and
happened in a matter of 20 days.

This was a team within a larger company but highly focused and close-knit,
pretty much like an independent start-up. The 4 ppl team had existed pretty
much from the beginning as long as 18 months and working 12-16 hrs and with a
great attitude for a game changing concept within the company known for its
culture.

When things had just started getting stable and these 4 ppl were looking for
an advancement and not really keen on a more balanced life, the leadership
decided to bring 18 more ppl into the team: few freshers and many
managers/tech folks from another team whose business had just got shut down.

Worse the initial 4 ppl were made to report to these new ppl who had not even
transitioned well into the business and team dynamics. Worse they turned out
into bad managers - micro managing or may be we felt so as we knew more than
them at that point of time.

3/4 of the initial team quit in a span of next 3 months. 50% of the new team
too felt highly uncomfortable and moved on elsewhere. A huge code base,
business knowledge and a great culture was taken down all in a span of 3-4
months. It took them many more months to get back in shape.

During my last week (the second one to quit, by now the team size too had come
down to 10 tech + 4 leadership), the top leadership involved themselves to
reason out:

\- Growth should never be sudden, it should give enough time and resources for
the team to ramp up the new member and the new member to get into the skin of
the team.

\- When people stop growing (not the growth in numbers), the organization
stops growing. This was referring to the initial 4 people being bogged down by
managers who were inserted into the ladder and who couldn't deliver. As much
as possible grow your own people first.

\- Leadership team had stopped connecting with the initial team suddenly. This
disconnect created a sense of distrust and pseudo-hatred against the
management (and kiddish enough against few of the new team members too.)
Essentially the team was not prepared mentally for this growth and leadership
did little help.

edit: added another reason

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zzzmarcus
I recently read a book called "Tribal Leadership" by Dave Logan and John King.
It talks about 5 stages of individual attitude and organizational culture,
basically:

1 - Life sucks.

2 - My life sucks (but maybe there's something better).

3 - I'm in it for me.

4 - We're in it as a group with a core set of values; there is a higher
purpose. We're great.

5 - Our values are everything. We're not fighting competition, we're fighting
for a cause.

Admittedly, this list sounds pretty straightforward, possibly even obvious,
but reading the examples in the book of the kind of thoughts people in each of
the five stages think was eerily like having my mind read.

First they convince you that they know what they're talking about when they
describe the possible cultures. Then they proceed to tell you how to elevate
yourself or your group to the next stage. They give plenty of examples along
the way, including what to do in situations of growth like you mention.

It's an excellent, well researched, book. It significantly changed the way I
look at myself and my organizations culture.

You can get the audio version for free from here:
<http://www.zappos.com/tribal.zhtml>

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Harkins
I worked at a startup with an abusive, toxic culture. Insults were used in
place of greetings, screaming was used in place of negotiation. The culture
came from straight from the CEO. The 2-3 managers (total company size
fluctuated between 12 and 60) were his old friends who he only rarely
attacked, so they imitated or let his shit roll downhill. The CEO was an
amazing salesman, though, so employees were hugely motivated for a few months
before total disillusionment.

The company grew and shrank between 12 and 60 at the impulse of the CEO and
that quarter's business model. To address your question, I wouldn't say that
growth was extremely well-managed.

I can only think of one person besides mgt who stayed longer than a year,
typical employment lasted 2-6 months. The company released a 1.0 that got
limited traction but never was able to release 1.1 because they had a terrible
codebase (due to demotivated coders) which no one could maintain (due to
everyone leaving/quitting and no docs). I know of one employee whose loved
ones staged an intervention to get them to quit, and one whose doctor ordered
them to quit.

Last I heard they performed some kind of corporate shell game to get out of
obligations to their initial investors (mostly employees) and started from
scratch for 1.1. I can't expect anything to come of it.

I've never before or since seen such an extreme in culture, but it sold me on
thinking of software as a product of the community and culture that created
it. I've been blogging a bit about that recently in relation to open source
and am consciously planning company culture of the business I'm soon starting.

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raffi
Mmm... in the military I got thrown into so many teams in real and artificial
environments. Its amazing how much culture matters. Beware, if you're the
dominant personality, the culture is going to reflect your personality. i.e.
if you're quick to look for someone to blame when something goes wrong, be
prepared to see a blame culture emerge at your company as others copy you.

Another thing that always stuck with me. Every team goes through this process
of forming, storming, norming, and finally performing.

Forming is the stage when everyone comes together. Everyone is cordial and
polite. This is the friendly but ineffective stage.

Storming is where personalities start to clash. Leadership is a social
designation and at this point personalities are vying for who will lead the
pack. Roles and responsibilities are informally sorted out at this time and
everyone is sizing each other up.

Norming is when the storming starts to settle down. The team is coming
together to get things done. Most of the important roles and informal rules of
the team are sorted out. I say roles and rules but keep in mind its often a
subconscious designation in a small org.

Performing is when the team is rocking and rolling. Everyone has a compatible
mental model of what they can expect of others and what the others expect of
them. There is no questioning of leadership... things are happening.

Bringing new people in, bringing people in fast, etc. can easily disrupt the
performing or norming stage and take you right back to storming. Be aware of
this.

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makaimc
I used to work at a major financial institution that spent $300 million/year
on IT projects. It had money to throw at every technical problem (until
recently), but ultimately many of the challenges were never solved because of
the mismatch between the finance areas and the IT organizations. Basically the
"culture" of each side of the company was completely different: technology
people didn't know finance and finance guys didn't understand the technology.

So it seems one of the biggest culture challenges is figuring out a way to
meld together people with different occupational backgrounds. If the
executives at the company knew that, they might have been able to find a way
to get each side to respect the skills of their counterparts.

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LukeG
I've heard of startups (in particular) losing everyone from key technical
architects to entire engineering teams to smart, great people in more average
roles.

The most common answer I've heard for people leaving is that they don't feel
like they're making a difference (or "being heard") anymore.

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knieveltech
When I hired on with my current company a couple of years ago it was like a
dream come true. A dev shop so small there wasn't much room for politics,
everyone in the office was really cool and very laid back, and the future was
very bright. Even the building we worked in screamed hip: our offices where on
the 2nd story of a refurbished textiles mill. Hardwood floors, track lighting,
foozball in the break room, and arty pictures on every wall. It was like
working in an art gallery or something.

Fast forward two years.After buying out a competitor and assimilating their
assets, we've moved into a new building with the standard issue craptastic
cubes and overhead florescents. Political infighting and turf wars among
management has successfully torpedoed most of the company's attempts at
innovation. Most of the cool people have bailed out of frustration, leaving a
core of moderately disgruntled old-timers and a few vanilla lifers (you know
the type).

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AndrewWarner
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, told me he sold his first company because he hated
the culture. It wasn't just about his employees hating work, HE hated going in
every day.

When he grew Zappos, he said he went out of his way to focus on its culture.
There's a lot that goes into it. He pays people to quit because he wants
everyone who comes to work to love it. He doesn't penalize his employees for
staying on the phone with customers for a long time.

His people even recommend a competitor's site when they don't have the right
size.

Does it work? Well they're doing $1 billion in sales. Plus their people love
coming to work. Ever since I published my interview with him, his people have
found a way to contact me to assure me it's all true.

He taught why/how/etc of culture on my interview on Mixergy.

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baguasquirrel
What's so special about 10 to 30 or 50 to 100 anyway? I ask because this is
actually something that has been studied.

<http://www.fldp.org/2008/11/07/group-size/>

My best guess is that organizations will go through growing pains any time the
toplevel group grows to a size that 12 people can't handle. This applies to
subgroups in an organization as well, i.e. if you're on a team that is
expanding, then it's going to be suck being the 13th person in.

By that logic, we should see growing pains at roughly magnitudes of 10 (10 is
close enough to 12 right?). Whatever, maybe not, but you get the idea.

This is a crude level of understand; I am well aware of it. But it's a place
to start, and you can get quite a bit of mileage from it.

I should note that neither of the two teams I've worked in professionally grew
beyond 12 people in a peaceable manner. In the first case, the company simply
fell apart.

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jff
In a large enough company, you get subcultures.

Working at a national lab in California, I found that my group was very
relaxed and informal. Several of us worked in a large 'Unix Room' area that
was also the group's common area. We would frequently get together there to
discuss programming problems, languages, and whatever else was of interest to
us. The managers weren't overly strict about regulations (except important
stuff) and were really good people to work with.

However, some other groups, for example the IT department, had terrible
cultures. The IT department was full of combative people who fought against
every other group tooth and nail over anything. Some groups were just
extremely anal about hours, dress code, etc.

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known
I recommend <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs>

