sunk thought’s - the playbook

“the playbook” is a mini-book delivered in 8 posts (the forward and seven chapters.) The energizer factory uses us to energize the people who energize the batteries that energize the energizer bunny! (This is not actually true.)

Codifying Your Culture

…and Running it in Production

Rules Versus Culture

Rules exist to concisely indicate the way we want people to behave. Except, rules don’t always cover all the use cases one encounters in the real world.

My apartment has a locked outside gate with a sign on it, “Keep Gate Closed At ALL Times.” Forget that I must break this rule daily to leave, what else might come up? What if I’m moving large things in? Well, on the other side of the gate (and it’s sign) is a latch which keeps the gate open for such cases. So, you’ve provided me with a rule, and also an implement with which to break this rule indefinitely.

Why? Because what you really intend is that I close it when not in use. The latch is an expression of culture, the sign is a rule. Culture allows us to interpret rules and expand their usefulness in the wild.

What is Culture?

Your organization’s culture is measurable. It is reflected in how your human actors behave when no one is looking, or when no one is available to tell them what to do. It’s your Human Operating Structure’s (the social structure that your organization executes upon) core.

As organizations grow so does complexity. This complexity then requires more rules and process. This slows you down. You inhibit creativity and innovation. Your metrics will begin to slow down. The stronger your vision and culture, the less you need to “manage” employees. You’ll “build alignment” along how you evaluate decisions, and allow your people to use their expertise to solve business problems for you. Your process requirements become lighter, your teams move faster, and innovation is fostered.

Your culture exists whether you codify it or not, and it bleeds out into the world where you least expect it. You will find it epitomized in your most trivial product details.

Spotting Organizational Culture

What if I told you that you could see a company’s culture by the way they did something as trivial as implement emoji (pictographs for text messages) on their devices?

The more trivial a project is, the less outside attention (and interference up the chain) it attracts. Because of this, trivial offerings like emoji are where you’ll see your company’s culture bubble into the wild. Let’s try it out, shall we?

:tomato: (U+1F345)

Emoji Specification: “A plump, red garden tomato topped with a leafy green stem. May resemble the red apple at small sizes.”

On the following images I have scaled the emoji :tomato: images up in order to expose image rastering, etc - an implementation detail companies deal with alongside the design-centric critique of their tomato implementations.

What do you think?

Do these emoji not fit with what we already know about these four companies?

What Kind of Organization Are You?

To steer your culture you must codify it and evangelize it. But, to do that, you first have to know what kind of company you are and what kind of company you want to become.

First, it makes a lot of sense to start with your founding leadership as a guide. In the Relationships of Trust chapter we talked a little about the two leadership theories. What they believe about people and work becomes vital to defining your cultural style. Identify what excited these founders about both what your company does and why it does what it does. How did they envision the company when they began?

Next ask, how does your leadership make business decisions? What are the litmuses used, what is valued above what when weighing these decisions.

Third, you will want to look at your organization's top performers. The folks who are constantly getting promoted, who have become inter-office memes, the people that, when missing, people on their teams notice.

Ask, what are the things these folks are doing well, how they do them, and why they are doing it? Now you’re beginning to get more data around what your organization actually values in practice.

As you plot out this information a picture of who you are begins to emerge. Now we’re getting somewhere!

Understanding and Communicating Your Culture

If you haven’t read the famed Netflix Culture Deck, you really should. Theirs is a prime example of a well defined culture, and they have used it to streamline operations.

Gibson Biddle was a VP of Product at Netflix who worked over the course of four years to help define Netflix’s culture in order to make their team more in tune, transparent, and effective. He has several pieces of advice around how to define your own company’s culture:

Identify who owns the defining of your culture.
Look at your top performers in every area and map their behaviors which you’d like to scale.
Ask yourselves why you do things and how you can do them better. (Define tests, measure, and iterate.)
Don’t copy another company. Your own values and processes will vary based on your size and beliefs.
What is unique to your company and its culture?
What are the potential magnets and repellants you should use in identifying job candidates?
Edit it as it needs to be changed. Seek internal feedback, and articulate those changes to all.
Try cases: “What would you do if ...?”
Make this culture central to your hire, fire, and promote questions.
Evangelize regularly and reinforce these values.

“Live your culture! This is supposed to be the antidote to process and rules. Have fun with it,” Gibson suggested.

Create a Culture Document

At my company we decided to begin codifying our culture early on because we were a remote organization. We knew evangelizing culture would be difficult because of this. I felt that we needed some form of organizational guidebook to help the spread of our values and processes for operating day to day to facilitate things.

This is also how it fell on me of the two founders to go through the process. Scratch your own itch, Wil!

We founders were also our first end-to-end design, development, and deployment team. So, there was little barrier at this point in time between us and our top performers - we were them! However, starting early also meant we needed to revisit it often as we grew to make sure it reflected the things we learned together as the company grew along the way.

This is how I structured our culture document:

Introduction - this communicated both what we do as a company but more importantly why we do it. I told this story in the context of where the founders came from professionally and what we believe.
Manifesto - articles of cultural values, contextualized to the point of view of an employee.
Recommended Reading - Articles and books that reenforce parts one and two. In our case they were the writings that the founders had in common when conceptualizing the company we wanted to create.
Team Norms - the basic rules and processes for doing your job day to day.
Project Guide - How we organize project teams, how to lead a team, and how to participate within a team.

With this framework, we had codified a human operating structure. We were able to plug people into our structure quickly, no matter where they lived or their job title. Just one way of doing things, but we found it effective.

Running Your Culture in Production

To make this operating structure to work you have to live your culture. It’s important to be aspirational in your cultural ideals, but you must then “run your culture in production” in all your decision making processes. It is code, if you cannot operate within it, you must rewrite it.

You will be challenged by this at some point. This will create future “trolley problems” for you to overcome.

Meeting the Challenge

When running my own bootstrapped company we had to work hard to compete for the best talent. Stealing high level engineers from Google and the like required us to find means beyond salary and equity to compete. Being fully remote 8 years before the pandemic helped, it was a novel perk for an engineer at the time. Also, being principled helped, folks liked working somewhere that was thoughtful and wanted to create an equitable work environment.

One such thing we did was not negotiate on salary. We could get away with this because we had a clear, merit-based, structure of bonuses. These were either received for billing lots of hours or for leading a project whose client renewed their contract with us. Those bonuses were then added to their base salary the next year, and so, as they proved their value their compensation would match.

Additionally, by playing to everyone’s sense of fairness, equipped with the above manner of matching one’s value with pay, folks were often willing to take less money to work with us than they could get elsewhere.

Fork in the Road

This all came to a head when we were several years into running the company. Billings were down, and our budget was razor thin. The partners were already bypassing payouts, we were barely going to make payroll, and we had someone who had earned a bonus/promotion. This person totally deserved it, they had been with us since they were an intern and now they were eligible to become a Sr. Engineer. It was a proud moment.

The problem was, there was no money to do so.

The idea was presented, “What if we just don’t give him the promotion?”

My response was immediate, “So, we have this pay policy that folks go along with because it makes things fair in a world where females and minorities tend to not negotiate as much in salary discussions, and the first person we’re going to screw over is going to be the only black member of our team?”

Obviously we couldn’t do that. It was against the culture we had built.

How far was I willing to go to ensure we lived our culture? I laid off my own brother, another Sr Engineer who had worked with us since he was an intern.

We had reached a fork in the road, but we had not forked our cultural code.

So, that’s my basic introduction to codifying your culture and running that code in the real world.

What’s next for your culture is “Talent Management” (the topic of part 3, up next.) This is how you use your culture as a means of attracting, growing, and retaining the best talent for your company.

the playbook part 2: codify your culture