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What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

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What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

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Revel in being discarded, or having all your energies exhausted in vain; only those who have endured hardship will be of use. Samurai who have never erred before will never have what it takes. —Hagakure

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.

Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture. Meanwhile, as business conditions shift and your strategy evolves, you have to keep changing your culture accordingly. The target is always moving.

“Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.” This created a new culture, a culture of empowerment: everyone was in charge and Noyce was there to help.

He believed that in a business driven by research and products, the engineers would behave more like owners if they actually owned the company.

Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

The problem is that obviously good ideas are not truly innovative, and truly innovative ideas often look like very bad ideas when they’re introduced.

A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively.

The samurai called their principles “virtues” rather than “values”; virtues are what you do, while values are merely what you believe.

Companies—just like gangs, armies, and nations—are large organizations that rise or fall because of the daily microbehaviors of the human beings that compose them.

a desirable product can overcome a miserable environment, at least for a while.

To get them to be who you want, you will first need to see them for who they are.

Culture only works if the leader visibly participates in and vocally champions

Culture isn’t a magical set of rules that makes everyone behave the way you’d like. It’s a system of behaviors that you hope most people will follow, most of the time.

As a final word of discouragement: a great culture does not get you a great company. If your product isn’t superior or the market doesn’t want it, your company will fail no matter how good its culture is. Culture is to a company as nutrition and training are to an aspiring professional athlete. If the athlete is talented enough, he’ll succeed despite relatively poor nutrition and a below-average training regimen. If he lacks talent, perfect nutrition and relentless training will not qualify him for the Olympics. But great nutrition and training make every athlete better.

A culture’s strengths may also be its weaknesses. And sometimes you have to break a core principle of your culture to survive. Culture is crucial, but if the company fails because you insist on cultural purity, you’re doing it wrong.

Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. It’s what you do. What you do is who you are.

Blood of a slave, heart of a king. —Nas

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

Building a great culture means adapting it to circumstances. And that often means bringing in outside leadership from the culture you need to penetrate or master.

No culture can flourish without the enthusiastic participation of its leader. No matter how well designed, carefully programmed, and insistently enforced your cultural elements are, inconsistent or hypocritical behavior by the person in charge will blow the whole thing up.

For a culture to stick, it must reflect the leader’s actual values, not just those he thinks sound inspiring. Because a leader creates culture chiefly by his actions—by example.

The trouble with implementing integrity is that it is an abstract, long-term concept. Will integrity get you an extra deal this quarter? Unlikely. In fact, it may do the opposite. Will it make your product ship a week early? No chance. So why do we care about it?

Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments. Their purpose is not to make the quarter, beat a competitor, or attract a new employee. Their purpose is to create a better place to work and to make the company a better one to do business with in the long run. This value does not come for free. In the short run it may cost you deals, people, and investors, which is why most companies cannot bring themselves to actually, really, enforce it. But as we’ll see, the failure to enforce good conduct often brings modern companies to their knees.

Often CEOs will be exceptionally explicit about goals such as shipping products, but silent on matters such as obeying the law. This can be fatal. It’s because integrity is often at odds with other goals that it must be clearly and specifically inserted into the culture. If a company expects its people to behave ethically without giving them detailed instructions on what that behavior looks like and how to pursue it, the company will fall far short no matter whom it hires.

Louverture’s optimistic view of human potential blinded him to certain home truths.

I’m a murderer, ngg, but I don’t promote violence. —Gucci Mane

Jobs explained: “We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.”

Here are the rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years: It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture. It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “Are you serious?” Its cultural impact must be straightforward. The answer to the “Why?” must clearly explain the cultural concept. People must encounter the rule almost daily. If your incredibly memorable rule applies only to situations people face once a year, it’s irrelevant.

“Cultures are shaped more by the invisible than the visible. They are willed.”

He believed that you were either selling or being sold: if you weren’t selling a customer on your product then the customer was selling you on why she wasn’t going to buy

To sell, you had have 1) the competence—expert knowledge of the product you were selling and the process to demonstrate it (qualifying the buyer by validating their need and budget; helping define what their buying criteria are while setting traps for the competition; getting sign-off from the technical and the economic buyer at the customer, and so forth) so that you could have 2) the confidence to state your point of view, which would give you 3) the courage to have 4) the conviction not to be sold by the customer on why she wasn’t going to buy your product. Cranney was obsessed with training every salesperson, testing them, and holding them accountable on the four C’s.

If you bring in outside leadership, it will make everyone highly uncomfortable. That’s what cultural change feels like.

The walk almost always wins. That’s how culture works.

When you inevitably take an action that’s inconsistent with your culture, the best fix is to admit it, then move to overcorrect the error. The admission and the self-correction have to be public enough and vehement enough to erase the earlier decision and become the new lesson.

the point is that when you are a leader, even your accidental actions set the culture.

But I had to hurt the culture—to stop walking my own talk, for a time—to save the company.

That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision—it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time. No one person makes or takes all these actions. Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.

What you measure is what you value.

It’s impossible to design a bug-free culture. But it’s vital to understand that the most dangerous bugs are the ones that cause ethical breaches.

When it comes to ethics, you have to explain the “why.”

It’s also critical that leaders emphasize the “why” behind their values every chance they get, because the “why” is what gets remembered. The “what” is just another item in a giant stack of things you are supposed to do.

If you remember one thing, remember that ethics are about hard choices. Do you tell a little white lie to investors or do you lay off a third of the company? Do you get publicly embarrassed by a competitor or do you deceive a customer? Do you deny someone a raise that they need or do you make your company a little less fair? No matter how difficult such questions seem, your task will never be as challenging as implanting ethics in a slave army during a war.

The shit I kick, ripping through the vest Biggie Smalls passing any test I’m ready to die. —Notorious B.I.G.

A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody. The reason so many efforts to establish “corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions. Culturally, what you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.

“The extent of one’s courage or cowardice cannot be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.”

If you realize that the life that is here today is not certain on the morrow, then when you take your orders from your employer, and when you look in on your parents, you will have the sense that this may be the last time—so you cannot fail to become truly attentive to your employer and your parents.

If you face death in that way, loyalty and familial duty to your employer and parents will be neglected, and your professional warriorhood will wind up defective. This will never do. The idea is to take care of your public and private duties day and night, and then whenever you have free time when your mind is unoccupied, you think of death, bringing it to mind attentively.

The biggest threat to your company’s culture is a time of crisis, a period when you’re getting crushed by the competition or are nearing bankruptcy. How do you focus on the task at hand if you might be killed at any moment? The answer: they can’t kill you if you’re already dead. If you’ve already accepted the worst possible outcome, you have nothing to lose.

Begin each day pondering death as its climax. Each morning, with a calm mind, conjure images in your head of your last moments. See yourself being pierced by bow and arrow, gun, sword, or spear, or being swept away by a giant wave, vaulting into a fiery inferno, taking a lightning strike, being shaken to death in a great earthquake, falling hundreds of feet from a high cliff top, succumbing to a terminal illness, or just dropping dead unexpectedly. Every morning, be sure to meditate yourself into a trance of death.

Meditating on your company’s downfall will enable you to build your culture the right way. Imagine you’ve gone bankrupt. Were you a great place to work? What was it like to do business with you? Did your encounters with people leave them better off or worse off? Did the quality of your products make you proud?

Bill Campbell, used to say, “We are doing it for each other. How much do you care about the people you’re working with? Do you want to let them down?”

“Sincerity is the end and the beginning of all things; without Sincerity there would be nothing.”

Any time you decide one group is inherently good or bad regardless of their behavior, you program dishonesty into your organization.

Stories and sayings define cultures.

Culture is weird like that. Because it’s a consequence of actions rather than beliefs, it almost never ends up exactly as you intend it. This is why it’s not a “set it and forget it” endeavor. You must constantly examine and reshape your culture or it won’t be your culture at

That’s the power of culture. If you want to change who you are, you have to change the culture you’re in. Fortunately for the world he did. What he did is who he is.

Culture is an abstract set of principles that lives—or dies—by the concrete decisions the people in your organization make. As a leader, this gap between theory and practice poses huge challenges.

Your own perspective on the culture is not that relevant. Your view or your executive team’s view of your culture is rarely what your employees experience. What Shaka Senghor experienced on his first day out of quarantine transformed him. The relevant question is, What must employees do to survive and succeed in your organization? What behaviors get them included in, or excluded from, the power base? What gets them ahead?

Embedding cultural elements you don’t subscribe to will eventually cause a cultural collapse.

To change a culture, you can’t just give lip service to what you want. Your people must feel the urgency of it.

Because they had no system of their own to impose upon their subjects, they were willing to adopt and combine systems from everywhere. Without deep cultural preferences in these areas, the Mongols implemented pragmatic rather than ideological solutions. They searched for what worked best; and when they found it, they spread it to other countries.

Don’t see me as a bastard or a black bone. See me as a first-class citizen and I will help you conquer the world.

If the key to effective inclusion is seeing people for who they are, then how do we make sure that we really see them?

He was deeply involved in the strategy and implementation, down to having his own mother adopt children from a conquered tribe to symbolize the integration process. He started with the job description he needed to fill, be it cavalry, doctors, scholars, or engineers, and then went after the talent to fill it. He did not assume that every person with a particular background could do the job that people with similar backgrounds had done—that all Chinese officials would make great administrators. Not only did he make sure that conquered people were treated equally, but through adoption and intermarriage, he made them kin. They weren’t brought into the empire under some separate but supposedly equal side program. As a result, they felt truly equal—and became more loyal to him and to the Mongols than to their original clans.

Good intentions, pursued without meticulous forethought and follow-through, often lead to catastrophe.

People who come from different backgrounds and cultures bring different skills, different communication styles, and different mores to the organization.

Whereas if everyone is hired on the same criteria, then the culture will see people for who they are and what they uniquely bring to the table.

I don’t want you to be me, you should just be you. —Chance the Rapper

The first step in getting the culture you want is knowing what you want.

Whether your company is a startup or a hundred years old, designing your culture is always relevant. Cultures, like the organizations that create them, must evolve to meet new challenges.

All cultures are aspirational. I have worked with thousands of companies and none of them ever achieved total cultural compliance or harmony. In a company of any significant size there will always be violations. The point is not to be perfect, just better than you were yesterday.

While you can draw inspiration from other cultures, don’t try to adapt another organization’s ways. For your culture to be vibrant and sustainable, it must come from the blood, from the soul.

If you aren’t yourself, even you won’t follow you.

If you follow the first rule of leadership, not everybody will like you. But trying to get everybody to like you makes things even worse.

There are parts of any CEO’s personality that he doesn’t actually want in the company. Think carefully about what your flaws are, because you don’t want to program them into your culture—or else leading by example will bite you in the ass.

It is much easier to walk the talk when the talk is your natural chatter.

A company’s culture needs to reflect the leader’s sensibilities. No matter how much you want a learning environment or a frugal company or a place where everyone works late, you will not get one unless that is what you instinctively do yourself. If the expressed culture goes one way but you walk in the opposite direction, the company will follow you, not your so-called culture.

The management consultant Peter Drucker famously said: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

But the truth is that culture and strategy do not compete. Neither eats the other. Indeed, for either to be effective, they must cohere.

Pick the virtues that will help your company accomplish its mission.

Great engineers love to build things and often code on side projects as a hobby. So creating a comfortable environment that encourages round-the-clock programming is vital. Hallmarks of engineering cultures often include casual dress, late morning arrival times, and late or very late evening departure times.

Great sales cultures are competitive, aggressive, and highly compensated—but only for results.

While every company needs core common cultural elements, trying to make all aspects of your culture identical across functions means weakening some functions in favor of others.

virtues must be based on actions rather than beliefs.

Making your hiring profile a big part of how you define your culture makes enormous sense—because who you hire determines your culture more than anything else.

A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?”

in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.”

The questions employees everywhere ask themselves all the time are “Will what I do make a difference? Will it matter? Will it move the company forward? Will anybody notice?” A huge part of management’s job is to make sure the answer to all those questions is “Yes!”

The most important element of any corporate culture is that people care. They care about the quality of their work, they care about the mission, they care about being good citizens, they care about the company winning. So a gigantic portion of your cultural success will be determined by what gets rewarded at your company.

Every time an employee works hard to make a change or to propose a new idea only to be met with bureaucracy, indecision, or apathy, the culture suffers. Every time an employee is recognized or rewarded for pushing the company forward, the culture strengthens.

If your organization can’t make decisions, can’t approve initiatives quickly, or has voids where leadership should be, it doesn’t matter how many great people you hire or how much work you spend defining your culture. Your culture will be defined by indifference, because that’s what you’re rewarding.

Some ways of thinking about a virtue’s effectiveness: Is your virtue actionable? According to bushido, a culture is not a set of beliefs, but a set of actions. What actions do your cultural virtues translate to? Can you turn empathy, for instance, into an action? If so, it may work as a virtue. If not, best to design your culture with a different virtue. Does your virtue distinguish your culture? Not every virtue will be unique to your company, but if every other business in your field does the same thing, there is probably no need to emphasize it. If you’re a Silicon Valley company, there is no need to make casual dress a virtue, because that’s the default behavior. But if you’re a technology company and you want everyone to wear a suit and tie, that will define your culture. If you are tested on this virtue, will you pass the test?

Your employees will test you on your cultural virtues, either accidentally or on purpose, so before you put one into your company, ask yourself, “Am I willing to pass the test on this?”

You’re quite hostile, I’ve got a right to be hostile, my people been persecuted. —Public Enemy

If the actions aren’t working, it’s time to get some new ones.

Determining that your culture is broken is hard. It would be great if you could trust your employees to tell you. But a) they’d need the courage to do that, and b) the person complaining would have to be a good cultural fit themselves or the complaint might actually be a compliment (your culture is working and therefore the complainer, who can’t get with the program, doesn’t like it), and c) most complaints about culture are too abstract to be useful.

The wrong people are quitting too often.

You’re failing at your top priorities.

An employee does something that truly shocks you.

If somebody behaves in a way you can’t believe, remember that your culture somehow made that acceptable.

An object lesson, by contrast, is a dramatic warning you put into effect after something bad has happened and you need to correct it in a way that will reset the culture and make sure the bad thing never happens again.

you should fire not only the salesperson, but the entire chain of command he reports to. Though managers in sales understand that they’re legally responsible for their subordinates’ actions, the mass firing will still be wildly unfair to at least some of them. Yet in this situation a CEO must take a Confucian approach, as the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. The object lesson will be universally understood: at this company, we never do anything illegal.

If a salesperson merely tells a customer that a feature is coming when it isn’t, but he doesn’t bind the company to the feature’s arrival, then you should reprimand or perhaps fire him, but it won’t be necessary to remove the entire hierarchy above him.

Why would a smart person try to destroy the company he works for? He is disempowered. He feels he can’t access the people in charge, so complaining is his only way to get the truth out. He is fundamentally a rebel. Sometimes these people actually make better CEOs than employees. He is immature and naive. He cannot comprehend that the people running the company do not know every minute detail of its operations. He therefore believes they are complicit in everything that’s broken.

The cultural problem is that if a team is counting on the flake, and she’s allowed to flake without explanation, then everyone else on the team believes that he should be able to flake, too.

Note that this dynamic only occurs if the jerk in question is brilliant. Otherwise, nobody will care when he attacks them. The bite only has impact if it comes from a big dog. If one of your big dogs destroys communication on your staff, you need to send him to the pound.

There are three keys to managing PORs: Don’t give feedback on their behaviors, give feedback on their behaviors’ counterproductive effect.

Recognize that you can’t fix a POR.

Focus your coaching on what the POR can do.

you are saying that regardless of performance, you will not tolerate much deviance.

This raises the deeper-level question of what kind of culture you want. Are you a zero-exception place, or one that tolerates diversity and idiosyncrasy?

a great Prophet of Rage can be the most powerful force…

The decisions you make influence your culture as much as anything. But the process you use to make those decisions also…

There are essentially three high-level decision-making styles: My way or the highway. This leader says, “I don’t care what you all think, we’re doing it my way. If you don’t like it, the door is right behind you.” This is maximally efficient as the decision-making process requires no discussion at all. Everyone has a say. This leader favors a democratic process. If he could call for a formal vote on every decision, he would. Decisions take a long time to get made, but everybody is guaranteed a say. Everyone has input, then I decide. This leader seeks a balance between getting the right information and using all…

In business, the third style tends to work best. My way or the highway disempowers everyone beneath the CEO and creates severe bottlenecks at the top. Everyone has a say, ironically, drives everyone completely…

CEOs are judged on the efficiency of their process and the acuity of their decisions, and Everyone has input, then I decide tends to balance informed decision making with speed. It also acknowledges that not everyone in the organization has enough information to make a given decision, so someone has…

The most common cultural breakdown occurs after the decision has been made. Suppose you decide to cancel a software project. Suppose further that it was primarily a financial decision and the project’s manager disagreed. Now the manager has to inform the team. The team, frustrated that all their hard work is being thrown away, will be generally pissed. The natural thing for the manager to…

This is absolutely toxic to the culture. Everyone on the team will feel marginalized because they work for someone who’s powerless. This makes them one level less than powerless. They have just been demoted from the bottom of the totem pole to the ground beneath it. The strong-willed among them will make their displeasure known throughout the company, causing other employees to question the leadership team and…

So it’s critical to a healthy culture that whatever your decision-making process, you insist on a strict…

If you are a manager, at any level, you have a fundamental responsibility to support every decision that gets made. You can disagree in the meeting, but afterward you must not only support the final decision, you must be able to…

In the speed-versus-accuracy calibration, the cultural question of empowerment plays an important role. How far down the org chart can a decision get made? Do you trust lower-level employees to decide important matters, and do they have enough information to do so with accuracy? If employees have a real say in the business, they will be far more engaged and productive. It’s also often the case that sending the question up the hierarchy not only slows things down but results in a less accurate decision.

It can break communication across product groups.

It can break communication between divisions.

You can lose input from your very best minds.

Peacetime CEO knows that proper protocol leads to winning. Wartime CEO violates protocol in order to win. Peacetime CEO focuses on the big picture and empowers her people to make detailed decisions. Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive. Peacetime CEO builds scalable, high-volume recruiting machines. Wartime CEO does that, but also builds HR organizations that can execute layoffs. Peacetime CEO spends time defining the culture. Wartime CEO lets the war define the culture. Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six. Peacetime CEO knows what to do with a big advantage. Wartime CEO is paranoid. Peacetime CEO strives not to use profanity. Wartime CEO sometimes uses profanity purposefully. Peacetime CEO thinks of the competition as other ships in a big ocean that may never engage. Wartime CEO thinks the competition is sneaking into her house and trying to kidnap her children. Peacetime CEO aims to expand the market. Wartime CEO aims to win the market. Peacetime CEO strives to tolerate deviations from the plan when coupled with effort and creativity. Wartime CEO is completely intolerant. Peacetime CEO does not raise her voice. Wartime CEO rarely speaks in a normal tone. Peacetime CEO works to minimize conflict. Wartime CEO heightens the contradictions. Peacetime CEO strives for broad-based buy-in. Wartime CEO neither indulges consensus-building nor tolerates disagreements. Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand. Peacetime CEO trains her employees to ensure satisfaction and career development. Wartime CEO trains her employees so they don’t get their ass shot off in the battle. Peacetime CEO has rules like “We’re going to exit all businesses where we’re not number 1 or 2.” Wartime CEO often has no businesses that are number 1 or 2 and therefore does not have the luxury of following that rule.

The truth about telling the truth is that it doesn’t come easy. It’s not natural. What’s natural is telling people what they want to hear. That makes everybody feel good … at least for the moment.

Trust derives from candor, and your company will fall apart if your employees don’t trust you. The trick—and it’s tricky—is to tell the truth without thereby destroying the company.

There are three keys to assigning meaning: State the facts clearly . “We have to lay off thirty people because we came in four million dollars short of projections”—or whatever the case may be. Don’t pretend that you needed to clean up performance issues or that the company is better off without the people you so painstakingly hired. It is what it is and it’s important that everyone knows that you know that. If your leadership caused or contributed to the setbacks that necessitated the layoff, cop to that. What was the thinking that led you to expand the company faster than you should have? What did you learn that will prevent you from making that mistake again? Explain why taking the action you’re taking is essential to the larger mission and how important that mission is. A layoff, done properly, is a new lease on life for the company. It’s a hard but necessary step that will enable you to fulfill the prime directive, the mission that everyone signed up for: eventual success. It’s your job to make sure that the company didn’t lay off those people for no ultimate purpose—something good needs to come of it.

event, he gave meaning to the country itself. As you think about bad news and how you might fear your people finding out and freaking out, remember Gettysburg. Be it a deal gone bad, a whiffed quarter, or a layoff, this is your chance to define not only the event, but the character of your company. And no matter how badly you screwed up, you didn’t send thousands of soldiers to their deaths.

It seems to conflict with an ownership culture. A common management adage is “Don’t bring me a problem without bringing me a solution.” This idea encourages ownership, empowerment, and responsibility among the employees, but it has a dark side. For one thing, what employees are likely to hear is just “Don’t bring me a problem.” At a deeper level, what if you know about a problem but you can’t solve it? What if you’re an engineer who sees a fundamental weakness in your software architecture, but doesn’t have the authority or expertise to fix it? What if you’re a salesperson who believes one of your colleagues is making fraudulent promises? How can you solve that without help? If you encourage bad news, you must be careful not to disempower people in doing so.

The company’s long-term goals may not align with an employee’s short-term incentives. Imagine that your new product must ship this quarter. It’s so critical you’ve offered a shipping bonus to the engineers. Now imagine that the product has a dangerous security flaw. If you’re an engineer who discovers the flaw, but you need the bonus to buy holiday presents for your children, what do you do?

Nobody likes to get yelled at. If you know about a problem, there’s a reasonable chance that you caused it and have no idea how to fix it. Revealing it to your superiors means admitting guilt, and who likes to do that?

When I heard about a problem, I tried to seem ecstatic. I’d say, “Isn’t it great we found out about this before it killed us?” Or, “This is going to make the company so much stronger once we solve it.” People take their cues from the leader, so if you’re okay with bad news, they’ll be okay, too. Good CEOs run toward the pain and the darkness; eventually they even learn to enjoy it.

Many managers want to attend executive staff meetings, as it makes them feel needed and it puts them in the know. I made use of this desire by setting a price of admission to the meeting: you had to fess up to at least one thing that was “on fire.” I’d say, “I know, with great certainty, that there are things that are completely broken in our company and I want to know what they are. If you don’t know what they are, then you are of no use to me in this meeting.” This technique got me deluged in bad news, but it also created a culture where surfacing and discussing problems was not just tolerated, but encouraged. We didn’t solve all the problems that came up, but at least we knew about most of them.

If you find a problem, do a root-cause analysis and figure out what caused it. You will almost always find that the underlying issue was communication or prioritization or some other soluble problem rather than a particularly lazy or idiotic employee. By getting to the root cause and addressing that, rather than playing the blame game with an employee or two, you create a culture that won’t be secretive or defensive—a culture open to bad news.

Look for Bad News in the Regular Course of Business As you meet with people in your organization, either formally or casually, ask them questions that will help uncover bad news. Questions such as, “Is there anything that’s preventing you from getting your job done?” or “If you were me, what would you change in the company?” You may have to ask several times, but people will talk about the problems if you encourage them to. The more you demonstrate genuine eagerness to discover bad news, and genuine supportiveness once it’s discovered, the more open they’ll be to opening up.

We obviously can’t offer lifetime employment. I hope what we can deliver is that in fifteen years, when people look back, they will think that they were able to do the most meaningful work of their careers here. In exchange, I expect two things: first, ethical integrity. Second, that they optimize for the company rather than for themselves. If they satisfy those two expectations, then they have our appreciation, respect, and loyalty.

Ultimately, loyalty is about the quality of your relationships. People don’t leave companies, they leave managers. If there is no relationship between a manager and an employee or, worse, a bad relationship, you won’t get loyalty regardless of your cultural policy.

Cultural design. Make sure your culture aligns with both your personality and your strategy. Anticipate how it might be weaponized and define it in a way that’s unambiguous.

Cultural orientation. An employee’s first day at work may not be as indelible as Shaka Senghor’s first day out of quarantine, but it always makes a lasting impression. People learn more about what it takes to succeed in your organization on that day than on any other. Don’t let that first impression be wrong or accidental.

Shocking rules. Any rule so surprising it makes people ask “Why do we have this rule?” will reinforce key cultural elements. Think about how you can shock your organization into cultural compliance.

Incorporate outside leadership. Sometimes the culture you need is so far away from the culture you have that you need to get outside help. Rather than trying to move your company to a culture that you don’t know well, bring in an old pro from the culture you aspire to have.

Object lessons. What you say means far less than what you do. If you really want to cement a lesson, use an object lesson. It need not be a Sun Tzu–style beheading, but it must be dramatic.

Make ethics explicit. One of the most common and devastating mistakes leaders make is to assume people will “Do the right thing” even when it conflicts with other objectives. Don’t leave ethical principles unsaid.

Give cultural tenets deep meaning. Make them stand out from the norm, from the expected. If the ancient samurai had defined politeness the way we define it today, it would have had zero impact on the culture. Because they defined it as the best way to express love and respect, it still shapes Japanese culture today. What do your virtues really mean?

Walk the talk. “Do as I say, not as I do” never works. So refrain from choosing cultural virtues that you don’t practice yourself.

Make decisions that demonstrate priorities. It was not enough for Louverture to say his culture was not about revenge. He had to demonstrate it by forgiving the slave owners.

If you don’t know what you want, there is no chance that you will get it.

Culture begins with deciding what you value most. Then you must help everyone in your organization practice behaviors that reflect those virtues. If the virtues prove ambiguous or just plain counterproductive, you have to change them. When your culture turns out to lack crucial elements, you have to add them. Finally, you have to pay close attention to your people’s behavior, but even closer attention to your own. How is it affecting your culture? Are you being the person you want to be? This is what it means to create a great culture. This is what it means to be a leader.

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