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 & posts help, but I'd also love to hear any personal experiences and insights that you're willing to share.

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?

So: what happened, and why?

[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

[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

[pushcx]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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).

[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.

[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.

[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.

[known]

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